Psycho Review

Hitchcock shot this with his television crew on a television budget, and the constraint is the point: John L. Russell's high-contrast black and white makes a roadside motel feel like a place where the lights are always slightly wrong. The structural gamble is still audacious. Forty minutes are spent making Marion Crane's stolen forty thousand dollars matter, and then the money and the woman are both discarded, leaving the audience stranded with the only person still on screen.

The shower sequence works because of cutting rather than gore, seventy-odd setups and a knife that never visibly touches skin, scored by Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings. Anthony Perkins builds Norman out of stammers, candy corn and a boyish courtesy that curdles the moment he mentions his mother, and the parlor scene, played beneath mounted birds of prey, is quietly the most frightening thing in it. Only the tacked-on psychiatric explanation lets the air out, a studio-era compulsion to tidy up what worked better unexplained. Everything before it remains a perfectly engineered trap.