Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock; Paramount) at first seems to be a typical Hitchcock spine tingler, whose moral is that heaven may protect the working girl but not if she takes long lunch hours in hotel rooms. The film commences with Janet Leigh bouncing about in her bra while her lover (John Gavin) tries to persuade her to take an early dinner as well as a late lunch ("We could laze around here"). She says pettishly that she wants to get married. He explains that he has no money. That afternoon she steals $40,000 from her boss's real estate firm and skips town, planning to rendezvous with Gavin.
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 nau seating 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.
The nightmare that follows is expertly gothic, but the nausea never disappears. 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.
Man in a Cocked Hat (Boulting Bros.; Show Corp. of America) launches a satirical spitball at the British Foreign Office, which not long ago returned the compliment by scotching plans to enter the movie in the recent Moscow Film Festival. Encouraged to know that the Banner of Blimpism (a blue funk on a field of choler) still flies, Britons by the thousands crowded in to see the spoof, and doubtless the film's American distributors would welcome a similar seal of disapproval from the U.S. State Department. At any rat Producers John and Roy Boulting, wh subverted the army in Private's Progress and big labor in I'm All Right, Jack, are as disrespectful—and funny—as ever on the subject of statecraft.
Things start popping at the F.O. when a dispatch arrives from Her Majesty's representative in Gaillardia, bearing the stunning news that three members of a visiting Russian Cossack dance team have been observed kicking out of step, and consequently must be spies. But where is Gaillardia? No one has ever heard of the place. The problem is bucked to Carlton-Browne of Miscellaneous Territories, a timeserver whose troutlike face mirrors his intelligence. C-B (played expertly by gap-toothed Terry-Thomas) discovers the file on Gaillardia among the rats in the archives: it is an island which, being of no value, was granted independence 40 years before—though no one bothered to inform the Queen's man in Gaillardia of this, or anything else; the last previous message to London was congratulations on the accession of Victoria.