Psycho (1960)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Writing credits Robert Bloch (novel) Joseph Stefano (screenplay)

Add to MyMovies

Photos

IMDbPro Professional Details

User Comments:

85 out of 110 people found the following comment useful:-
"It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance...they were aroused by pure film.", 11 November 2005

Author: alfiehitchie ([email protected]) from Bel Air, CA

One of the first intimations of a new mood in Hollywood was Alfred Hitchcock's extremely successful "Psycho" (1960). It was a formally dazzling and brilliantly perverse film, oriented to a new generation of moviegoers, and more erotic, violent, and macabre than any of Hitchcock's previous work. In this bleak black and white film, Hitchcock, working with his usual obsessions (i.e., guilt, voyeurism, Oedipal complexes, and misogyny), utilizes the iconography of the horror film an isolated motel, an old, forbidding Victorian house, a sensational murder sequence (using an Eisenstein like montage) that arouses feelings of terror, and a chilling musical score. "Psycho" marked the introduction of the formula thriller "which redefined the limits of sex and violence in films", and would in a decade or moreover run the theaters with mediocre slasher films.

"Psycho" begins with one of Hitchcock's favorite devices for making the audience an accomplice in the action. The camera pans past the Phoenix, Arizona skyline and seemingly picks out a window of a hotel, then glides in to watch two people, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and Sam Loomis (John Gavin) involved in an adulterous affair. But if they are guilty of a sexual indiscretion, we are guilty of voyeurism. Their affair�sordid and sad, since the man cannot afford to pay his ex-wife alimony and marry his lover�was itself a mild shock, for it was still unconventional for movie stars to play such unglamorous roles. But Hollywood convention would be flouted even more strikingly in the next sequence: Marion compulsively steals a large sum of money at the real estate agency where she is employed as a secretary, hurriedly packs her belongings, and drives in the direction of Los Angeles, where Sam lives. When Marion checks in at a roadside motel, she meets the somewhat shy young proprietor, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) who offers her sandwiches and milk and stimulating conversation.

"Psycho's" impact derived from its demonstration of Hitchcock's perceptive view of the upcoming decade. Our old enemies were gone: the fascists of the Forties and been replaced by the threat of the Communists in the Fifties, but even the Russians seemed somehow less dangerous in the Sixties than the forces of potential violence within our own society. In "Psycho", the threat comes from that nice clean-cut boy down the street. The theme would be re-echoed throughout the next ten years, not only in Hitchcock's films, but in those of other American filmmakers as well.

Check for other user comments.

I have seen this movie and would like to comment on it

Message Boards

Recommendations

If you like this title, we also recommend...

Psycho (1998)

Show more recommendations

Add a recommendation

Email this page to a friend

Update Information

You may report errors and omissions on this page to the IMDb database managers. They will be examined and if approved will be included in a future update. Clicking the button on the left will take you through a step-by-step process.