27 Mar Psycho

With the 50th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho fast approaching, the Times of London asked various luminaries to assess its impact. Peter Bogdanovich, director of The Last Picture Show and author of The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, recalled its first public screening:

I saw the very first showing of Psycho for the critics and the public together in the DeMille theatre in New York at 10 o’clock on the morning of June 16, 1960. It was an extraordinary event. There were about 1,000 people sitting in the stalls below and the press were 500-strong upstairs. The picture started, and everyone thought that it was a movie about a woman who stole some money. And then, about 45 minutes in, came the shower scene. I’ve never heard such screaming — sustained screaming — from the audience. You couldn’t hear the soundtrack. It was unprecedented, and it really was the first time that going to the movies was not a safe experience. I came out of the theatre at noon and walked down Broadway and Times Square, feeling as though I’d been raped. I hated the picture, but I thought that it was extraordinarily powerful. And I knew that it was a tour de force that was going to change moviegoing.

I later got to know Hitch well and knew him for 20 years, and never once got to see a dark side to the man. He said that Psycho was made with a lot of humour. And the film is certainly a circus. It’s a sensation. Brilliantly made. But demonic in its brilliance.