Psycho Semi-Centennial: Before It Was a Classic - Excerpts from Original Reviews

Time heals all wounds, and it also apparently adds some perspective. For example, perhaps you're familiar with how The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, West Side Story and other films generally regarded as excellent today were soundly panned by critics upon their original release. Well, Psycho was another one of those which, while perhaps not roundly rejected, did get a decidedly mixed reaction from reviewers in 1960 (though certainly not from audiences, who made it the biggest money-maker of Hitchcock's career.)

Psycho is an interesting example, as the first round of reviews from publications like Time, Newsweek, Esquire and The New York Times were negative--and then, as audience opinion proved significantly contradictory, and Hitchcock himself amped up the buzz surrounding the flick with a brilliant marketing campaign, many critics and periodicals flip-flopped. By the end of 1960, it was already being hailed as a modern masterpiece, and was strongly represented at the Oscars. But it's fascinating to see the initial knee-jerk repugnance of critics who perhaps had some difficulty processing what they were seeing. Here are a few snippets:

With such game afoot, the experienced Hitchcock fan might reasonably expect the unreasonable—a great chase down Thomas Jefferson's forehead, as in North by Northwest, or across the rooftops of Monaco, as in To Catch a Thief. What is offered instead is merely gruesome. The trail leads to a sagging, swamp-view motel and to one of the messiest, most nauseating murders ever filmed. At close range, the camera watches every twitch, gurgle, convulsion and hemorrhage in the process by which a living human becomes a corpse.

...Little should be said of the plot—Hitchcock enjoins all viewers to be silent—except that Anthony Perkins, who plays an amateur taxidermist, is sickeningly involved, and that a blow is dealt to mother love from which that sentiment may not recover. Director Hitchcock bears down too heavily in this one, and the delicate illusion of reality necessary for a creak-and-shriek movie becomes, instead, a spectacle of stomach-churning horror.

Time Magazine, June 27, 1960

Mr. Hitchcock, an old hand at frightening people, comes at you with a club in this frankly intended bloodcurdler...

There is not an abundance of subtlety or the lately familiar Hitchcock bent toward significant and colorful scenery in this obviously low-budget job. With a minimum of complication, it gets off to a black-and-white start with the arrival of a fugitive girl with a stolen bankroll right at an eerie motel.

Well, perhaps it doesn't get her there too swiftly. That's another little thing about this film. It does seem slowly paced for Mr. Hitchcock and given over to a lot of small detail...

That's the way it is with Mr. Hitchcock's picture—slow buildups to sudden shocks that are old-fashioned melodramatics, however effective and sure, until a couple of people have been gruesomely punctured and the mystery of the haunted house has been revealed. Then it may be a matter of question whether Mr. Hitchcock's points of psychology, the sort highly favored by Krafft-Ebing, are as reliable as his melodramatic stunts.

Frankly, we feel his explanations are a bit of leg-pulling by a man who has been known to resort to such tactics in his former films.

The consequence in his denouement falls quite flat for us. But the acting is fair...

The New York Times, June 17, 1960

I'm against censorship on principle, but that killing in the shower makes me wonder. And not because of the nudity; I favor more nudity in film.

Esquire, June 1960

Plainly a gimmick movie...

Newsweek, June 20, 1960

Time Magazine would later issue a new review describing the film as "superlative" and "masterly". And the New York Times' critic, Bosley Crowther, would later name Psycho among his top 10 films of 1960.

See, kids? It's all about perspective--initial reviews aren't everything. Who knows, in future years, film students may be studying Birdemic, Halloween 2 and The Happening! OK, maybe not...