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Reviews of Psycho from 1960

posted 3 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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(NOTE: All "quotes" from film reviews are paraphrased, from my memory, not exact.)

In the interest of trying to add a little "legacy" to this board, I thought I might run a few excerpts of Psycho reviews from 1960 here.

They are, pretty much, all up in my head, from memory. Though I think that some can be found on the internet or linked to.

An opening statement: for all the nostalgia that Psycho has provided me as a movie over the decades -- the TV showings, the revival house and college showings, VHS, DVD and streaming -- reading the Psycho REVIEWS now carries its own nostalgia.

For a read a lot of these reviews in the 70s. It was in that decade that I started hanging out at college libraries to do research for classes -- and for fun -- and I would often give myself "an hour for myself" to read things from the past that appealed just to ME. Not class assignments.

Psycho was such a topic. I can remember on a very cold and rainy winters day taking cover in a college library and looking through the bound volumes of Time and Newsweek until I found each magazine's original June , 1960 review of Psycho. In 1970, 1960 was "ancient history" to a young fellow like me -- to look at 1960 periodicals was truly a "trip back in time."

And so I will lead with those two reviews, Time and Newsweek, because I think that those were the first ones I read:

Interesting: in 1960, neither Time nor Newsweek told the names of their film critics. I guess this was just meant to be "the magazine's viewpoint."

The Time reviewer was pretty repulsed and offended, noting that the movie "leads to a sagging, swamp view motel and the most nauseating murder ever filmed, as one watches every gasp, gurgle, scream, and hemmorage by which a living human becomes a corpse." Interesting, sans the hemmorage part, I'd say that description applies to the murders in Frenzy and Torn Curtain, too.

Time noted, "what follows after that murder is expertly Gothic, but the nausea remains." Interesting: "expertly Gothic" rather covers all the visual and narrative greatness of Psycho, but the reviewer didn't much care. Time closed out: "what could have been a satisfying creak-and-shriek thriller becomes a spectacle of stomach-churning horror." (As someone pointed out, that "bad review" probably drove horror fans to the theater.)

Interesting: 1960 Time had "weekly capsule summaries of previously reviewed films" and lo and behold, each week Psycho got a better write-up. I think they called it a masterpiece in one of them. But another kept the negative promotion up: "Hitchcock's hand is heavy in this one, and thoroughly dripping in blood." Again -- page the horror hounds!

Famously, a year later, Time reviewed William Castle's rather dopey Psycho copycat -- Homicidal -- as BETTER than Psycho, "at least as a matter of pace." And they put Homicidal on their Ten Best of 1961 list. William Castle was very proud. Hitchcock had to be disgusted -- all that cinematic prowess on screen in Psycho and...Homicidal? But I DO think that Time put Psycho on their 1960 Ten Best as well...they got over their earlier pan.

NEWSWEEK took a different tack, focusing on the twist: "Psycho has been filmed in rather noisy secrecy in Hollywood, and now that the movie is here, we can see why: it depends on a specific twist."

Newsweek continued: "With regard to that twist, right guessers will deal themselves out of the suspense...wrong guessers will be enthralled to the end."

Hmm. Good point, I guess, but this: suppose you are sure that Norman IS the killer. Its still scary when Arbogast goes up those stairs. But you WILL be "dealt out of the suspense" when Norman is down with Sam as Lila explores the house. Still, it gets scary again when Norman knocks Sam out and runs up to the house...

NEWSWEEK gave this away "Hitchcock pulls a stunt that opens with water spraying out of a shower head that puts a lot more scare into the movie than the creepy old house on the hill."

1960 Newsweek magazine movie reviews ended with a "summing up" phrase.

For Psycho: "Summing Up: Sporadic chills."

Hmmm...sporadic chills. Not terribly terrified, the Newsweek reviewer.

Note: sharing the pages of Time and Newsweek with Psycho for reviews were The Apartment, and Bells Are Ringing.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

And then there was the venerable old Bosley Crowther of the New York Times.

Somebody put the word out that the New York Times review was a pan ("a blot on an honorable career") but I think that was just Hitchcock paraphrasing to Truffaut. The NYT review is respectful, astute, but just not particularly wowed.

Still, Crowther opens with: "You better come prepared with a strong stomach and be ready for a couple of shocks when you see Alfred Hitchcock's new film Psycho, which I feel a large number of people will." So, there: Crowther saw the blockbuster potential for Psycho from the get-go(versus those at Paramount -- and Hitchcock himself -- who feared a flop.) The "strong stomach" warning rather matches the "nausea" reports from Time...in 1960, Psycho was often said to be "not for the squeamish." (Is that word even USED anymore?)

Crowther noted "Always a fair hand at suspense, Hitchcock comes at you with a club in this frankly intended shocker." Again...Crowther certainly got it. Crowther saw the film as a melodrama and noted quite rightly: "That's the way it is with Psycho, slow build ups to sudden shocks until a couple of people have been gruesomely punctured and the mystery of the old house is solved."

"Slow build ups to sudden shocks." Yep. Crowther is even more specific "Perkins has an old mother, and that mother is adept at sneaking up on people and stabbing them with a big knife, drawing considerable blood." Indeed, Mother DOES sneak up on Marion in the shower and Arbogast at the top of the stairs. Well called, Bosley.

Interesting: Crowther does not single out the shower murder, giving the two murders equal weight it seems and, of course, accidentally giving something away: ONLY " a couple of people" get killed in Psycho. Read that review, you know that Sam and Lila will survive.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

These sentences sting today: "The acting is fair. Perkins and Leigh perform with verve, and Vera Miles, John Gavin and Martin Balsam do well enough in other parts." Well, the acting is MORE than "fair" if Crowther contends that Perkins and Leigh perfrom "with verve." Bosley was on to something about how special the Perkins and Leigh performances were. Note, too, that John Gavin is not singled out as acting poorly -- indeed, he almost always seemed to be given a fair shake in Psycho reviews. So much for "the stiff" (was HItchocck just resentful about having to take on Gavin?) In most reviews, I found that Perkins, Leigh, and BALSAM got the best notices.

Crowther ended his review with a little joke that said a little something. He was disappointed that in Perkins parlor with the stuffed birds, "there are no significant bats." We realize that bats in the parlor would be TOO macabre and out of place, but that Psycho WAS a horror movie. Again, Crowther "got" Psycho. He just didn't get how historic it would be and...like so many other film critics of 1960...he just couldn't bring himself to acknowledge the cinematic mastery and profound power of the film.

But: a few weeks after Psycho opened, Crowther wrote about it again. In a special Sunday article which covered both Psycho and The Apartment weeks into their summer run. Crowther found BOTH films to be important and special.

Crowther ---knowing that by now lots of New Yorkers had seen Psycho -- led off with "the biggest story this summer other than the political conventions is the shower scene in Psycho." Quaint: Presidential conventions were suspenseful and mattered back then. Indeed, Janet Leigh attended the Democratic convention in Los Angeles that summer, no doubt basking in her blockbuster horror fame.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Crowther wrote of audience members coming out of Psycho "trailing shredded nerves" and noted that for those who were offended by the film, "It is Psycho, not Anne of Green Gables." Crowther with his second review of Psycho -- after it was well established as a "lines around the block" blockbuster, very much became its fan...and indeed named Psycho to HiS Ten Best of 1960 list (as his successor Vincent Canby would name "Topaz" one of the Ten Best of 1969 at the end of the decade. Wow.)

Quite a few years later, I was bookstore browsing a book full of essays on film by Bosley Crowther (long and forcibly "retired" from the NYT) and I remember him writing this about "Psycho": "I have worked for some time on trying to determine why Psycho was such a massive hit...and I have decided it is because of the sheer terror of the demon created by Hitchcock to power the movie." That's a good call -- Mrs. Bates in action (in the bathroom sharing the shower with Marion, finishing off Arbogast on the floor) is scary enough today -- in 1960, I think she was the stuff of nightmares and sleeping with the lights on.

