100 All-Time Films (To see the entire list click here)
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)
After 50 years, is there anything about the film you haven’t heard over and over again? How one of the most famous scenes in film history, the shower scene, took a week to shoot. How that scene was a landmark in editing. How the main character dies in the first third of the movie. How Bernard Hermann’s score inspired composers to move to film. This is an undeniably famous movie and absolutely one of the landmark films in cinema’s history.
You can’t discuss film history without touching on Hitchcock’s Psycho. Film courses break down an entire class just for the shower scene. Forget that it spawned a whole array of slasher and torture-porn thrillers for the next five decades, but lets discuss the year it was released, 1960. This was the year (historians decided) that film evolved. Before 1960, you can classify it as Classical Hollywood and the studio films. You pretty much know what you are going to get. The hero survives and the bad guy loses. There is nothing too visually jarring when it comes to editing and the endings always wrap up with a little bow on top with a definite ending. Psycho is the film labeled as the one who changed all that and brought us into ‘New Hollywood’.
Even foreign cinema was going through a renaissance at the time with Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless, but in the states it was Psycho. Mainstream American cinema was becoming more vague and more graphic, in terms of violence, sexuality, and language. Social changes were occurring in the 60’s and films changed along with it.
Psycho exemplified Hitchcock’s knack for suspense. He introduces one of the top villains of all time in Anthony Perkins’s brilliant portrayal of Norman Bates. There is a psycho-analyitical side to the character that shows us a tortured soul who in turn tortures us, the audience, with his (or her) brilliant monologue at the end of the film. It really does appear that Bates wouldn’t hurt a fly and that is what is so frightening.
Psycho is one of the most recognizable films in history and is Hitchcock’s most well-known film. To leave it off of this list would be rediculous.
