David Thomson's "Moment of Psycho'

For my money, David Thomson (author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, Suspects, and "Have You Seen…?") is one of the best contemporary writers on film. So I was especially excited to learn that he has now written The Moment of Psycho, a book-length study of Alfred Hitchcock's celebrated 1960 shocker.

Life imitates art in this case, and things begin well as Thomson dissects Marion Crane's slow descent into crime (as portrayed by Janet Leigh). He gets inside of the minds of Marion and her longtime lover Sam Loomis almost as though you're reading a novel. Thomson is the first critic I've encountered who brings out the underlying malice of Marion's office "friend" Caroline (played by Hitchcock's daughter Patricia), and he even makes a few choice observations concerning "California Charlie," the used car dealer. Everything builds to that rainy night encounter between Marion and young Norman Bates, who runs a failing motel for his unseen but bullying mother.

So far, Thomson commands my full attention because he's presenting more than just a "then she said, then he did" commentary. He's almost re-writing the movie.

Then, alas, Marion is dead, suddenly and shockingly killed in a motel shower, and Thomson punctures the balloon by confessing that he's not all that fond of the film! (He apparently prefers Hitchcock's Rear Window.)

Did Hitchcock lose interest?

Further, he suggests that, having delivered one of the most unexpected and nastiest shocks heretofore visited upon an unsuspecting audience, Hitchcock lost interest in the business as well. Thomson contends that the second half of the film is a rather perfunctory affair, and much of the rich psychological observation he brought to bear in discussing the film's first section (Marion-and-Norman) vanishes when the spotlight turns to Sam and Marion's sister Lila.

Thomson's 181-page book might well have ended at page 102, which concludes his discussion of the film proper, but one can imagine his editors slapping their foreheads in anguish over such a slender output, so Thomson soldiers on with an interesting, but not very germane treatment of Hitchcock's The Birds (perhaps a magazine article that never took wing?) and then adds an additional four full chapters of filler.

In one of these chapters Thomson discusses Psycho's progeny. Earlier he had mentioned Orson Welles's 1958 Touch of Evil as a possible inspiration for Psycho— a blonde (Janet Leigh, of course) menaced in an isolated motel run by a strange stuttering clerk— but he neglected to mention the 1959 British witchcraft thriller, City of the Dead, in which a comely blonde co-ed conducting research in a strange New England village is abruptly murdered halfway through the film— just when we thought she'd be the damsel-in-distress.

The Italian Hitchcock

In discussing the films that followed Psycho, I think Thomson added a few for name value. (The Silence of the Lambs was the first horror film to win a Best Picture Oscar, but I doubt that it was all that influenced by Psycho.) On the other hand, Thomson erred in omitting any mention of the "Italian Hitchcock," Dario Argento. Argento is probably the only director who beat Hitchcock at his own "Gotcha!" game: In the film Tenebre, he had the psycho-killer himself murdered halfway through the film by one of his intended victims, who then uses the dead killer's already-established murder spree to settle a few scores of his own.

In the end I found The Moment of Psycho to be curiously like Thomson's own evaluation of Psycho. Imagine if Thomson had chosen to write about a Hitchcock film that he actually liked.♦


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