My Favorite Alfred Hitchcock Film

Alfred Hitchcock has been seeing a mild resurgence of interest lately with the recent release of movies about the director, "Hitchcock" and "The Girl." I haven't seen either of them yet, but I knew that I had to get this post written before I saw either. I've read enough about both films to know that they both advance their own heavily biased views of the director, and I'm more easily influenced than I like to admit, so I figured I should get my own thoughts about old Hitch down in words first.

Alfred Hitchcock was a great director but an even better showman and marketer, which fueled his legend and won him lasting fame, such that he's probably still the most well-known and well-loved director of his time. Though he started out in the UK, I think of him as perhaps the greatest American director, because he embodies so much of the entrepreneurial spirit and the inherently populist attitude of Hollywood filmmaking. He was a creature of genre films, but elevated that genre to dizzying heights. He outlasted the dismissive critics, multiple career slumps, and cultural shifts by coming up with something new and daring to show us, again and again. He was a director of endless invention, and some claim that he created the first real slasher film, the legendary "Psycho." The first time I saw the full movie after hearing years of hype, I sat down almost determined not to be impressed. And then the amazing title sequence with Bernard Hermann's jolting strings began, and it was useless to resist.

"Psycho" is about a series of intersecting crimes. First, a woman named Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals a large sum of money from her employer and goes on the run. She stops at a motel run by a young man named Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and his sinister, unseen mother. And really, that's all the plot summary it needs, because the less you know about "Psycho," the better it plays. It's a film full of sudden turns and misdirection, constantly upending the viewer's expectations. Like so many of Hitchcock's other films, the story can be reduced to a series of basic gimmicks. In this case, we have the mystery of Norman Bates, and a few major narrative and POV shifts. However, the film is so cleverly constructed and well executed on a technical level, it is extremely effective at getting exactly the kind of response it wants: rapt attention, followed by screams.

Alas, the famous shower scene was ruined for me long before I saw "Psycho," after too many appearances in retrospectives and too many trips to Universal Studios. I knew from an early age that I was supposed to be shocked and scared by the sequence, but I always saw it apart from the rest of the film, so I never had the proper context to enjoy it as intended. Instead, I found myself much more engaged by the longer, steadier build-ups of tension. There was the initial robbery sequence. And Norman Bates tidying up the vacated motel room and almost overlooking the newspaper. And then there was my favorite shot, the very last of the film - not our final glimpse of Norman, but of Marion's car, being dredged slowly but inexorably up out of the muck to reveal the extent of our killer's crimes. I could feel the creeping dread in the pit of my stomach with every creak of the winch.

The effectiveness of "Psycho" as a thriller has faded a bit with time. It's no longer considered particularly racy or violent, and many of its innovations have become commonplace. Hitchcock killed off his biggest star halfway through the picture, a shock lessened by the fact that "Psycho" is practically the only thing that actress is remembered for . Then he got us to sympathize with the killer by showing the action from his POV. It was pretty daring in 1960, but these days there are whole television shows built around this conceit. The disturbing nature of Norman Bates has long been surpassed in both real life and in fiction. On the other hand, after over fifty years "Psycho" still works on a fundamental level. Norman and his mother are still creepy and fascinating. The viewer is encouraged to root for Marion to get away with her crime, and then encouraged to root just as hard for Norman.

Norman Bates remains a villain for the ages, perhaps the greatest representation of the irreparably damaged psychotic to ever find his way to the silver screen. He appeared in three largely forgotten sequels, and will be resurrected again this year for a television prequel series, "Bates Motel," starring Freddie Highmore as young Norman, and Vera Farmiga as his mother. But without Hitchcock providing his menace, it just won’t be the same.
---