Psycho (1960)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Psycho (1960) -- A. Hitchcock

Another one of those movies where it is best to time travel back to the year when the movie opened -- or to a time when you didn't know anything about the movie.  What must it have been like to be shocked by Janet Leigh in her underwear (let alone the shower) and not to know what was coming.  Much has been written about Hitch's total manipulation of the audience, getting them to identify with Leigh -- and then Tony Perkins for a bit, because his mother is so tough on him.  But of course we are then implicated in his messed-up-ness and it is a very serious messed-up-ness.  Robin Wood argues that all of the characters (but principally Leigh and Perkins) feel the weight of the past on the present and this is as good a key to the film as any wackier Freudian notions.  Don't we all walk into "traps of our own making" or are they made for us? Sounds plausible, but Hitch rejects even this, with one or two (or more) random slashes of a knife in a motel bathroom. That's what's really scary.