(More soon.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

MORE:

To the negative side:

While I would generally haunt college libraries to research movies (in bound volumes of magazines, and on microfiche for newspapers), I found one "book on film" in my high school library and found that it had TWO entries on Psycho -- both bad.

The book was called, I believe "On Movies," and the critic was a bearded, professorly looking fellow named Dwight MacDonald.

In this 1965 book, MacDonald went after Psycho for a couple of paragraphs, but started with the following asterisk remark:

"Psycho was a big hit with audiences and generally well reviewed by the critics*

*but not this critic. (MacDonald went on to cite from his 1960 Psycho review for Esquire Magazine:

"They won't let anyone in after Psycho starts. This creates a dilemma which might best be solved by staying home(NOTE: no cable or streaming THEN.) For Psycho is third rate Hitchcock, where one simply waits around for the little thrill at the end, as with a striptease. And in both cases, one ends up with the feeling that one has been had; a bad taste in the mouth. Oh, there is a bit where a naked woman is stabbed to death in a shower, with lots of blood and screaming.

In The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock had imagination and style. Now all that remains is the meanness. I think that Psycho is the work of a mean, sly, sadistic little mind.

Psycho...it just one of those (Hitchcock) TV shows, just padded out so that the sadism towards the victims is more pronounced. We've come to know quite a lot about that girl who is killed in the shower.

I'm against censorship on general principle. But this killing in the shower makes me wonder. It was perfectly all right to show the slaughter, but if we had seen Janet Leigh's nipples, it would have been actionable.

MORE

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

A lot to digest there. What amazed me about this bad review and at least one other (by Stanley Kauffman) is the idea that Psycho (and for Kauffman, NXNW and Vertigo too) marked a real decline for Hitchcock, from the heights of his little British 30's films.

Hitchcock himself told Truffaut that he felt this analysis was daft -- HITCHCOCK believed that his Hollywood productions during his peak period were better than his British stuff.

A "mean, sly sadistic little mind"? Well, mean, sly and sadistic ...yes. "Little," no. For the meanness of Psycho is also SADness. Its mean what happens to Marion (especially when we learn that Sam WOULD have married her), but it is also profound. And Mrs. Bates IS mean...vocally to her son, physically(beyond all rationality) to Marion and Arbogast.

"Sly?" Sure, Hitchcock IS sly in Psycho, both in his trickery and in his approach -- a raised eyebrow in general -- "LOOK at what these people are doing to each other."

Sadistic? An old British friend of Hitchcock's said after seeing Psycho, "sadistic son of a bitch, aren't you?" Well, maybe, but "tastefully so": we are meant to jump and scream at these murders, not to savor(as the killer might) the cruelty of them.

MacDonald's biggest 1960 "slap" at Psycho only SEEMS valid: "Its just one of those TV shows." In some scenes, just a little bit, yes -- the real estate office scene; the California Charlie scene, the scenes with the sheriff. But even those scenes are composed and shot with more noirish "oomph" than a Hitchcock TV episode(there was more time and money to do them) and OTHER scenes, never, ever, EVER would have been on that TV show in 1960, including the opening hotel scene, both murders, the clean up scene, and some of the shrink's psychosexual speech.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Moreover, it took a lot of time(7 days) just to film that shower scene. An entire half hour Hitchcock TV show took three days to film. Time, budget...COST were major for the shower scene, the staircase attack(which was, said one of the crew members, the hardest scene to film in the movie), and likely, the clean up scene.

Jump back to the book itself, circa 1965. MacDonald throws in a paragraph with new insults:

"This is a crime lacking any human passion or motives. She happened to stop at a motel run by a homicidal maniac, could have happened to anybody. The characters, like the audience don't KNOW Perkins is insane and so the hard boiled detective is as helplessly surprised by Perkins when he swoops down on him in drag on the stairs as Leigh had been in her shower. The audience didn't care, they got their two little shock thrills...one of them particularly delicious: a naked girl stabbed in the shower...

END

NEW food for thought in this paragraph. I'll pick "two little shock thrills" first. Short (and quick) the two murders were, but they were hardly LITTLE shocks. They were big , terrifying, never-before--seen, gory and powerfully unforgettable shocks.

But MacDonald seems to beg his own question about the terror of Psycho: indeed, nobody knows of Normans homicidal madness until it is too late. It is why Marion in the parlor and Arbogast in the office can have totally rational (if intense) conversations with Norman and yet die by "his"(her?) knife only minutes later. Norman is not only that "hair trigger," but Murderous Mother is ALWAYS within him.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

The lack of rationality to Norman Bates/Mother Bates is at the heart of Psycho's terror. When killing time comes, neither Marion nor Arbogast is given even a second to try to negotiate: they die, horribly. AND: the shower murder could NOT have "happened to anybody" who stops at the motel. Not to the old couple Norman mentions to Arbogast, not to a travelling salesman or anyone NOT young,female, single, and pretty.

Dwight MacDonald seems to have been wrong in Psycho in 1960(his Esquire review) and wrong in 1965 (his book "On Movies.") I think the biggest embarrassment to MacDonald is his lack of knowledge about how movies are made, and censorship concerns. He does not seem to understand at all the time and skill that went into the filming of the shower scene, or other "expensive" scenes or other scenes that barely passed film censors and would not have passed TV censors. MacDonald(whose book "On Movies" shows a tendency to praise foreign films and diss American studio product) is the kind of critic they used to hire back then: a snide naysayer with no knowledge of the product(movies) he followed.

There is a review for The Birds in MacDonald's book, which opens "the only thing of note about The Birds is that Alfred Hitchcock directred it." There follows a pan in which MacDonald notes: "Birds are even more irrational than knife wielding psychopaths. What's next, killer plants and flowers?"

Well, the fellow was snide and superior and, it turned out, quite wrong, about Psycho and The Birds(though his dis of the script perhaps holds.)

Also in his 1965 book, MacDonald notes, "Americans seem of two minds. They like Psycho and they like The Sound of Music. Does this mean that different fans take the field at different times, like pro football teams? Or do they have split personalites and enjoy BOTH Psycho and The Sound of Music."

The latter, Mr. McDonald. I know I do.

(More soon.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

‘Psycho’ is a mind-teasing shocker: 1960 review
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |

(Originally published by the Daily News on June 17, 1960. This story was written by Wanda Hale.)

(With comments by me.)

From the lobby of the DeMille Theatre where Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" is being presented, and I presume from that of the Baronet, which is also showing the film, a voice comes from a loudspeaker entreating: "Please don't give our ending away; it's the only one we have."
--

A funny line and a reminder that Psycho, in addition to having the greatest logo in movie history, and arguably the greatest trailer in movie history, Psycho had one of the greatest PR campaigns in movie history. The "NO ONE can enter the theater after Psycho starts" gimmick was key to everything, but pithy little "Hitchcock quotes" (aside photos of Hitchcock -- at his peak of TV fame -- pointing) helped stoke the fire. "Don't give away the ending -- its the only one we have." Hilarious and ...a clue, yes? There shall be a twist.

---

Critics never give away an ending to a mystery; there is such a thing as ethics. It isn't fair because complete enjoyment depends on the big surprise at the conclusion.

--

Ah, but many 1960 critics just couldn't help themselves. Some gave away the shower scene. Some gave away the staircase murder. Few gave away the twist, but a couple pointed at it.

--

But Mr. Hitchcock gives out several clues and if you are sharp you can figure it out.

--

Well...let the games begin.

--

The obvious thing to say is that Hitch has done it again;

--

And that was a GREAT thing to say. Tom Cruise was once quoted that he was astonished how Hitchcock was able to make so many great movies, back to back to back, again and again.

Psycho WAS Hitch doing it again -- after the big hit of NXNW, after the already-being-lauded Vertigo, after hits like The Man Who Knew Too Much, To Catch a Thief and Rear Window -- and even after interesting films like The Trouble With Harry and The Wrong Man. What a run!

