Checking Out the Motel

I've now heard "you mean you've never seen Psycho?!" for the last time. Yes, somehow, incredibly, a film nut like me had managed to come this far having never seen the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller. But I rectified that oversight yesterday.

I've often found with classic movies that one has to make a great deal of allowances for the time frame in which they were originally created. Put another way, most "old films" just don't hold up for me when I watch them with my modern sensibilities. And there's no question, Psycho was distinct in many ways in its time, a first of its kind. But I don't think you have to make any of those allowances for it to still be a very good film.

The greatest testament I can make for the film is that it still managed to generate a good amount of suspense for me even though, as one of the "classic movies," all the big moments had been long ago spoiled for me. The shower scene, the revelations at the end... no real surprises were waiting for me in this movie. But it was still tense. The direction was great, the camera work very dramatic, the writing mostly clever, and the acting in all the major roles compelling.

Of course, next year, Psycho will be 50 years old, if you can believe it. And I can scarcely imagine what the movie would have been like to see in its time. An onscreen murder, surely more grisly than anything that had been previously presented in a mainstream movie. A ghoulish corpse presented in a shocking reveal. A main character dispatched barely halfway into the proceedings? You can thank Psycho for a lot of good movies that followed. (And blame it for a lot of bad knockoffs, too.)

Still, it did hurt my full enjoyment of the movie to know every major beat before it happened. It did sometimes intrude that the acting of so many minor characters was stilted and old-fashioned. (There's a scenery-chewing psychiatrist in the final scene that's pretty laughably bad, but then he's working with the one truly bad monologue in the film. Or perhaps it just seems that way today, reflecting on the attitudes on psychology of the past era?) It may not be fair to hold that against Psycho, but it is the perspective I bring to it.

In any case, I'm very glad I watched it. And I'll join the chorus saying this movie is a classic that should be seen. (I certainly don't feel that about all -- or even most -- classic movies.) I rate Psycho a B.