Thanks, Robert and Henry for your interesting comments. It's true, there is something rather grubby about Psycho's first half which gets us thinking about various realisms. On the one hand, the film harks back to the documentary realism of the Louis de Rochemont films noirs of the late-40s, and to Clair and to neo-realism. Perhaps this is consonant with what was in fact a very 'down market' approach on Hitch's part, after the Hollywood high gloss of North by Northwest and Vertigo. Food for thought. I did a feature on Janet Leigh recently for Images website and was struck by the way that Psycho posits the high glamour of Janet Leigh's dreamboat showing up in a grubby hotel, as she might show up in her fans more grubby dreams. What is striking, and perverse, about the film is that this perspective renders Norman as one of us. Very murky! I say all this as, in the UK, the dreadful date is ten minutes away! Suffice to say, Psycho remains an extraordinarily unsettling film.

 

And of course, its appearance during a time when high Hollywood was in decline and Corman and others were making exploitative appeals to a grindhouse world of schlock and drive-in sensation also figures the emergence of 'creature feature' aesthetics in the mainstream. The Boston Strangler (1968) was another crime exploiter that attempted to anchor demented interiority in tabloid terms. The '60s get more fascinating as the years pass us by.

 

It is now December the Eleventh, (but not Friday)!

Richard