---

that the suspense of his picture builds up slowly but surely to an almost unbearable pitch of excitement.

--

I found another review from 1960 -- Playboy's -- that said the same thing. "Starts slow, builds up to ..."

Note in passing: I found the Playboy review on microfiche. In 1960, the playmates were rather chastely posed and the cartoons of couples in sexual congress usually had a big piece of furniture blocking our view of all but the two heads of the coupled couple. Interesting to me.

--

"Psycho" is a murder mystery. It isn't Hitchcock's usual terrifier, a shocker of the nervous system; it's a mind-teaser.

--

Hmm. While overall, I found Wanda Hale's review to be on of the most astute about the movie and how it works, these sentences seem "all wrong" (Hitchcock BEFORE Psycho was making terrifiers and shockers? What's a mind-teaser -- the twist ending, I guess. Well, that that is a correct assumption on Ms. Hale's part.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

From the novel by Robert Bloch, the story concerns the search for two people who disappear completely: a young woman running away from something, a man who is following her. That's about all I can say and not give too much away.

---

Well..she gave away that two -- and only two -- people disappear, but she certainly outlines for us all yet again the spectacular SIMPLICITY of the Psycho plot: its about the events leading up to each disappearance, and then away from them.

--

Hitchcock has the same control over his characters as he has over his direction.

--

Nice praise here -- of the movie-making and the direction of actors.

--

Anthony Perkin's intelligent performance, the best of his career, makes the picture what it is, which is better than it would be without him.

--

I'm reminded that Hitchcock lured Perkins to do Psycho by saying "Tony, you ARE this picture." Wanda Hale got that. And here is Perkins getting something he had not gotten since Friendly Persuasion: Oscar worthy reviews (Perkins -- wrongly -- felt sure he'd get nominated. He should have been, of course, and Hitchcock cabled him: "I am ashamed of your fellow actors.")

--

He is seen as a lonely young man with an abnormal love for his mother. And he hates girls.

--

I'm reminded that Uncle Charlie and Bob Rusk certainly hated girls -- women. Bruno Anthony may have. But what vibes does Norman put out that he "hates girls" (Until the twist ending.) His snarling at Marion in the parlor? His telling Arbogast "But I'm not a fool, and I'm not capable of being fooled -- not even by a woman."

--

Janet Leigh has never been better in the dramatic role she plays, a woman desperate because she cannot marry the man she loves,

--

Another "best" review for Ms. Leigh. Wanda Hale got in 1960 what the rest of us got for years after.

--

John Gavin is excellent as this man.

--

Aha. That's the second good review for Gavin in Psycho I've read. I certainly liked his performance, and his look, and his voice. And I think Gavin was MUCH better than Viggo Mortenson in the remake -- Viggo played his Sam like a hick who doesn't much care about (the rather plain) Marion and actually hits a little on Lila!

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Vera Miles is fine, especially in the scene in which she is frightened out of her wits.

---

Ms. Hale nods in the direction of the fruit cellar...

--

In the main supporting roles, Martin Balsam is engaging as a know-tall private detective.

--

As in other 1960 reviews, when it comes to the supporting players, the reviewer has to "thumbnail it," but this is a good thumb nail. Balsam IS engaging(and interesting) as Arbogast and I like the phrase "know-tall" -- which is funnier than "Know it all" and also bespeaks of his character. He's a bit smug, Arbogast is. He doesn't know what he's dealing with, though.

--

John McIntire is as amusing as he is good

--

more praise

--

as a country sheriff who doesn't believe the weird tales he hears from the city folks.

--

More good "nutshell work."

--

Simon Oakland plays a psychiatrist, the one who throws the light on the strange behavior of a dual personality.

--

Hmm. No dumping on the scene or Mr. Oakland. Ms. Hale took the scene at face value. But oops -- she reveals that the shrink discusses "a dual personality." BIG clue, Ms. Hale.

--

Paramount is releasing "Psycho."

--

Interesting that Ms. Hale got that into the review. More interesting still: Psycho WAS a Paramount movie, but it looked and sounded like a Universal-International movie(same sound effects and backlot work.)

With Psycho getting dissed by Time and Dwight MacDonald and (we shall see) Stanley Kauffman(The New Republic), this "bread and butter" Wanda Hale review sees the good in the picture. This is a particularly strong review in praising the actors, which is very astute. I like Hale singling out Perkins and Leigh for "career best" performances. Its another reason that Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche failed in the remake.

More soon

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

In December of 1998 when Van Sant's Psycho came out, the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed it(not liking it much) but went to the trouble of re-printing the original 1960 SF Chronicle review of Hitchcock's original.

The critic was one "Paine Knickerbocker." Whatta name, eh? This rather SOUNDS like San Francisco circa 1960 -- only two years removed from being immortalized in Vertigo as a rather sophisticated and moody City by the Sea. Here is Paine's review, with my comments:

"Psycho" which opened yesterday at the RKO-Golden Gate, obviously represents a challenge that Alfred Hitchcock gleefully accepted. 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.

....(PLOT STUFF.)..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.

And just when affairs get bizarre again, Hitchocck brings in John McIntire as most easygoing and acceptable of sheriffs.

CONT

--

---

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Miss Leigh is effective as the troubled fugitive. Gavin and Vera Miles, who plays Leigh's troubled 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 a final fillip to Hitchcock's artful and theatrical trickery.

END

With comments:

"Psycho" which opened yesterday at the RKO-Golden Gate,

---
Hey is that a name for Frisco movie theater, or what? RKO still had some residual clout.
I think it is still there, but to do theatrical plays. I've been there. But that was some years ago, so maybe..no more.

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obviously represents a challenge that Alfred Hitchcock gleefully accepted. 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.

---

And so...we have another 1960 positive review for Psycho. Rather in the "practical daily paper tradition" -- not much room for heavy analysis -- but from the sophisticated city of San Francisco (which was perhaps TOO sophisticated for Psycho; the CBS affiliate there refused to broadcast Psycho even BEFORE CBS pulled it from the whole nation in 1966.)

--

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.

---

Now that's a good overall take on the film, yes? "blended the real and the unreal in fascinating proportions? -- says I: the story is all pretty REAL (non-supernatural) but what is UNREAL are the coincidences, the dream-like flow and especially the stylized murders(in look AND in music.)

--

"punctuated his film with several quick, grisly and unnerving surprises."

--

Well, we know what THEY are, don't we? And they generated big long screams in 1960.

I like the phrase "punctuated." That's how I feel the far more numerous murders in The Godfather play out -- as punctuation to the story as it moves along. And one critic noted that when Mother's knife comes down on the (unseen) Arbogast at the end of his murder, it is like "visual punctuation." Period. Period. Exclamation mark!

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Anthony Perkins, who smiles disarmingly, tightens and freezes at certain suggestions, and betrays a speech defect during moments of nervous excitement.

--

There's not much that a "daily paper" critic can say about performance, but here Knickerbocker at least breaks down Perkins' technical performance. You can picture it.

---

Perkins is excellent as young Norman Crane (sic.)

--

The 1998 SF Chronicle put the (sic) in there. But how funny to read "Norman Crane." Oops. Nobody gave Knickerbocker a cast of character list to work on his review from.
Note in passing: "Norman" and "Marion" are almost an anagram. Almost.

---

No more of the action may be disclosed here.

---

Ah, yes. Marion finishing her supper with Norman is usually where the 1960 critics had to stop on the plot. But so often, they ended up giving things away anyway...

--

But violence follows,

--

Hmm. Violence against WHOM? Norman? Marion? Someone else? The rest of the review ends up suggesting: Marion.

