Psycho (1960)

PSYCHO (1960) Four stars
Oh, to get into any one of the seven DeLorean DMC-12s used in BACK TO THE FUTURE and rev that sonuvabitch up to 88.8 MPH with the date set for June 16, 1960, the release date for Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO.

I’d go find the nearest theatre where it’s playing and put down the 69 cents. Of course, I would be sure to arrive early and hang around the lobby if necessary since Hitchcock made sure theaters enforced a strict “no late admission” policy.

Hitchcock even wrote a beautiful note, “Surely you do not have your meat course after your dessert at dinner. You will therefore understand why we are so insistent that you enjoy PSYCHO from start to finish, exactly as we intended that it be served.

“We won’t allow you to cheat yourself. Every theatre manager, everywhere, has been instructed to admit no one after the start of each performance of PSYCHO. We said no one — not even the manager’s brother, the President of the United States or the Queen of England (God bless her).

“To help you cooperate with this extraordinary policy, we are listing the starting times below. Treasure them with your life — or better yet, read them and act accordingly.”

Gotta love that Hitchcock and his ripped, twisted sense of humor.

Anyway, I would go back in time to see PSYCHO just to observe others’ reactions to it, to see their shock, to see their absolute terror at certain moments. They would not have possibly known all the surprises in store for them, while viewers for the last nearly 60 years have not had the benefit of watching PSYCHO with a clean slate. Since its release, PSYCHO has been analyzed, overanalyzed, parodied, satirized, and its famous shower scene long ago replaced the Odessa Steps sequence from BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) as the most fetishized scene in movie history.

Every time I watch PSYCHO, I am gobsmacked by just how audacious Hitchcock and gang were in making it. Start the movie with a love affair in a seedy hotel? Check. Show the heroine in her bra multiple times? Check. Kill off the heroine played by a big movie star halfway through the film? Check. Start out with the theft of $40,000 and more or less drop it after the death of the heroine? Check.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Of course, none of that might seem the least bit audacious in 2018, but please keep in mind the Motion Picture Production Code dominated Hollywood movies from the early 1930s through 1968. PSYCHO helped chip away at that damn archaic code.

Everybody knows the plot by now. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals $40,000 from her employer’s client and she’s on the lam hoping to get together with her lover Sam (Sam Loomis, played by John Gavin). We hear the voices that are inside her head (her mind and by extension our minds are obsessed with the money) and Hitchcock once again proved he’s the Master of Suspense by making a policeman’s stop and Marion’s drive in the pouring rain as tension-filled as any of the death scenes. With the rain beating down on her poor, weary windshield wipers, a conscience-stricken Marion stops at the famous Bates Motel with its 12 cabins and 12 vacancies.

There we meet proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a fictional character in Robert Bloch’s novel and Hitchcock’s film with roots in the real-life Wisconsin murderer and grave robber Ed Gein (an inspiration for THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE’s Leatherface). Gein, for example, loved to make wastebaskets from human skin. Unlike later slasher movie super villains Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, Norman speaks and he does not wear a mask. This makes Norman Bates far more fascinating than any of the slasher film madmen descended from PSYCHO.

Norman loves taxidermy and he’s got mother issues.

Otherwise, he seems like a good, old-fashioned All-American boy.

Oh, what happens to Marion? Let’s just say that in real life, Leigh stopped taking showers for years, preferring a bath after the fate of her character in PSYCHO.

Sam teams up with Marion’s sister Lila Crane (Vera Miles) and they try and track down Marion. Of course, all roads lead them and poor, poor Detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam) to Bates Motel and Norman Bates and his dear old mother.

In arguably his most audacious move, Hitchcock substituted protagonists from Marion Crane to Norman Bates. Perkins gives one of the great performances, one that will be discussed and cherished for centuries. He walks away with the movie.

The HALLOWEEN sequels continued to add more and more back story to the detriment of Michael Myers. Near the end of PSYCHO, Hitchcock gives us a phony baloney psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) and his phony baloney explanation for Norman Bates, but it’s taken to such an extreme that it plays like a parody. We could have done without this sequence, though, unlike the rest of the movie.

Early on in this review, I shared a note from Hitchcock. Now we go full circle.

A woman complained to Hitchcock that the PSYCHO shower scene had such a deleterious effect on her daughter that the young girl refused to shower.

Hitchcock replied, “Then Madam I suggest you have her dry cleaned.”