AFI #14: Psycho (1960)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on July 10, 2020.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.

(M) ★★★★★

Director: Alfred Hitchcock.

Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam, John McIntire, Simon Oakland, John Anderson, Mort Mills, Pat Hitchcock.

"Well, it's a fixer-upper, but it comes with its own skeleton cellar."

In the two years prior to making Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock made two of the best films of his career to that point - Vertigo and North By Northwest. The former is a deeply psychological film that pushes the boundaries of mainstream film-making while subverting traditional narrative structure. The latter is a film that aims to be entertaining, and to excel at its particular style of entertainment by pushing it to new heights. 

In many ways, Psycho is the culmination and combination of these two disparate films. Its twists and reveals hinge on its psychological aspects, and it turned film-making and storytelling conventions on their heads. But it's also hugely entertaining, and pushes boundaries on its way to doing what it sets out to do, which is be a scary horror film. Psycho is that rarest of beasts - it's both art and entertainment.

"I didn't start off to make an important movie," Hitchcock told fellow iconic director François Truffaut. "I thought I could have fun with this subject and this situation. My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audience... (it) made the audience scream. I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. It wasn't a message that stirred the audience, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film. That's why I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers."

In Psycho, Hitchcock plays his audience "like an organ", he told Truffaut. He makes us like the conflicted Marion Crane (Leigh) - she seems nice enough, she wants to make an honest man of her boyfriend, she has wants and desires just like the rest of us, and she has the kinds of trouble that money could help fix. And we don't dislike her for the crime she commits, partly because the unwitting victim is a skeezy jackass with more money than he knows what to do with.

All the while, the tension grows; a tension that was right there from the frantic and fractured opening credits, and Bernard Herrmann's percussive, stabby score. It builds slowly as Marion Crane (Leigh) commits her crime. It bubbles away with the score, the sighting of her boss, Marion's internal imagined dialogues, and then almost reaches a boiling point as a the persistent traffic cop (Mills) tracks her.

But, much like how Vertigo switches genres and tones as it goes, Psycho's tension suddenly gives way to a creeping dread as she settles in for sandwiches and small talk with the charmingly goofy Norman Bates (a pitch perfect Perkins). Under the watchful eyes of taxidermied birds and paintings of women in peril, you can feel things going off the rails. "A boy's best friend is his mother" is right up there with the most chilling and portentous lines you can find in a movie.  

It all comes to a head in the shower (pardon the pun). The shower scene is quite rightly a big deal, and a huge part of Psycho's legacy lays within its 45 seconds and 52 edits. Still shocking, it's a masterwork of editing, suggestion, and manipulation - all key elements of good horror. "If you take the audience right in ... you involve the audience," Hitchcock said on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972. With these 78 camera set-ups and 52 edits, Hitchcock showed the audience just enough for them to fill in the worst themselves.

I'm not going to delve into the myths, legends and debate around the shower scene, but a lot of it is in this video:

All of this is Hitchcock playing us "like an organ", usually by doing the unexpected. No one offs their film's protagonist 47 minutes in. It's bold, daring, and still hugely effective, 60 years on. From there, (following 10 laborious minutes of crime scene clean-up that lets everything sink in and sees us side with Norman) the film becomes something else again - we've just watched an hour-long prologue to a 45-minute mystery that's now beginning.

The first half of the film, with its great performances and excellent shared scene from Leigh and Perkins, can't be matched by the latter half, but it's still engaging and enticing. We're desperate for answers, and as Hitchcock's camera moves around the mystery, it sometimes feels like we won't get them. Save for the "so here's what happened, folks" explainer at the end, Psycho doesn't do anything by the rules, and if Norman Bates had ridden off into the sunset with his mother by his side, frankly we wouldn't have been surprised.

After all these years, Psycho still packs a punch. Vertigo's ending is still a shock after all these years, but much of the rest of it feels dated, notably the age-gap between its stars and their quaint yet disturbing romance. Oddly, Psycho feels less dated, despite its black-and-white cinematography. Its ability to shock and scare remains strong, even after inspiring the horror genre to bust out so many copycat killers. There's something timeless and enduring about Psycho, and it's largely due to the fact it's still disturbing, 60 years on. If not for what it inspired, it would be more highly regarded than Vertigo.

As Otto Penzler sneers in his 101 Greatest Films of Mystery & Suspense: "Psycho was a tremendously influential film that, for all its brilliance, caused a terrible decline in horror and suspense films as less-talented writers and directors now felt free to show more and more graphic screen violence. Slasher films, unknown until then, have since become a staple of summer cinema, and the entire notion of subtlety appears to have died with Hitchcock."

But Psycho is Hitchcock's best film. The American Film Institute disagrees, as does The Incredible Suit. In fact, many knowledgeable cinema types disagree with my assertion. But for mine, Psycho is the pinnacle of his powers as an artist, an entertainer and a provocateur. He was often great, but never better.