"A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother..."

Rating: 9/10 (13 February 2005)

Psycho is an exercise in bait-and-switch by the maestro of playing an audience, director Alfred Hitchcock. What begins as a story about someone stealing money becomes one about murder in a seedy motel shower. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is a secretary who is supposed to deposit a huge sum of money, but instead takes it and leaves Phoenix, Arizona, headed towards California. Along the way, she is shadowed by a cop (the classic Hitchcockian theme of distrust towards police) and finds her way to a rundown motel off the old highway, The Bates Motel. Running the once popular, now with "12 cabins, 12 vacancies" motel is Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins in wonderful manic weirdness. You know something is askew with young Norman in the very first scenes we see him, but we can't quite put our finger on it. Is it his stuffed bird collection? Is it how he talks about his mother? Is it the way he communicates to Marion Crane in their uncomfortable conversations they have? It's probably the combination of all of the above, but whatever it is, Perkins portrays Bates in such a manner that we know something is wrong with him. In perhaps the most famous scene in movie history, the switch to the money is made. The star of the film, the Marion Crane character is killed off while taking a shower by Norman Bates' mother in brutal fashion. We the audience think we see a lot more than we actually do, if you look at the scene carefully. The scene is 45 seconds long, but features over 90 individual cuts and camera angles, leading to a manic and desperate moment in the movie. The music during the scene, almost as famous as the scene itself, is cutting with the violins, replicating the action in the scene itself. The shower scene in Psycho is pure movie making, showing the audience what the director wants them to see, and in what he hides leaves the viewer to imagine, and sometimes think they saw what they think they saw. The rest of the film plays as an investigative film, as Marion's loved ones try to piece together what happened after she ran off with the money. The star of the second half of the film is Norman Bates as he tries to cover up the murder by his mother, and his paranoid ways really show up during this period. The film benefits from being shot in black and white and the violin-only musical score adds much more depth to the mood of the film. Made for less than a million dollars, Psycho is also an example of what a director can do for cheap. This movie touched a nerve with the movie-going public, as many people feared taking showers for months after seeing Psycho. It has been said that star Janet Leigh still, to this day, has never taken a shower since filming Psycho.