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The Times (05/Aug/1960) - Mr. Hitchcock and horror

(c) The Times (05/Aug/1960)

MR. HITCHCOCK AND HORROR

FLAIR FOR STARTLING SEEN IN PSYCHO

We, the people who go to the cinema that is, have much cause to be grateful to Mr. Alfred Hitchcock. Sometimes he has depended too much on tricks, on visual surprises and shocks, and sometimes, in later years, as in Rope, Lifeboat, and Rear Window, he has appeared to be interested mainly in setting himself difficult technical problems and then using his ingenuity to overcome them — a kind of game he personally seemed to find absorbing. Still, in the words of an acute American critic, "Mr. Hitchcock continues to be one of the most interesting and accomplished of America's star directors. Few move their cameras so daringly, frame their action so expertly, or know so well the precise moment to cut from action to reaction. Few have his flair for staging a scene to give it the rare quality of reality caught by chance..."

All that is true, yet Mr. Hitchcock has not always been happy in his choice of scripts, and Psycho, now to be seen at the Plaza Cinema, which has a script by Mr. Joseph Stefano and is based on a novel by Mr. Robert Bloch, is no exception to the rule. There has been a vast amount of publicity pointing to the fact that here was a story so different that no one could be admitted to the auditorium once the film had begun, but actually Psycho is conventional enough in outline and only at the end does Mr. Hitchcock's flair for the startling — not to say the shocking — give some justification to all the fuss.

A nice girl, Marion (Miss Janet Leigh), gives way to sudden temptation, steals 40,000 dollars, and finishes up at a desolate "motel" run by Norman (Mr. Anthony Perkins), an apparently nice young man. Norman appears (the story is, after all, sufficiently subtle in its implications to demand such equivocal verbs) to have a domineering old mother, who lives in a kind of Charles Addams residence, and, when first Marion and then a private detective (Mr. Martin Balsam) are murdered, it seems that the old mother is involved. And so, in a way, a psychological way, she is, for the title of this film is, after all, Psycho and so a split personality cannot be far away. Psycho is neither so horrifying nor so surprising as might have been expected, and there are scenes and lines of dialogue which inspire the wrong kind of laughter.

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