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| PSYCHO (1960) |
Shortly after “Psycho” settles into its story, Alfred Hitchcock does the unthinkable: He knocks off one of the film’s top-billed stars in a scene that still frightens today.
The infamous “Psycho” shower scene is a technical tour de force, an intricately designed and meticulously filmed sequence that remains one of many highlights of Hitchcock’s lengthy film career. The sequence is so effective that film scholars still study it in-depth.
More than 50 years after “Psycho” opened in 1960, the movie still packs significant scares and suspense into a small, intimate story. A year after helming the hit comic thriller “North by Northwest” in 1959, Hitchcock went for something totally different: a scaled-down, low-budget, black-and-white thriller filmed with the crew from his hit television show.
With strong performances from Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins, a lean script from writer Joseph Stefano and taut direction from Hitchcock, “Psycho” is in a class all its own. “Psycho” jolted film-goers in much the same way that “The Exorcist” did 13 years later. Audiences had never seen anything quite like Hitchcock’s film.