--

and then a skillfully paced interrogation by Martin Balsam

---

Ah...so Mr. Knickerbocker was impressed by the interrogation scene. It IS rather historic in its own way, given that Perkins and Balsam bring a sort of semi-improvisational talking-over-each other patter to the talk, even as Hitchcock's film editor "went nuts" trying to cut the scene and Hitchcock indeed paced the whole thing(on set, in the editing) skillfully.

---

as an affable but determined private eye.

--

Affable. Determined...in other reviews: tenacious. Engaging. "Know-tall." Balsam managed to make his presence felt, and to keep Arbogast (with the help of Hitchcock and Stefano) a far more precise and likeable character than in the book.

---

And just when affairs get bizarre again,

----

Hmm? What does this mean? Oh yeah -- Arbogast's turn to get killed...

---

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Hitchocck brings in John McIntire as most easygoing and acceptable of sheriffs.

--

I guess so. I think perhaps that 1960 critics "reviewed the poster" per the acting. There are six players on the poster: Perkins, Miles, Gavin, Leigh, Balsam, and McIntire. Those actors and their characters always get a note in a 1960 review. Plus, sometimes, Simon Oakland as the psychiatrist.

---

Miss Leigh is effective as the troubled fugitive. Gavin and Vera Miles, who plays Leigh's troubled sister, have less to contribute,

---

With Perkins having been given several sentences, Miss Leigh is given one, and Gavin and Vera Miles end up in their usual "taking up the rear position." But not BADLY reviewed. I do mean Gavin.

That Miles plays Leigh's "troubled sister" again clues us in that Leigh doesn't come out of things.

--

but the overall effect is expert, and again Hitchcock has used the camera skillfully.

---

Again, only that could be written in 1960. The rest of us have spent decades analyzing exactly how and WHY that overall effect is expert. Hitchcock seems to be getting "the usual praise" here for his cinematic skills as the 50's ended and a new decade began.

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Such a picture, in addition to all this, needs a gimmick.

---

Does it? Note the phrase "in addition to all this." Its like Pat Hitchcock wondering how anyone remembered her small role in Psycho given "everything else that happens." The point: a LOT happens in Psycho, it was a blockbuster among other reasons because so much HAPPENS: sex, shocks, terror, set pieces, performances. LA Times critic Charles Champlin called it "a spectacular picture" which is pretty good for such a small, cheap film (Chanplin did not review the movie in 1960, he wasn't there yet.)

---

Here it is that no one will be admitted to the theater after the film has begun. This device is a final fillip to Hitchcock's artful and theatrical trickery.

--

Indeed, a "final fillip." Ha. "Artful and theatrical trickery." A review that "gets it." Hitchocck the artist. Hitchcock the showman.

More soon.

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

(NOTE: All "quotes" from film reviews are paraphrased, from my memory, not exact.)

--

I wrote the above in my OP, but as it turns out, I was able to find the verbatim reviews for most of them above.

Here and now, I'm going to have to shift to, indeed, memory.

Though I have a couple of "big ones"(verbatim) saved for the end.

--

Right now:

I'm angry that I could not find one of my books on North by Northwest that had, within it, the entire angry and dismissive review of NXNW by New Republic critic Stanley Kauffman. Its a book that I always "had around" and it seems to have been lost, or misplaced in a move(along with some other books.)

But my memory of the NXNW review is strong, and it feeds my memory of the Kautfman review of Psycho.

Kauffman on NXNW:

"Its clear that Alfred Hitchcock has died and his work is being carried on by an untalented imposter....his last film, Vertigo, was an asinine bore...(and NXNW is bad, too.) The crop duster scene...is comic book stuff. (NOTE: Little did Kauffman know what was coming.) And the film has the usual ridiculous Hitchcock love scene in which the couple snuggle and nibble at each other in an unbelievable way. It has as much resemblance to real sex as Hitchcock's current films have to his actual classics."

Hmm..Kauffman was another of those who felt that Hitchcock was truly Hitchcock with The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. Hitchcock himself did not. And for me, there is no way that the tinny 30's smallness of The 39 Steps(however enthralling it must have been to 1935 audiences) can match Herrmann and Bass and Cary Grant and Rushmore and Techniclor and VistaVision and James Mason and the crop duster and Eva Marie's sexy train banter...

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Anyway, my memory on Kauffman's NXNW review is pretty clear, but I read his Psycho review(via microfiche) decades ago, and I only remember these pieces:

"Hitchcock here moves his usual ridiculuous snuggling and nibbling scene right up to the front of of the picture(NOT ridiculous, but true enough and clever on his part -- he put that sexy love scene , which is not in the book, up front because the rest of the movie couldn't accommodate romance AT ALL -- just horror. The Friday the 13th teens having sex motif wasn't here yet. Still, Hitchcock wanted SOME sensual lovemaking in Psycho, and he made sure it got in there)

The other thing I recall about Kauffman's Psycho review was that it did what critics too often do: attack the movie on their own wrong understanding OF the movie:

Kauffman asked these two questions:

ONE: Why, in all these years, has no one seen the mother in the window from the road?

Hmm. The answer is in the movie itself: the house is a LONG way up from the road, and blocked by the motel at certain angles. We see how long it takes Marion to drive up the path to where the motel and house are.

TWO: Why, on such short acquaintance, do the sister and boyfriend believe the detective's story about the mother?

Hhm. Possibly because Lila in particular is desperate to follow EVERY lead to where Marion might be or what happened? Why DISREGARD the detective? Lila and Sam take Arbogast's story to the sheriff, and when told mama is dead(or maybe some OTHER woman)...they keep following the lead. Of COURSE they would, Kauffman was wrong again.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Kauffman does raise an interesting story point, though, a rather sad one. WE spend a lot of time in Arbogast's company -- with Norman at the motel, in the phone booth, back to the house and doom.

But indeed, the sole acquaintance of Sam Loomis and Lila Crane with Milton Arbogast is but a few minutes of their lives. And when Arbogast walks away from them...they will never see this man alive again. Kind of sad when you think about it.

"In real life," I once had a business dinner with some strangers (to me) and conversed at length with one of the men. I learned some weeks later that he died in a car crash. I was a bit shaken up. I'd seen the man days before he died. One meeting and that was it. He was dead.

--

A couple of more things on Stanley Kauffman (and his "ilk") .

Imagine: Kauffman hated what are considered three of Hitchcock's absolute best(Vertigo, NXNW, Psycho...all in a row.) i'm pretty sure he hated The Birds, too.

But then..luck hit. Hitchcock started making his "decline" films, and now Kauffman and Company could REALLY attack Hitch.

Utlimately, however, Francois Truffaut named Kauffman BY name in an essay about how popular Hitchcock was, and how great his peak films were and how "Kauffman has lost." Kauffman seemed a bit cowed. He later gave Frenzy a good review , backhanded -- "Hitchcock finally has a good script, and lo, the Director has returned" and said of Famiily Plot, "In the seventies, Hitchcock has seemed to gain a second wind with this and Frenzy." But he said "I leave the rest to his fans."

Hey, I got it then and I get it now: Hitchcock's movies were perhaps not the most serious or adult films around. He wasn't Bergman or Fellini. But he sure was fun, and he sure know how to mix art, technique, story, style and stars.

Also hey: I'm not sure I don't have days when I don't myself think that " Vertigo was an asinine bore." But no: just because the plot doesn't particularly hold water (the villains' plan) and just because it lacks either the action of NXNW and the shocks of Psycho -- there is certainly something there in Herrmann's score and Hitchcock's style and the sad performances that Kauffman just refused to see(likely because he was looking for a thriller.) So...I don't think its an asinine bore. But sometimes I think it is (the famous moviechat word)..overrated.

Finally: about Kauffman's gripe about Hitchcock's kissing scenes -- with all the snuggling and nibbling.

I'd say that Hitchcock's penchant(as an obese, not terribly attractive man who didn't do much kissing himself) for making sure that most of his movies had at least one extended kissing scene made those kissing scenes very much part of the "allure of the Hitchcock picture." They were set-pieces just as much as the action scenes or murders. NXNW has the drunk drive, the crop duster and Rushmore -- but it also has Cary and Eva circling around each other in the train compartment, nibbling away.

