During a classic sequence, Norman sinks a car in a nearby swamp. He is tasked with cleaning up the mess, and there Hitchcock gets to exploit a key tenet of mysteries, in that we want to see whomever did it get away with it.
The film gives you one protagonist with a complicated morality and then replaces it with Norman, who also has a complicated morality - though there the picture keeps its distance from him (the film enters Marion’s headspace, but rarely Norman’s). Psycho is still shocking – it was re-rated R after the fact – but compared to the more recent R rated examples like Hostel, it’s going to be harder for the film to provoke an audience that has seen much, much worse.īut the film works, and it amazingly efficient as it has such an interesting bifurcated structure. The problem with transgression is that when Hitchcock opened the doors he did with this film, cinema was forever altered, but all that followed dampened the impact of what he did. Reviewing Psycho is difficult in the sense that the film has been spoiled, parodied and recycled ad infinitum, and as such there can be something of a disappointing reaction to seeing the film for the first time. But all the answers lie in The Bates Motel. Sam and Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) are concerned about her disappearance, and there’s also a private investigator, Detective Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam) who’s looking for the money. He feels trapped, and she plans on going home and returning the money in the morning, only to be violently murdered by Mrs.
Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) runs the hotel with his mother (Virginia Gregg), and he offers Marion some food, and while she eats the two talk about their lives. But on the road her doubts and fears ring out, and when she’s stopped by a cop, she freaks out and sells her car.Īfter hitting the road for too long (and on a dark and stormy night) she stops at the Bates Motel, where she is the only client. As her relationship and life seem to be going nowhere, she impulsively steals the money to give it to her boyfriend and start a new life. When she heads back to the office, a rich man offers a down payment on a home for his daughter in cash ($40,000) and Marion is tasked with taking it to the bank. Janet Leigh stars Marion Crane, a single woman conducting a sexual relationship with Sam Loomis (John Gavin) on her lunch hour. My review of Psycho on Blu-ray after the jump. Regardless of whether you know what’s waiting for you in the fruit cellar, Psycho is still a great film - at least it is once it’s removed from the amber it’s been encased in. In Psycho, Janet Leigh plays Marion Crane, a woman who steals money from work and spends a night at the Bates Motel as run by the troubled mother’s boy Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). The shower scene from Psycho is so well known that it’s possible some people know it only from the parodies (done by The Simpsons, Jackass, etc.). On one hand it was the master at his subversive and transgressive best, on the other hand so much has changed in fifty years of cinema that it’s virtually impossible for an audience to find the film without knowing the big reveal or having a familiarity with its set pieces - if only from the pop culture unconsciousness. Such is partially the dilemma of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. For modern audiences, a shot of a silent train in black and white would have no such weight. At least, that’s what the history books tell us. When the Lumiere brothers made “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” in 1896, audiences famously left the theater, afraid that a silent train might kill them.
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