Cast a long shadow

Many years ago I invited a young student of mine to see Psycho, a film of which she had never heard, made by a director (Hitchcock) with whose name she was unfamiliar and shot in a format (black-and-white) whose apparent old-fashionedness so mystifed her she wondered aloud why no one thought to complain to the projectionist. Yet, shrieking on cue at all the spooky moments, she ultimately admitted to having been so bowled over by the film that she asked what other Hitchcocks she ought to see. I recommended North by Northwest — only subsequently to learn, to my stupefaction, that she had found it boring. Boring? The most euphoria-inducing comedy thriller in cinema history? I asked her why. ‘Well,’ she replied. ‘I was under the impression he made horror movies.’

If I begin my review by quoting that trivial anecdote, it’s because it constitutes a neat encapsulation of what the critic David Thomson calls ‘the moment of Psycho’. Confounding the traditional qualms of the studio bosses — which is why, accustomed to bountiful budgets and generous shooting schedules, Hitchcock had to work so cheaply and swiftly — it gave him not just his biggest hit but genuinely altered the course of the American cinema. Despite himself, he became the patron saint, so to speak, of slasher movies. Only one other film in his lengthy and prolific career (The Birds, Psycho’s immediate successor in the canon) offered anything like the same intoxicating cocktail of graphic gore and knowing drollery. Yet it was from these two exceptions to the Hitchcockian rule that his influence on several generations of filmmakers — Thomson cites, among others, Polanski, Kubrick, Chabrol, Scorsese, De Palma, as well as those undistinguished, indistinguishable hacks he gathers under the dismissive rubric ‘The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, et cetera’ — tended to derive.