That's a set-piece. Sam and Marion on the hotel room bed in their underwear is a set-piece. The major kiss in green light in a hotel room between Scottie and Judy(now "Madeleine") is a MASSIVE set-piece(and a sad one; he DOES look too old and nutty for her). Cary and Grace with the fireworks is a set-piece. Grace awakening the sleeping Jimmy with a kiss in his wheelchair is a set-piece.

And of course, Cary and Ingrid -- the "longest kiss in screen history" -- (tricking the censors with brief breaks) is a set-piece.

Its a part of Hitchcock, and Kauffman doesn't seem to have gotten its value in box office, patron satisfaction(especially evidently women) and ...art.

And this: Hitchcock worked in an era where actual sexual congress could never be shown, not even simulated, not even under the covers (though Torn Curtain seemed to pull that off in 1966.) He substituted his rather overdone, very erotic "mouth attacks" for sex itself -- these weren't just regular kisses. Kauffman may have felt these kisses weren't like "real sex" but they were a sensuous, arousing, and yes, romantic substitute.

Plus...just like in real life...a great kiss is the gateway to even greater delights.

(More soon.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

CONT

I have a couple of full 1960 Psycho reviews to finish with(the best, I believe)...but here's where I come in with a few "paraphrased from memory" bits and pieces of 1960 reviews.

The Los Angeles Times

The critic then was one Phillip K. Schuer, and he didn't much like Psycho, speaking near the end of his review about "the whole messy business" and you know -- he's kinda right. The shower murder was messy...with blood. The clean-up of Marion's body was messy...with blood. The burial of Marion's car in the swamp was messy ...with mud.

Arbogast's murder was messy...with blood spurting on his face and suit lapel, and the "messiness" of Mother's final stabs being a reduction of human beings to hunter and prey.

The fruit cellar reveal of Mother's face was messy -- such a mottled, rotted skull face. And the movie ends with Marion's car emerging from the messy swamp.

What Phillip K. Schuer could never know was how much MORE messy murder and horror would become; Giallo, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Carrie, Alien, Friday the 13th, John Carpenter's The Thing...

Schuer also wrote: "Psycho is Hitchcock's most unpleasant film since The Trouble With Harry, which was unpleasant in a different way."

That's interesting to think about. The Trouble With Harry is often considered Hitchcock's "sweetest" film, a warm black comedy that ends with marriage for two couples -- one young, one middle-aged.

And yet: to Schuer's 1955 eyes, The Trouble With Harry DID have a great unpleasant reality at its center: Harry himself, a corpse who is NOT removed and buried quickly (as corpses must be, or cremated.) The corpse unceremoniously remains WITH US...being buried and dug up repeatedly, moved into a house and a bathtub for bath. Its pretty unpleasant, indeed. And it anticipates two corpses in Psycho -- Marion's (so horrific after having known her as a human being); and Mother's(ALSO dug up, and gutted, and stuffed!)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Scheuer wrote: "When blood is supposed to spurt in Psycho, it really spurts." This joined Scheur to other critics whose "attack" on Psycho was really a LURE to young horror buffs.

But what does that MEAN? How can blood be meant to spurt, and NOT spurt? I suppose when...the blood doesn't spurt at all. In Psycho, the blood spurts twice -- two gouts on the floor of the shower during Marion's murder, and once on Arbogast's face (the "big spurt" of the movie, and, I'd say, I'm motion picture history...MARION isn't slashed in the face.)

And Scheur adroitly noticed that the fruit cellar climax .."is lifted from the Phantom of the Opera." Just so...when the woman creeps up on the Phantom, pulls his mask off and sees THAT FACE.

Still, Psycho found its own double-whammy twist on that famous Phantom of the Opera scene -- and the Bates staircase was built exactly where the Phantom of the Opera was FILMED on the Universal lot.

The Los Angeles Times is among the newspapers for which I checked "Years Best Lists" on 1960. Psycho didn't make it for Philiip K. Schuer, but he put it in the honorable mention category, thusly: "Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho greviously misused his mastery of the cinematic medium for a terrible purpose." Or something like that.

BTW, I checked Scheur's "Years' Best List" for 1959, and he wrote of Ben-Hur and other major films but noted, "of course, here in Hollywood, its North by Northwest that everyone loves the most." So there.

(More soon.)

[–] swanstep (2632) 3 years ago

It's interesting to read through some of these initial reviews of Psycho once again. I do feel a little sorry for early reviewers of what in fact turn out to be massively influential or important films (or albums or songs or books or plays or tv shows....). For at least two reasons:

1. In a very popular, hype-ridden medium like film was in 1960 especially, an initial reviewer's job in some ways just *is* to try to play it cool, to resist hype, to not be overawed by the premiere occasion or by any charm or glad-handling from stars or directors, you name it, to not be like-a-naive-kid-and-be-sucked-into-something, to not be fooled by flash and trash. In this sense, being under-enthusiastic, guarded is almost a professional requirement.

2. Later viewers and reviewers have increasingly more information than the initial reviewer has. They have a good idea of what the commercial significance of the film is, what the broader public reaction to it has been, what critical consensus has emerged, how other filmmakers have responded to it, what Awards attention it received, and so on. Eventually, say after a decade or two, we all finally end up knowing exactly how posterity sees and values what was originally, just-another-Friday movie, one of several hundred at least released that year. In Psycho's case, it really was a great turning point in movie history. As a big hit and popular sensation it was clearly a very big deal even a couple of months after its release, but no one in December 1960 could have quite grasped how vast its impact was going to be, how many imitators it would spawn, how many trends in culture it would set in motion, how central to film education it would become, and so on. *We* know all that of course.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

It's interesting to read through some of these initial reviews of Psycho once again.

---

Thanks for dropping by this little "project," swanstep. There is a method to my madness. This provides a "discussion" of Psycho "as it was" (1960, so long ago) and one reason I offer it is that I eventually learned that the internet only goes so "broad and deep" in terms of being able to look up old movie reviews. I found SOME that I could directly link to or re-write, but most of these are indeed from a pretty good memory I have. Trips to the library over the 70s, 80s, 90s. Time and Newsweek in bound volumes. The New York Times and the LA Times on microfiche.

I recall eventually finding libraries that had microfiche on all sorts of newspapers -- and I'd look up how Psycho got reviewed in San Diego or Washington DC. One library actually had Playboy on microfiche -- in addition to finding a 1960 Playboy review of Psycho, I got to see what Playboy was LIKE in its infancy -- 1960. (Less graphic.)

I guess it is true that I did this mostly with Psycho, but in my early "Hitchcock Jones period" of my youth, I did look up many reviews on NXNW, Vertigo, The Birds and...a little bit...Rear Window (The 1954 Time review of that one was "masterpiece" -- it must have felt good for Hitchcock to know that some folks in his heyday DID appreciate him as a filmmaker, after all.)

I will admit that some review snippets could also be found in books on Hitchcock films. I think it was in a book that I read the Newsweek assessment of Vertigo: "Just a Hitchcock and Bull story in which the real question isn't whodunit, but who cares?" (It must have felt BAD for Hitchcock to know that some folks in his heyday did NOT appreciate him..ha.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

CONT

I have a lot of books on Hitchcock , but one "lost to time" was called "Guidebook to Psycho" by a man called James Naremore. I think from 1973. THAT book had a bibliography which, as I recall, gave me plenty of citations as to issues of 1960 magazines and newspaper reviews of Psycho. (I might add that somewhere along the line, this research wasn't ENTIRELY for fun; I wrote some school papers in high school and college that worked this stuff in...getting "paid" in grades if nothing else.)

