NPR’S Weekend Edition has an occasional thing called “Movies You Missed”, where they find someone who has never seen an iconic film, make them watch it, and get their impressions. This week it was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The reviewer did not give her age, but I’m guessing 30-something.
She describes the plot as a “series of additional violent murders” after the famous shower scene. There is one other killing, but we’ll just chalk that up to faulty memory.
She says these killings have a “comic aspect in the way that everyone staggers around”. She must be referring to the famous shot where Hitchcock’s camera follows Martin Balsam as he falls backward down the stairs. Apparently this shot didn’t resonate with her.
Is my love for this film (which I first saw in 1967) blocking me to its flaws? Or are kids these days just unable to appreciate a classic film non-ironically?
Psycho was a new mold for the horror/thriller genre. Since then it’s been imitated and parodied so many times that it seems to parody itself to a new viewer. The most outstanding scene in this movie IMO is still the shower scene, uniquely Hitchcock, and unappreciated by many due to the imitations. The rest of the film doesn’t come off as well, and in modern movies would be filled with CGI and other effects instead of Hitch’s simple use of camera angles and the lens settings.
You are not blocked from its flaws, you simply have the ability to distinguish art from staler fare.
The most out-of-date thing about the movie that always strikes me is the psychiatrist’s explanation at the end. It seems almost like baby talk, compared to the current understanding of such matters.
I think this reviewer was very affected by things she had heard about the movie as a child from her mother (see link), things which made her terrified of the movie. I suspect she was purposely preventing herself from letting herself go into the movie because of that, so that her reaction is very different from someone who had no previous knowledge of the film (if you can find such a person). And from her use of language I would guess she is younger than 30-something, probably closer to 25.
It is out of date, but in context and at the time I believe it was absolutely necessary. The plot was so out there, using tropes that had never been seen before, the script had to walk the audience through what they had just seen.
At least she picked up on the fact that Norman Bates is the archetype for every psychotic serial killer of the last 60 years.
That would be Ed Gein. Robert Bloch was inspired by his case in writing Psycho. Any movie villain that ever made housewares from human body parts owes a bit of a debt to Eddie.
As for the movie, this reviewer who is older than her but younger than the people that saw it in the theater, I think Hitchcock is campy on his best days. He has a lot more hokeyness in his suspense than really he should have. There are parts of Strangers on a Train that make me roll my eyes, and when Raymond Burr is in Stewart’s apartment in Rear Window I laugh out loud. Psycho has some of that, too.
The privilege of seeing the film in 1967 is allowing you to love an innovative film that has since been eclipsed by innovations that have followed thanks to its influence.
First off (from IMDB) - “The sound that the knife makes penetrating the flesh is actually the sound of a knife stabbing a casaba melon.”
Casaba melons are muskmelons, not watermelons.
That aside, the review in the op is hip to the film’s original intent:
The reviewer in the OP’s link can also be credited for picking up on the film’s manipulation of the audience into rooting for Bates (e.g., the sinking car scene).
It might be interesting to hear from this reviewer again in a year or so, after a re-viewing of the film. I found that Psycho was practically unwatchable a second time; it takes forever to get to the shower scene, and in general, I felt I was watching only to see the two murder scenes and “shocking” end… which has no shock value on a repeat view. Imo, Psycho is a classic “gimmick film” that ultimately winds up as less than the sum of its gimmick scenes.
While the review in the op is testament to the film’s cultural impact, it fails to account for its heinous cinematic legacy. Psycho’s gratuitously detailed murder scenes served as the aesthetic foundation for a generally worthless lot of Italian gialli (from the late 1960s), the rot of U.S. slasher films (1970s and beyond), and today’s torture porn. Establishing to a greater degree than probably any other film that dehumanization (through serial character murders) is a commercial standard for “entertainment” is not my idea of a worthy legacy.
Yes, I’ve heard that before, that Psycho is the “blackest of black comedies”. I think it just means that Hitchcock was totally out of step with his audience (way in front? way off to the side?). As much as I love Hitchcock - if he meant to make a comedy but instead wound up making a classic horror film by mistake, then I think the world of cinema is better for it.
(And I don’t fault him if there have been thousands of trashy replicas.)
I dunno, my mom saw it in the theater when it was new. She wouldn’t take a shower when she was alone in the house afterward, but remembered the audience laughing at the “shocking” reveal at the end.
I found it frightening when I watched it the first time, but I was 10 or so. When I saw it after that, it was merely interesting movie making. But yeah, all Hitchcock has some camp to it.
Except there’s that scene of Marian waking up on the side of the road, seeing the highway patrolman’s mirrored sunglasses. I hadn’t seen the movie until college in the 1970s, but the hangout bar had it on their TV with the sound off, and the first scene I saw was that sunglasses scene. It creeped me right out.
It’s in black and white because it was an experiment to see whether a movie could be made on the same budget as the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show. The cost difference between B&W and color was still substantial.
Reminds me of the old joke where a high school kid is required to read Shakespeare, and says “why does everybody think he’s such a great writer? It’s all clichés!”
There are certain darkly comedic elements to the story that, with a slightly different spin, could be actively funny. Like Marion’s general incompetence as a criminal: She is spotted leaving town by her boss before her crime is barely underway. Having encountered a suspicious highway patrolmen, she tries to throw him off her trail by ditching her car and buying a new one–even though the cop is sitting right there across the street watching her as she does so. She’s so anxious to just get rid of the car that she arouses the suspicions of the used car salesman, making the sale even more difficult and time-consuming than it would have been already.
All of this is part of the story, of course. Marion isn’t really a master criminal, just someone who gave in to a sudden impulse to steal some money, so of course she’s not good at it. But looked at from the right angle, there is a sort of “What can go wrong next?” humor in it.
Then there’s the fact that, after Marion is killed, we see the newspaper in which she’s hidden the stolen money. The object that every action in the movie has centered on so far, the one remnant of the story we had been following. It’s even framed right in the center of the screen when Norman comes in to clean up. It must be important, right? Wrong. Norman just picks it up and tosses it in the trunk of the car along with Marion’s body. The money didn’t matter at all! That’s not what this movie’s about. Fooled you! That’s a joke, to a certain extent.
There are people who feel it necessary to analyze movies to death and pick apart camera angles, special effects, editing tricks etc., because they’re incapable of just enjoying a movie for what it is, or feel it necessary to expound on their cleverness.
I avoid the pre- and post-analyses on TCM, detailed articles on just what the director was trying to do, and especially those dinner-and-a-movie gab-fests with the young hip crowd that used to plague showings of classic movies on TV. Even when I’ve seen the movie a number of times, I still want to watch without getting bogged down in your oh-so-clever takes.
Psycho is a masterpiece and it’s pretty galling to hear that twit’s post-ironic opinions on the air. Ah well, I guess we’re all entitled to have them.
By the way, I read that Hitchcock saw the very bad low-budget horror flicks of the era and thought to himself, what if I made the very best horror flick I could make, on the same low budget as the bad ones? What a result. He did get to “cheat” a little, though, getting that iconic Bernard Herrmann score at a friend price. Without it, the movie might have been forgettable.