1)
"my mother...uh..what is the phrase...": Wav
39 KB
2) "Well,
a..a...boy's best friend is his mother": Au
40 KB
Review:
Alfred Hitchcock's powerful and complex psychological thriller, Psycho
is the greatest of all modern horror suspense films. Psycho was
a major change for Hitchcock (North
by Northwest, Rear Window) at the
time because it wasshot with an unusually low budget ($800,000)
by Hitch standards. Shooting the film in black and white helped keep the
film within the targeted budget, but I've read that the main reason that
Hitchcock wanted to shoot Psycho in black and white was that he felt it
would be too gory in Technicolor. The movie broke new ground regarding
many different taboos. Adultery, voyeurism, Oedipal murder, and transvestitism
were revealed unlike ever before. When the one well-known actress (Janet
Leigh) gets murdered early into the film, the audience is sent into a
state of shock, and must then seek a relatively unknown character to follow.
Ironically, one of the characters for the audience to sympathize with
is the Norman Bates character, played to perfection by Anthony Perkins.
The role of Norman Bates has and will gone down in history. The single
most discussed and dissected scene in all of cinema lasts less than a
minute. As one critic put it, "Hitchcock packed 87 crosscuts into
a frenzied 45 seconds to create the most perfectly timed visual shock."
Bernard Herrmann's score is fantastic, and you are taken on an emotional
joyride just listening to the music. Psycho was nominated for four
Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Leigh),
Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction. It failed to win any Oscars,
which were largely swept by Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960)
which I recently saw and found rather annoying. -Review by Aaron Caldwell