I think it was the Naremore book that had one phrase from The Nation's critic Robert Hatch, that he was "offended and disgusted" by Psycho. I went to the library and read the whole review and it was a bit different in tone: "I am offended and disgusted by Psycho. Not so much by the violence and horror of it, but by its exploitation of mental illness in the service of a mere thriller." (Hmm...sounds like a review written in 2021.)

---

Eventually, I used libraries to read CONTEMPORARY reviews in newspapers and magazines , sometimes in the same year of release, sometimes later. My knowledge of how many raves Frenzy got (most of them) was from reading Time, Newsweek, Life(which didn't review movies when Psycho came out in 1960) the NYT, the LA Times, etc.

CONT.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

CONT

And it wasn't just Hitchcock reviews that I read, eventually. I pored over reviews for Dirty Harry, The Godfather, American Graffiiti ("Bitchin. Superfine." wrote Jay Cocks of Time.) The Sting(Cocks HATED that one, said it "was like a musical comedy with the songs removed.) Chinatown(Cocks didn't much like that one either -- "Looks good from a distance, but not up close.")

Also: In the 70's, a cadre of critics did their best to salute "a great new movie auteur per week": Altman, Peckinpah, Penn, Nichols, Michael Ritchie(its true -- his "competition films" Downhill Racer,The Candidate, Smile and Semi-Tough); Kubrick got his time as a bit of an "old dog" and even Hitchcock got some "late breaking respect from the young critics" with Frenzy -- and then some measured respect for Family Plot, which they all seemed to peg as his last.

Ya see..its not like I spent my life reading Psycho reviews. I spent my life reading a LOT of reviews in general. Its OK by me. I did other stuff too. These reviews, properly "arrayed" created their own "moviechat" in an era without the net.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

swanstep wrote:

I do feel a little sorry for early reviewers of what in fact turn out to be massively influential or important films (or albums or songs or books or plays or tv shows....). For at least two reasons:

1. In a very popular, hype-ridden medium like film was in 1960 especially, an initial reviewer's job in some ways just *is* to try to play it cool, to resist hype, to not be overawed by the premiere occasion or by any charm or glad-handling from stars or directors, you name it, to not be like-a-naive-kid-and-be-sucked-into-something, to not be fooled by flash and trash. In this sense, being under-enthusiastic, guarded is almost a professional requirement.

--

Agreed. You have 1960 reviewers like Dwight MacDonald and Stanley Kauffman taking a "natural adversary" role against American movies in general, and indeed, their stance is "I'm too hip to countenance this or give it the power of the hype." For instance, MacDonald didn't like Psycho, but he didn't much like The Apartment ("I don't believe the fairy tale ending for these disreputable characters") or West Side Story ("The songs didn't 'send me') either. I stumbled onto THOSE MacDonald reviews in his book with the bad Psycho ones.

Bosley Crowther of the New York Times got "two bites of the apple" on Psycho. His initial review rather sagely predicted a hit: "...if you go to see Psycho, which I think a great many people will...." Once it became a phenomenon and a blockbuster , he wrote a special follow up column very much defending the event and identifying its popular power ("Audiences walk out into the street from the theater dangling shredded nerves")

NEXT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

But no, for the most part, critics can't REALLY know if they are reviewing something monumental until some time has passed.

With some exceptions. I read reviews of The Godfather and, later, ET on release that called them "instant classics." With those movies, the critics seemed to know at once that they were viewing a great film AND that
the film was going to be a blockbuster AND remain "talked about for years to come."

Along the same lines, I recall the first week reviews arriving for The Godfather, Jaws and....all the way out to Batman (1989) with ALL the critics KNOWING that they were reviewing blockbusters that people had been waiting all year for. The critic knew they had to factor that anticipation and desire into their reviews. I recall that Charles Champlin of the LA Times said of The Godfather: "Its everything we wanted and so much more, an improvement on the book." But later Champlin wrote of Jaws: "Its lumpily written and a bore ashore." A bore ashore - one of those phrases a critic likes to write.

--

In some ways, Hitchcock movies must have been odd for critics to confront. In the forties and fifties, he delivered at least one movie a year, and critics "took him for granted." "Here's the new Hitchocck, its OK" seemed to be the tone, or (a bit better) "Here's the new Hitchcock, he is as good at what he does as ever, but its no big deal." THESE critics had to stand back and watch a "second wave" of more in-depth analysts(if not critics) do a "deep dive" (that's this year's catchphrase, yes?) into Hitchocck's incredibly artistic visual style and less noticeable thematic depth.

Robin Wood began his seminal 1965 book "Hitchcock's Films" with an essay called "Should We Take Hitchcock Seriously?" and then noted "Its a tragedy that such a question even has to be asked." I guess folks took Hitchcock movies as one step up from B's, or something. Or like the popular movies of those other populist auteurs -- Jerry Lewis and Elvis.
CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

swanstep wrote:

2. Later viewers and reviewers have increasingly more information than the initial reviewer has. They have a good idea of what the commercial significance of the film is, what the broader public reaction to it has been, what critical consensus has emerged, how other filmmakers have responded to it, what Awards attention it received, and so on. Eventually, say after a decade or two, we all finally end up knowing exactly how posterity sees and values what was originally, just-another-Friday movie, one of several hundred at least released that year.

---

Yes. All true. I would like to add that usually I have read some reviews of a movie I want to see, and I get a sense of if the movie is liked by the critics or not. (Why, "Rotten Tomatoes" has now enshrined that pre-knowledge, yes?)

But a few times, I saw a movie in sneak preview and with my OWN opinion, I didn't know if I was seeing something great or not.

Two examples:

ONE. Blazing Saddles. I saw it at the premiere (with Mel Brooks et al in attendance) with a built-in laughing crowd, but I thought it was like a dirty episode of the Carol Burnett Show(perhaps because Harvey Korman was in it.) I stood back and watched it dominate a LOT of 1974 and today it is seen as a rebellious classic "that could never be made today."

TWO: Taxi Driver. I saw it first at a seminar hosted by its writer, Paul Schrader. I loved that Bernard Herrmann scored it; it was clearly a powerful, somewhat sickening film. And my small audience laughed and laughed at "You tawkin' to me?" But I can't say I saw the film as a major classic that would last forever as one of the "great Scorseses" -- if not the greatest. Hell, we barely knew who Scorsese WAS. Other guys like Altman and Bogdanovich and Friedkin were getting the ink at the time.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

swanstep wrote:

In Psycho's case, it really was a great turning point in movie history. As a big hit and popular sensation it was clearly a very big deal even a couple of months after its release,

---

I have found a link (which I will try to share soon) to a particular 1960 newspaper ad for "Psycho" which consisted of a cartoon drawing of "scores of people lined up around the block to see it" -- with Hitchcock drawn into the crowd. THAT ad spoke directly to the fact that Psycho was drawing crowds and evidently like no other Hitchcock before it (though I think Rear Window was a lining up movie, too.)

---

but no one in December 1960 could have quite grasped how vast its impact was going to be, how many imitators it would spawn, how many trends in culture it would set in motion, how central to film education it would become, and so on. *We* know all that of course.

--

We DO know that, swanstep, and its rather one of those "gifts that keep on giving."

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

A thought on the "imitators" of Psycho: when The Sound of Music hit big, we got a ton of big 60's musicals thereafter -- most of which underperformed or were not very good. (I think only Hello Dolly was a big hit, not big enough to pay off its cost.) When Easy Rider hit big we got a ton of "low budget counterculture movies" -- many of which flopped (like Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie) or faded away(Rafelson movies like The King of Marvin Gardens.)

We got Mafia movies after The Godfather; Satanic movies after The Exorcist, SOME (not a lot) of animal attack movies after Jaws.

