PSYCHO: DVD

SYNOPSIS: 
Desperately in love with the married Sam Loomis (John Gavin), Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals $40,000 from her employer and drives out of town to meet Sam hoping that the cash will fund his divorce and their marriage. She stops at an isolated motel run by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a nervous young man who lives in an eerie mansion overlooking the motel with his sick and demanding mother. When Marion fails to arrive at Sam’s place and a private investigator disappears, Marion’s anxious sister Lila (Vera Miles) and Sam pose as a married couple when they come to the motel to search for the truth.

Review by Keith Lofthouse:
In 1998, director Gus Van Sant paid suspense master Alfred Hitchcock the supreme compliment when he remade the great grandpappy of all serial slasher shockers with barely a change from the 1960 original.

It was, of course, a mistake. Van Sant’s colorised “recreation” only emphasised how much the black and white Hitchcock classic has dated.

Way back then, before audiences became so immune to guts and gore that they giggled when Hannibal the Cannibal dined on a victim’s exposed brains, Psycho served up a fright-filled house of horrors. But since then Jason, Freddy and Michael have committed the foulest deeds on reel to reel and the TV news has revealed that nothing Hollywood can do can rival the chilling sickness of the real world. Still, in terms of style, technique, innovation and daring Hitchcock was years ahead of his time. 

His marketing campaign, warning moviegoers that no-one would be admitted after the film had started, would be dismissed as a cheap gimmick today. But at the time the tactic was unique, as was the notion of a countdown during “the shorts” that primed patrons for the kill by flashing “15 minutes to Psycho,” “10 minutes to Psycho” at intervals onto the screen. 

Critics worldwide, who were denied pre-release previews, rebelled. One spun the title Psycho into “Sicko”; others used words like “vile,” “disgusting” and “appalling,” not referring to any especially grisly murder, but to the flushing of a toilet! This, apparently, was the first time a camera had focused on such domestic abominations and outraged censors wanted it cut, but Hitchcock defied them by leaving it intact as this is a key scene when Marion tries to flush evidence of her crime. 

Anthony Perkins is the mother-fixated fruitcake who runs the Bates motel and stuffs birds for a hobby. Norman takes a nervous shine to Marion when she first arrives to take shelter from the rain and installs her in Room 1 adjacent to his parlor, which has a peephole into the room. Mother isn’t pleased. She suspects that there’s dirty work going on and she descends from that glowering old house to do a little dirty work of her own.

Perkins was haunted by Norman Bates until the day he died and received crank calls every time his most famous role was given a television replay. 

I met Perkins in 1986 when he was in Australia to promote Psycho III (1986). He was testy and twitchy and always resented that the body of his work over 40 years was subjugated by Bates. Curiously, he wore a suede jacket with the collar turned up, which was a dead ringer for the one he wore in Psycho 25 years before…also with the collar turned up.

There’s no doubt that the real appeal of Psycho these days is nostalgia. Apart from the still famous, still shocking shower scene montage and Perkins’ sublimely creepy performance, what is most enduring about the film is the Bernard Herrmann score and the staccato strings that rent the flesh with their shrieks.

Special features on the DVD include the director’s guided tour of the set which served as a teasing trailer: “You should have seen the blood. The whole place was…well, it’s too horrible to describe.” Classics do date and the film that Hitchcock claimed as his “little joke” may not be a such good scare anymore, but just as people were afraid to go into the water after Jaws, Psycho had a similar impact. At least one man wrote to Hitchcock, complaining that his wife refused to bathe or take showers after seeing Psycho and wondered what he should do. Hitchcock wrote back: “Sir, have you ever considered sending her to the dry cleaners?”

Published January 23, 2003