when a film can still shock and horrify an audience after nearly fifty years, it deserves to be remembered

Rating: 10/10 (4 July 2009)

The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, is a director famous for a great many films. His movies and his passion for the crime of murder cemented into our collective consciousness images of terror and panic that even people who have never seen his movies can identify and pick out. Hitchcock made a stream of remarkable films over the course of his legendary career including the thrill ride "Rear Window" (1954) and his ultimate psychological masterpiece "Vertigo" (1958), but the film everybody remembers and relates to when discussing Hitchcock is his notorious 1960 box office smash "Psycho" and the scene everybody remembers is the one that made many people, including one of its performers, Janet Leigh, think twice before taking a shower again.
"Psycho", adapted from a novel by Robert Bloch, is the classic story of a woman from Phoenix (Janet Leigh) who in order to marry her financially-stressed lover (John Gavin), embezzles $40,000 dollars from her employer's client and finds herself on the run, fearing and panicking every face that looks in her direction. During her flee more or less from her morals, she checks into a desolate motel run by a handsome but strange young man named Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). What follows is the film's infamous "shower scene" and a long chain of thrills, frights, and terrifying images that people, to this very day, never forget.
A film can be viewed as a true work of art when it has the same effect on an audience as it did nearly half a decade again. It has been forty-nine years since "Psycho" was first released and to this day, it still terrifies and appalls people very much like it did in 1960. To some, such as Walt Disney himself, "Psycho" is just too much. It's really the "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991) of its day. But to those who can appreciate art and storytelling, this is a motion picture that simply cannot be refused repeated viewings.
The pivotal performance of the film is, without a doubt, Norman Bates by Anthony Perkins. The acting by Perkins is so iconic and so creepy and so off-putting that he really set the standards for slasher villains and frightening characters. It is so ironic that an actor so harmless-looking, so timid-sounding as Perkins could, in an instant, turn himself into the image of a sick, bloodthirsty psychopathic monster. He can become creepy without apparently even making an effort, as though he were in real life as deranged as his character. Perkins' Norman Bates is like the Charles Foster Kane of horror movies. He's been mimicked, but never matched or overpowered. The only real contender for a match is Hannibal Lecter by Anthony Hopkins. Whoever is creepier is up to you, but it's nevertheless a very close match.
"Psycho" is not a film that is about character development, but it doesn't need to be. In fact, extreme character development would get in the way. Norman Bates is strongly developed, but the other characters are established exceedingly well and then play from that point on. Janet Leigh, in particular, who takes up the first third of the movie almost entirely by herself, gives a great performance even though her character is very simple. Hitchcock used Leigh as a personification of the human fears and sins: guilt, panic, fear, envy, and lust. The film also features a well-cast Martin Balsam as a private investigator who tends to, like Hitchcock felt about some of his producers, get in the way too often without understanding fully what or whom he's dealing with.
And of course, we can't leave out the thrills of the movie. Hitchcock used his techniques of shock, horror, and suspense to their fullest in this film. He uses the two main horror procedures: alerting an audience of an impending threat without telling the character or simply having the scare jump out and "render you speechless" as some of the ads for "Psycho" claimed the movie would do. And there is certainly more than just the infamous shower scene. It's not just the brutal killings. Again, there's Anthony Perkins in the landmark role of his career, and the black-and-white photography is notably far more effective than if Hitchcock had decided to shoot the movie in color (look at the dismal 1998 shot-by-shot remake for proof) and of course there's Bernard Herrmann's iconic all-string music score that rivets and lunges out at you.
Although it is an intensely frightening film and ends with one of the creepiest final lines of all time, "Psycho" is so much more than just a horror story. Apart from the dawn of the slasher genre and a montage of spine-tingling images, it is a work of art done by one of the true geniuses of the cinema: Alfred Hitchcock. And while I don't feel this is his all-time best motion picture, it's certainly his most famous and deservedly so. When a film can shock and terrify an audience nearly fifty years since it was first released and tags an excellent story along with it, it deserves to be remembered.