Sometimes, when you finally watch some great, important, landmark film for the very first time, the experience of actually sitting down to absorb it doesn’t quite live up to all the hype. Maybe you can appreciate its place in cinema history or whatever, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually all that entertaining (I kind of felt this way about Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights). With the disadvantage of time and the advancement of modern pacing and filmmaking techniques, some classics just don’t hold up.
Psycho is not that kind of classic.
Especially for a first-time viewer, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror masterpiece is still wildly entertaining and keeps you on your toes throughout the entire picture, which is why, if you’ve never seen it before, it’s worth finally watching while it’s on Netflix.
Psycho begins with a Phoenix woman named Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), who is in love with a deeply indebted man from Fairvale, California, named Sam Loomis (John Gavin). She has only brief encounters with him while he’s on his business trips to Phoenix, despite them both yearning for more. As long as Sam has so many money problems, he won’t marry her.
Working at a real estate office, Marion sees an opportunity when a rich man comes in and pays for a house in cash ($40,000, representing one of the few things about the movie that does age poorly thanks to inflation). Marion has been instructed by her boss to bring the cash to the bank, but she pockets it and goes on the run, determined to pay off Sam’s debts and live happily ever after with him.
On her way from Phoenix to Fairvale, Marion is deeply worried about getting caught. After an encounter with a police officer where she acts very suspiciously, she decides to switch out her car for a new one, then she continues on. When she gets tired, she decides to sleep a night at the Bates Motel, a remote establishment run by a strange, shy man named Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). Marion mentions that she’s hungry, and Norman runs back to his house, which sits on a hill behind the motel, and makes her a sandwich, while also being berated with insults from his mother offscreen. Norman then returns to Marion and the two talk in the parlor, which is connected to the front office. They discuss his hobby as a taxidermist and he hints at a dysfunctional relationship with his mother. After the conversation, Marion returns to her room, which is right next to the office. That’s when we see Norman spying on her as she undresses.
I’ll stop there, to preserve the experience, in the slight chance that you don’t know what happens next, but even if you do know what’s coming, Psycho is still full of surprises. If there’s anything wrong with Psycho, it’s that it’s become famous and has so many iconic moments — from the shower scene to the twist with Norman’s mother — that even without ever seeing it, people may feel like they already have.
But trust me, if you haven’t seen Psycho, you have no idea what you’re in for.
Psycho is good, even if you know what’s coming
While, yes, a lot of the big twists in Psycho are spoiled by its fame, the story itself isn’t given away by those iconic moments. I first saw the movie years ago. I watched it again when it just returned to Netflix, I’d forgotten just how many times the movie completely changes what it is. It begins as a movie all about Marion, then the focus shifts to Norman, then this happens a couple of more times. Throughout the movie, Hitchcock keeps reinventing the story by changing the protagonist and going in unexpected directions. So even if you know some of the big reveals of the movie — which you likely do — Psycho still manages to keep you guessing.
All of the different perspectives are interesting, too. A story about a woman stealing some money from her boss may not sound like the most exciting thing ever, but Janet Leigh’s performance is captivating, and you can’t help but wonder if she’ll be caught. We don’t get to the Bates Motel until about a half hour into the movie, but that first half hour still draws you in and could have been a movie all its own. It never feels like you’re waiting to get to the good stuff because it’s all the good stuff.
The movie is helped a ton by its score, and I’m a guy who hardly ever notices a movie’s score. Sure, for something like Jaws I can appreciate the score, but usually, I don’t ever think about it. For Psycho, it’s impossible not to think about the score because the movie’s opening titles explode with Bernard Herrmann’s bold string orchestra, which immediately pulls you in and doesn’t let go through to the very end. Psycho is a definitive thriller — maybe the definitive thriller — thanks to its still-modern pacing and the way it keeps you guessing, but much of that pacing feels like it’s the music doing a lot of the work. It feels as though the music is propelling the movie forward, rather than simply complementing it.
Seriously, put on Netflix and just start Psycho. You’ll immediately be drawn in by that music. From there, Hitchcock tells a story that keeps twisting and changing in unexpected ways, even if you think you know what to expect. While some of the great masterworks of motion picture history are more for “appreciating” than enjoying, Psycho is simply not that kind of classic.