Psycho
Part of the Avalon’s Hitchcock/Truffaut Film Festival, May 5-7
Friday, May 6 at 8:00pm
Thanks to its lasting and profound influence on popular culture, it’s easy to forget what a dramatic change of pace the Psycho was for Alfred Hitchcock. Deliberately stepping away from his big-budget, big star, lavish Technicolor productions of the 1950s, Hitchcock shot Psycho in black & white with his television crew on a shoestring budget. The film was an experiment in audience manipulation. “I was directing the viewers,” the director told Francois Truffaut in Hitchcock/Truffaut. “You might say I was playing them, like an organ.” Helped by a genius PR campaign, the film broke box office records in the U.S. and around the world. The film’s 3-minute long “shower scene,” with over 70 camera angles, is one of the most famous in all cinema.
Phoenix secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) impulsively steals $40,000 from her employer to run off with her alimony- and debt-ridden boyfriend, Sam Loomis (John Gavin. Traveling on the back roads to avoid the police and overcome by exhaustion during a heavy rainstorm, Marion stops for the night at the ramshackle Bates Motel. There she meets the polite but highly strung proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a young man with an interest in taxidermy and a very difficult relationship with his mother. 1960.
The Avalon is presenting film classics from directors Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut before the theater’s spring benefit event “The Genius of Hitchcock,” on Sunday, May 8. Learn more about the event & buy tickets.
109Rated NR
in English