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"Psycho: Hitchcock's Avant-Garde Masterpiece"

This document summarizes and analyzes the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho. It argues that the film is a daring and avant-garde work that provides a symbolic commentary on modern society. It also asserts that Psycho does not compromise its vision or cheat its endings to please audiences, unlike other horror films. The document recommends seeing Psycho at least three times to appreciate its terror, comedy, and hidden meanings beneath the surface.

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70 views1 page

"Psycho: Hitchcock's Avant-Garde Masterpiece"

This document summarizes and analyzes the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho. It argues that the film is a daring and avant-garde work that provides a symbolic commentary on modern society. It also asserts that Psycho does not compromise its vision or cheat its endings to please audiences, unlike other horror films. The document recommends seeing Psycho at least three times to appreciate its terror, comedy, and hidden meanings beneath the surface.

Uploaded by

MARIO BARRANCO NAVEA
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Psycho

por Andrew Sarris en The Village Voice

For many years American and British critics have been mourning the “old” Alfred Hitchcock
who used to make neat, unpretentious British thrillers before he was corrupted by
Hollywood’s garish technical facility. Oh, for the days of “The Thirty-Nine Steps,” “The Man
Who Knew Too Much” and “The Lady Vanishes!” Meanwhile in Paris the wild young men on
Cahiers du Cinema, particularly Claude Chabrol, were proclaiming the gospel that Hitchcock’s
later American movies stamped him as one of the screen’s major artists.

A close inspection of “PSYCHO” indicates not only that the French have been right all along,
but that Hitchcock is the most-daring avant-garde film-maker in America today. Besides
making previous horror films look like variations of “Pollyanna,” “Psycho” is overlaid with a
richly symbolic commentary on the modern world as a public swamp in which human feelings
and passions are flushed down the drain. What once seemed like impurities in his patented
cut-and-chase technique now give “Psycho” and the rest of Hollywood Hitchcock a personal
flavor and intellectual penetration which his British classics lack.

No Longer Cheats

For one thing, Hitchcock no longer cheats his endings. Where the mystery of “Diabolique,” for
example, is explained in the most popular after-all-this-is-just-a-movie-and-we’ve-been-taken
manner, the solution of “Psycho” is more ghoulish than the antecedent horror which includes
the grisliest murder scenes ever filmed. Although Hitchcock continually teases his
conglomerate audience, he never fails to deliver on his most ominous portents. Such divergent
American institutions as motherhood and motels, will never seem quite the same again, and
only Hitchcock could give a soft-spoken State Trooper the visually sinister overtones of a
dehumanized machine patrolling a conformist society.

Despite its huge grosses, “Psycho” makes fewer concessions to popular tastes than an
allegedly daring film like “Private Property.” “Psycho” takes its audience wherever its director
wants to go, while “Private Property” stays a little ahead of the audience until catching-up
finale worthy of Albert Zugsmith.

Forced to Respond

In its treatment of outrageous perversion as a parody of an orderly social existence, “Psycho”


has a certain affinity to a modern theatre piece like “The Connection” in which the audience is
forced to respond to its own hypocrisy in making the conventional moral distinctions

“Psycho” should be seen at least three times by any discerning film-goer, the first time for the
sheer terror of the experience, and on this occasion I fully agree with Hitchcock that only a
congenital spoilsport would reveal the plot; the second time for the macabre comedy inherent
in the conception of the film; and the third for all the hidden meanings and symbols lurking
beneath the surface of the first American movie since “Touch of Evil” to stand in the same
creative rank as the great European films.

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