Happy Birthday, Psycho!

I couldn't let this week pass without noting a special anniversary. Yesterday, Psycho turned fifty. On June 16, 1960, driven by an offbeat marketing campaign ("No one will be allowed in the theater after the movie begins"), Alfred Hitchcock's terrifying (and deeply ironic) masterpiece opened to eager crowds.

The film seemed like quite a departure for Hitch. He had reigned as the cinema's Master of Suspense since the 1930s, but none of his earlier pictures could properly be called a horror film. They were terrific thrillers, mind you, mixing wit, glamorous stars, glossy production values, stunning formal mastery, and, yes, suspense in equal proportions; but the shocks of Psycho— that notorious stabbing in the shower, the subsequent staircase murder, and the final unmasking of the killer—caught his fans by surprise.

Only a year before Psycho, Hitchcock had made something more typical of his oeuvre: the spy-chase epic North by Northwest. It was produced for what was then Hollywood's biggest studio, M-G-M, on what was then a lavish budget, $4.3 million. Its screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, called it "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures," and indeed the movie proved to be one of the director's most popular to date.

But then Psycho came along. Determined to scare the hell out of the audience, Hitchcock would push screen violence to the very limits imposed by industry censors, "good taste" be damned. Working from a pulp novel by Robert Bloch and a script by former songwriter Joseph Stefano, he shot the movie in black and white on cheap sets with $800,000 of his own money: Paramount Pictures, his primary employer at the time, was wary of the lurid subject matter and had balked at financing it. The cast, which included Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, and Vera Miles, was quite capable but not exactly in the Cary Grant–Grace Kelly–James Stewart league, at least in terms of star power. Hitchcock cut all sorts of other corners and went without salary in exchange for 60-percent ownership of the film. Responsible only for marketing and distribution, the Paramount executives figured they had little to lose.

Of course, Hitch made out like a bandit. Psycho quickly raked in millions and, more important, became a milestone in movie history. It's now a staple of film-school classrooms. Critics and scholars have written about it, and written about it, and written about it—and keep writing about it. The late Robin Wood, in a famous mid-sixties essay, compared it to Shakespeare's Macbeth and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, dubbing it "one of the key works of our age." Wood toned down his enthusiasm for Psycho a bit in later writings, but for my money he got it right the first time.