Psycho, too, DID trigger some immediate imitators in the 60s -- but these imitators were rather in the "B" zone - William Castle movies, movies with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford that were NOT "Baby Jane" (I'm thinking of The Nanny , Berserk, etc...) Die Die My Darling with Tallulah Bankhead...and just a bunch of really terrible American and British "psycho thrillers." In short, Psycho was at heart too "sick" for the big studios to want to emulate it . (Only really the two Aldrich pictures -- "Baby Jane" and "Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte" went that way, and "Baby Jane" wasn't much for shock murders.)

No...it seems like it took to the 70's for a new generation to REALLY go to town with the Psycho knockoffs. Brian DePalma(Sisters, Bates High School in Carrie, Dressed to Kill) and the "re-birth of the slasher movie" after a brief Satanic period: Halloween, Friday the 13th and their offspring. It was all very "delayed" from 1960.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

swanstep wrote:

In Psycho's case, it really was a great turning point in movie history

--

To the extent that the 1960 reviewers seemed to "get that from the get-go," I'd say that was reflected in the reviews that saw BOTH of the murders of the film as landmark:

"..you'd better have a strong stomach if you come to see Psycho...A mother who uses a big knife to stick holes in people, drawing considerable blood. Before the movie is over, a couple of people have been gruesomely punctured...

"...the grisliest murders in film history" (That's from the Andrew Sarris review, coming up, he was smart enough not to specific only two murders and kill the suspense.)

"..two murders, and a third attempt, are among the most vicious I have ever seen in a theater."(That's from the Stanley Kauffman and I have to say AMONG the most vicious? Which other ones prior to 1960 in American film.)

And the Time summary of the shower murder: "The messiest and most nauseating murder in film film history as we witness evey twitch, gasp, gurgle and hemoraghe by which a living human being becomes a corpse."

I also recall one other reviewer talking about how the murders are shown "in full and at close range."

Yep, I daresay the critics who "got" Psycho got that it was the two murders that were the landmark thing about the movie. A graphic violence that went BEYOND anything audiences had been allowed to see before, Interestingly, most of the 1960 reviews (save the Time review) seemed to rank the two murders equally ...it took some years for the shower murder alone to carve out its prominence in movie history. (Let's face it, Arbogast wasn't a pretty woman naked in a shower; and a shower is a universal symbol of privacy and vulnerability.)

Not to mention: Herrmann's screeching strings (which are really LOUD, especially in the staircase murder) were as violent to the ears as the images were to the eyes.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

A few more reviews to go, but I'll single out only this headine (in a Washington DC paper, not the Post) as telling us something else about 1960 and Psycho:

"IT'S 'PSYCHO' -- AND ITS FUN"

Hitchcock himself told some interviewers (not Truffaut) that he found Psycho to be a "fun" movie and likened it to a roller coaster ride(which he called a "switchback") or a trip to the haunted house at the fair.

This DC reviewer seems to have been the ONE critic who GOT that about Psycho. It WAS a thrill ride, people DID scream at the top of their lungs and that WAS a reason it made film history as a hit as well as art.

I would add this: Psycho is really only fun BECAUSE the two murders (with their shock music) are so brutal. People screamed BECAUSE the violence and the music was so intense, never had a movie elected "not to pull the punches." And so: they screamed. And so: they had FUN.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

A "pause" for a few quick memories on reviews of OTHER Hitchcock movies:

Newsweek on The Birds: "Hitchcock's Godzilla Movie." .... "there is a suspense sequence on a staircase, but because we just saw the same sequence, on the same staircase, in Psycho...its rather redundant." (Eh...not really the SAME staircase, says I.)

And this: More than Vertigo, Psycho or The Birds, North by Northwest seemed to get the best reviews on release. It was very much Hitchcock "doing what Hitchcock does best" with the great Cary Grant as his star.

From Newsweek:

"If it proves nothing else -- but it does! it does! -- North by Northwest proves that Cary Grant in front of the camera and Alfred Hitchcock behind it, are unbeatable."

From Time:

"The audience already knows...its going to take more than a Red Spy Ring to take out Cary Grant....James Mason is as smooth and polished as a Kremlin bannister as the villain."

(Time had strong anti-Communist leanings in 1959.)

(More soon..on Psycho.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/film/082860hitch-psycho-ban.html

Above:

I found the SECOND article about Psycho by Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, from later in the film's summer run. He quite defends the film, and certainly praises Hitchcock's cinematic expertise. I honestly don't think history has properly characterized Crowther's positivity about Psycho.

The review also reveals a certain "quaintness" of phrase, I think. 1960 was a long time ago, critics used the English language differently.

I also like how Crowther caught that what one does NOT see in Psycho is as important as what one does see (I'll opine: exactly what happens with the knife in the shower scene and how the final attack on Arbogast is below the frame.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I now bring in some(only a couple, maybe) reviews from 1960 on Psycho that REALLY seemed to get how important it was, and what it meant at the time, and what it was GOING to mean:

Link to the Village Voice "Psycho at 50"

There is an introduction as to Psycho's historic importance but then the Voice gives us Andrew Sarris's original 1960 review. Link to both articles here:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2010/06/15/psycho-is-50-remembering-its-impact-and-the-andrew-sarris-review/

Some things to note about the Andrew Sarris review of Psycho:

ONE: It was, evidently, his first review FOR The Village Voice, and that is from where Sarris launched his historic career (and feud with fellow New Yorker Pauline Kael.)

TWO: Sarris nicely ties up and compares those critics who loved the old British Hitchcock pictures, and "the French" who were extolling him in the fifties, and chooses his side: "The French were right all along."

THREE: He doesn't give away much of anything about the plot and even writes "the grisliest movie murders of all time" without saying just exactly how MANY such murders there are(unlike Bosley Crowther, who said "two" and gave the game away for Lila and Sam at the end.)

FOUR: He makes a rather good (and surprising) point that the solution to Psycho is more more "ghoulish" than to other horror films -- and when you think about it, Norman's killing, gutting, and stuffing of his mother IS(and certainly WAS) ghoulish.

FIVE: He sees it as "the first American film since Touch of Evil to stand in the ranks of European film." That bias was always gonna be there back then, but then Hollywood needed some shocks to the system to catch up with European candor.

--
CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Outside of the content of Sarris' review here, I note that I read somewhere else that Sarris was roundly attacked by the "intelligentsia" readership of the Voice for having the temerity to so soundly approve of Alfred Hitchcock as a great director...particularly with something as "lowdown" as Psycho.

Well...it would take more time, but Sarris was soon joined by a lot of American and British critics in praising Hitchcock for the peak of Psycho ("all of human life is here" wrote one) and, retroactively for his whole career. The movies from Marnie on (less Frenzy) may have been films of decline(OK, maybe INCLUDING Frenzy, to some) , but no one could take away the greatness of Hitchcock's first four decades of work(plus the TV series that made him a star and richer still.)

Soon Sarris wrote that book that ranked directors into "levels." Hitchcock was among the few at the very top -- the Pantheon. I believe that Wilder was a few levels down ("Less Than Meets the Eye.")

PS. I feel that perhaps the key sentence in Sarris's review is "(Psycho") makes the horror films before it all look like "Pollyanna." HERE was a review that didn't take the shocks and perverse content of Psycho at face value. Also: another hit of the summer of 1960 WAS "Pollyanna" -- a Disney movie with a rather dark undertone and a tragedy near the end that turns into only a PARTIAL happy ending. Uncle Walt could be as rough on audience emotions as Hitch.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

(More:

I was kinda sorta hoping to "hold this review to the end" but other 1960 reviews are popping up and I figured I would being this one in "sooner rather than later."

Quite simply, THIS 1960 review of Psycho strikes me as the greatest of them all,. the best, the one most "on point" -- and the one that truly "got it" about the impact of Psycho both as box office commerce and cinematic art.

It is by Ernest Callenbach, in a periodical called "Film Quarterly." It is, I suppose a bit unfairly favored versus "on the day" 1960 reviews. First of all , I think it was printed in the fall of 1960, once folks knew just how much of a summer hit Psycho was. Second, it is longer than the other reviews I found -- more of an ARTICLE than a review; a critical study of the type that would eventually come along(in the 70's and after) of Psycho -- including books like "A Long Hard Look at Psycho"(Durgnat) and "The Moment of Psycho"(Thomson.)

