The Telegraph (04/Nov/2005) - Must-have movies: Psycho

(c) Telegraph (04/Nov/2005)

Must-have movies: Psycho (1960)

Mark Monahan reviews a classic that every film-lover will want to own

In Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock not only created a blazing masterpiece and spawned a new cinematic genre - the slasher. He also delivered one of the boldest blows in screen history. It was not just how he killed Janet Leigh's Marion Crane, astonishing though that was - it was when.

The film is 109 minutes long, but he offs his heroine, the glamorous miscreant with whom he's made us identify, after just 47. In 1960, this generated, by all accounts, an unprecedented sense of careering into uncharted and terrifying territory: what the hell would happen next? Even now, it's distinctly unnerving.

That said, Marion Crane's now-famous end in the shower - made up of 70 camera set-ups and 78 pieces of film, with no actual shot of the knife piercing flesh - is very nearly matched for shock value by the later dispatching of Detective Arbogast as he explores the motel on Marion's trail. And, although the trick is simpler here, it's no less powerful.

As soon as the policeman reaches the top of the stairs, Hitchcock cuts disorientatingly to a bird's-eye view of the landing, and then, before we've had even a second to get our bearings, a figure darts into view from the right of the screen, knife raised. No matter how prepared you are, how many times you see it, it's almost impossible not to flinch.

Hitchcock's mischievous genius for audience manipulation is everywhere: in the noirish angularity of the cinematography, in his use of Bernard Herrmann's stabbing string score, in the ornithological imagery that creates a bizarre sense of preying and being preyed upon. Was he also subconsciously warming up for his next project, The Birds?

The creatures are everywhere in Psycho, from the aerial shots, to Marion's surname, to the town where the action begins (Phoenix), to the hideous taxidermy looming on Norman's walls, and even his world-view. "I think that we're all in our private traps," says Norman (the terrifying, touching Anthony Perkins). "We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch."

The audience is similarly helpless in Hitchcock's "trap" - but you wouldn't have it any other way.