PSYCHO (1960) It would be hard to find anyone who is not familiar with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Just about everyone knows the infamous shower scene, a forty-five second slasher murder made up of seventy-eight individual takes, some of which go by so quickly as to be almost subliminal. Equally iconic, and much parodied, is the accompanying Bernard Herrmann music, played on shrieking violin strings. Today Psycho is regarded as the greatest thriller ever made. Back in 1960, though, a lot of people thought Hitchcock had completely lost his mind. The management at Paramount Pictures, then Hitchcock’s home base, were so apprehensive about the subject matter that they tried to dissuade him from making the film any way they could, including claiming (untruthfully) that there was no available soundstage at the studio to house the production. Hitchcock countered every one of their objections, offering to move the production over to Universal City, where his television anthology show Alfred Hitchcock Presents was being produced, and guaranteeing financing for the picture himself. That move to Universal, incidentally, is why its backlot holds the Bates Motel and mansion sets, which remain hugely popular on the studio tour, rather than Paramount’s.
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Above: Alfred Hitchcock (at top, with hands folded) supervises Janet Leigh and John Gavin’s love scene in Psycho.
When Psycho was finally screened for the critics, most were appalled by its combination of brutal horror and very dark humor; the eponymous source novel by Robert Bloch had actually gotten better reviews. But audiences, intrigued by a sly marketing campaign that insisted no patron be seated after the film had started, flocked to the theaters, and within months many of those critics were forced to reevaluate the film for the better. In a sense the film is one big “MacGuffin,” Hitchcock’s pet term for a plot point that is of vital importance to the characters, but about which the audience just doesn’t care. The theft of $40,000 by Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is what gets the plot rolling, but that is quickly forgotten in lieu of Psycho’s legendary cinematic set pieces: the shower scene, the violent murder of Detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam), the revelation that motel owner Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and his mother couldn’t be closer. What Hitchcock considered to be the film’s real shocker, and what drew him to the property in the first place, was the killing of the leading lady halfway through. This simply was not done in films of the time, particularly if it involved killing a character played by an A-list actress. When
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