After his suspense pictures and romantic adventure stories could he come
up with a shocker, acceptable to regular American audiences, which still
carried the spine-tingling voltage of foreign presentations such as
“Diabolique”?
The answer is an enthusiastic yes. He has very shrewdly interwoven crime,
sex and suspense, blended the real and the unreal in fascinating proportions
and punctuated his film with several quick, grisly and unnerving surprises.
“Psycho” opens with Janet Leigh and John Gavin in a cheap hotel room.
That afternoon, on returning to her office, Miss Leigh succumbs to
temptation and steals $40,000.
But as she flees Phoenix, Hitchcock’s finger is always on the wheel. A
highway patrolman represents menace behind his disturbing dark glasses. She
is back in the world of uneasy reality as she purchases a used car from a
convincing dealer.
And then suddenly she is in a strange motel, talking to its eager,
sensitive manager, Anthony Perkins, who smiles disarmingly, tightens and
freezes at certain suggestions, and betrays a speech defect during moments
of nervous excitement. Perkins is excellent as young Norman Crane (sic).
No more of the action may be disclosed here. But violence follows, and
then a skillfully paced interrogation by Martin Balsam as an affable
but determined private eye.
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And just when affairs become bizarre again Hitchcock brings in John
McIntire as the most easygoing and acceptable of sheriffs.
Miss Leigh is effective as the troubled fugitive. Gavin and Vera Miles,
who plays Miss Leigh’s sister, have less to contribute, but the overall
effect is expert, and again Hitchcock has used the camera skillfully.
Such a picture, in addition to all this, needs a gimmick. Here it is that
no one will be admitted to the theater after the film has begun. This device
is the final fillip to Hitchcock’s artful and theatrical trickery.