Anyway -- in a few posts for space -- I will offer up Ernest Callenbach's review of Psycho and then come back to analyze it:

The review (FILM QUARTERLY, FALL 1960, ERNEST CALLENBACH):

begin:

Hitchcock is said to be very pleased with this film, and well he might be. In it he has abandoned the commercial geniality of his recent work and turned to out-and-out horror and psychopathology: there are two gruesome knife-murders portrayed in more or less full view, and an attempted third one. The film begins with a drab, matter-of-fact scene in a hotel bedroom (the girl's unwholesomeness -- she later steals $40,000 -- is no doubt established equally by the fact of her being found in bed with a man, though wearing bra and half-slip, and by the fact that it is midday).

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

It imperceptibly shifts to a level of macabre pathology, unbearable suspense, and particularly gory death. In it, indeed, Hitchcock's necrophiliac voyeurism comes to some kind of horrifying climax. Phallic-shaped knives swish past navels, blood drips into bathtubs, eyes stare in death along the floor, huge gashes appear in a man's amazed face, and so forth.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

So well is the picture made, moreover, that it can lead audiences to do something they hardly ever do any more -- cry out to the characters, in hopes of dissuading them from going to the doom that has been cleverly established as awaiting them. (It turns out to be a slightly different doom than the audience believes; and in the third instance it is thwarted, slightly improbably: in this we see the usual Hitchcock, unbothered by problems of motivation and concerned only with the joy of giving one more turn to the screw. But on the whole one does not need, in Psycho, the suspension of common sense usually required to enjoy Hitchcock.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

The key to the excellent shift in levels (it is perhaps more a smooth descent, from apparent "normality" to utter ghastliness) is provided, unbelievable as it may seem, by Anthony Perkins, who in this film is revealed to be an actor after all. Instead of the rather wooden person we have seen in Desire under the Elms or On the Beach, Perkins here gives us first a charming, shy, lonely boy; then a lecherous, dangerous, frustrated youth; then a frightened, sinister, criminally insane man; and finally he is revealed (there is no real reason to conceal the final twist, which is equally horrifying if one knows about it in advance) as a psychological hermaphrodite who has killed and mummified his mother but preserved her in half of his own personality, so to speak, and who "in her person" commits the murders motivated by the sexuality or fears of the other half of his personality.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

All this is explained, in the obligatory rationality-scene at the end, by a young psychologist in the police office. This scene supposedly restores the audience to some real frame of reference. Meanwhile Perkins, sitting in a nearby cell, hears his "mother's" voice in internal monologue, meditating on "her son's" fate. The camera closes in, but not too close, on his face, now utterly strange, intense, mad. (It is probably the most apt use ever made of internal monologue.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

All this is very nice, if not quite the kind of thing one would recommend to sensitive souls. It is superbly constructed, both shot-by-shot and in the overall organization by which the shocks are distributed and built up to. (The music by Bernard Herrmann, an old radio man, is conventional suspense stuff but immensely effective.) Aside from Perkins, the acting is ordinary but satisfactory. Hitchcock is said to have once remarked that "Actors are cattle," and this is all that is really required in many of his pictures. The suspense mechanism is all; style is all; deception is all. To allow the personae involved to become human beings would destroy everything, in the usual Hitchcock film. Psycho is better: the people are acceptable, at any rate; there is no need to make excuses for them.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Still, it is the film itself that grips one-in these times, a remarkable achievement, and a hint that "realism" in the cinema is perhaps not so important as people think. Psycho is full of jokes, twists, pieces of nastiness that one would think gratuitous in any other film-maker. Hitchcock forces one to realize that these things are the point. How lovely, he would doubtless say, about the way Janet Leigh, a faintly playful, quite sexy broad, is done in! She gambols in the shower, like somebody in an advertisement, while in the background a figure blurred by the shower curtain enters the room, approaches, grips the edge of the curtain ... Then, in a flurry of quick cutting which managed to get past the censors yet remains the goriest thing seen on film in a long time, she is stabbed to death, and slumps hideously to the floor in a series of movements over which the camera lingers lovingly.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Psycho is surely the sickest film ever made. It is also one of the most technically exciting films of recent years, and perhaps an omen: only, it appears, in films whose subject-matter is trivial and sometimes phony can Hollywood film-makers find the inspiration or the freedom to make really ingenious films. The trickery of Psycho is more imaginative and far more elegantly contrived than the all-out seriousness of Nun's Story, not to mention the gigantism of Ben-Hur.
There is, to be sure, a "serious" subject to all trivial films, and in the case of Hitchcock the elucidation of the hidden motives upon which he has built his seemingly unimportant remains an intriguing job for some intrepid critic. In the meantime, anybody who likes gore, or who likes Hitchcock, will be made happy by Psycho. The tone of Hitchcock's recorded plug for the picture-delightfully charlatanish, reassuringly and almost smugly personal -- is a perfectly sound introduction to the film.

(END OF CALLENBACH REVIEW)

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Some analysis of Callenbach review

Though I split 'em up, that's a lot of paragraphs and my instinct is to "cut to the chase" and discuss what Callenbach says "at the end" of his review. It seems where he most got where Psycho was taking "the movies":

BEGIN:

Psycho is surely the sickest film ever made.

--

Ka-BOOM. Quite a statement, and in 1960-- as far as American studios went -- quite correct. Its funny, many of the other 1960 reviews of Psycho seemed to "take it in stride" as a horror film, nothing more, nothing less, and saluted Hitch mostly for doing it well.

But "sickest film ever made" speaks to just how disturbing Psycho was beneath the thrills. The whole idea of a young man murdering his mother, gutting her, stuffing her, LIVING with the corpse(for 10 years!)... pretty sick. But enthralling. And that Marion and Arbogast rather stumble into this horror and in turn become the innocent victims of it -- sicker still, once we know that's WHY they died...and so horribly.

CONT

.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Callenbach wrote:

It is also one of the most technically exciting films of recent years,

--

Ka-BOOM. Again, Callengach "gets it" about Psycho -- he sees beyond simply the "sick" narrative of the piece and --

---

and perhaps an omen: only, it appears, in films whose subject-matter is trivial and sometimes phony can Hollywood film-makers find the inspiration or the freedom to make really ingenious films.

---

YES. Several great points in one here, I think. One is that Hitchcock's wild-eyed cinematic style seems to have ONLY really fit the thriller. The thriller allows Hitchcock in Psycho to have his camera dive under Perkins' bobbing throat as Arbogast questions him; or for the blood swirling down the drain to dissolve into the camera swirlilng away from Leigh's eye. Just as the thriller allows Hitchcock to shoot Cary Grant from high atop the UN building as a speck running down below, or to make the bell tower staircase in Vertigo zoom in and out in dizzying. Hitchcock could NOT have been the director of something "serious" like Anatomy of a Murder or The Nun's Story or On the Waterfront with such techniques.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Callenbach wrote:

only, it appears, in films whose subject-matter is trivial and sometimes phony can Hollywood film-makers find the inspiration or the freedom to make really ingenious films.

---

Here, Callenbach is REALLY seeing the future that Psycho is predicting:

"Subject matter that is trivial and sometimes phony" by Hollywood's serious Oscar bait standards, could very well mean: Jaws, Dirty Harry, Bullitt, The Exorcist, Alien, and yes..Star Wars. And Callenbach's point is that it is only In such movies that "Hollywood filmmakers can find the inspiration or freedom to make really ingenious films."

YEP.

I will leave this thread for a bit and let this soak in. What a review Mr. Callenbach wrote!

[–] [deleted] 2 years ago

It is the height of arrogance for you to assume that even the most devoted Psycho fan would want to read thread after thread of your garrulous garbage.