Psycho 1960
I thought for sure I had seen Psycho before, but watching it on a Blu-ray I bought over a year ago, I realized I wasn’t at all familiar with it other than the classic scenes. So I didn’t realize the shower scene was in the first half of the movie or that Janet Leigh stole money which sort of set things in motion (and was also kind of a MacGuffin).
The movie is a classic with some great Hitchcock flourishes, not least of which is Leigh herself as Hitchcock’s gorgeous blonde of the moment. She looks great and pushes the boundaries not just in the shower scene, but the hotel hookup at the beginning, one of several scenes of her in a bra and slip only. But the movie is also a little clunky. The private detective is hired by the guy who lost his money, but then winds up reporting to Leigh’s boyfriend and sister. It feels like something was missing there. While the movie had to have had a bigger impact in 1960, the shower scene now seems kind of tame without even a wound being shown and hardly any blood. But this was also a time when toilets weren’t shown in bathrooms. Today it is a distraction that someone waving a knife around could somehow kill someone, though the sound effect of the knife hitting flesh is pretty gruesome. Towards the end of the film when Mother shows up in the basement, the scene is almost comical as she just runs down the stairs and stops for no reason with the knife in the air, kind of waving it like a kid in a play waving to his parents in the audience. Anthony Perkins is great otherwise, playing it normal, weird, nervous, and just unhinged all perfectly. Unfortunately the movie is such a big deal that it is hard to imagine anyone not knowing the big twist that Hitchcock tried so hard to hide from audiences about Mother. It seems like that takes a lot of air out of the movie.
My copy of the Blu-ray had a ton of great extras, including at least an hour long Making of feature with interviews with a lot of the major players except Anthony Perkins and Alfred Hitchcock. The story of how the movie got made is a great one all by itself, so much so that they made a movie about it in 2012 that I watched a couple of days later.
Written: 08 May 2019
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital