Shower power: 'Psycho' at 50

The 1960s began with Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’, which, in spite of its agelessness, contains a lesson in why it’s a bad idea to try and break all cinematic taboos at once

WHEN DID THE 1960s begin? One popular theory argues that, like sex for Philip Larkin, the decade properly came to life in 1963 – “Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP,” as the midlands miserablist had it. There is something to be said for this argument. It is often forgotten that, by the official turn of the decade, rock ’n’ roll was in retreat and trad jazz looked to be the coming movement. The King’s Road refused to swing. Football fans still wore ties to matches.

If you were talking about American politics you might suggest that the decade kicked off in 1962 with the inauguration of President Kennedy. Many boxing fans would point to the 1964 title fight between Cassius Clay (as he then still was) and Sonny Liston.

What of mainstream American cinema? A cynic would argue that the studios didn't acknowledge the growing social changes until the groovy years were nearly over. In 1969 Easy Ridershowed that rebellion could sell tickets. A year or two later, with Nixon comfortably in the White House, the psychedelic decade finally began in Hollywood.

Allow us to put forward a more controversial notion. Perhaps, for mainstream cinema, the 1960s began in 1960. In that year Alfred Hitchcock released a brilliantly horrible little film called Psycho.

Fifty years later the sharp melodrama, in which Anthony Perkins chops up a guilty Janet Leigh, still seems impressively contemporary. Whereas showy emissions of the hippy era such as Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Pointor Roger Vadim's Barbarellaremain anchored in their period, Psycho– or, at least, its first half – has the look of a film that will never age.

Psycho prefigured many of the developments that were to shake up American cinema in the decade to come. In the mid to late 1950s, films such as Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder(prominence given to a pair of "panties"), Suddenly Last Summer(implied homosexuality) and The Man with the Golden Arm(drug addiction) tested the Hays Code – the rigid industry guidelines on decency – to the point of annihilation.

Alfred Hitchcock, then the most celebrated director in the world, took the opportunity to push all manner of shocking vulgarities before an ultimately grateful public. The violence and the cross-dressing marked an obvious shift from the more deeply buried Freudian tropes of recent Hitchcock classics such as Vertigoand North by Northwest. The film was also more explicit in the area of sex: the very first shot finds Janet Leigh and John Gavin lounging sweatily in a Phoenix bedroom. It even broke new ground in its depiction of bathroom behaviour: many film historians claim that, when Norman Bates flushed the toilet, it was the first time such an operation ever appeared in a respectable American picture. Yes, there had been many murders on film before, but nobody had dared pull that metal thing attached to the cistern. What would the good people of Peoria think?

All these outrages had already appeared in low-grade B-movies and shockers intended for the drive-in market. What was remarkable was that a major director – a regular collaborator with royalty such as Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant – had decided to bring the rudiments of exploitation to reputable movie theatres. By shooting the picture in black and white for a miserly $1 million, Hitchcock further emphasised the project's spidery connections with cinema's squalid nether regions. It is hardly surprising that Paramount was so reluctant to finance the film. Hitchcock ended up producing Psychohimself, and when it became a smash he chortled all the way to his local credit union.

The sheer oddness of the film is heightened by the juxtaposition of schlock paraphernalia – Argh! Mother is a scary skeleton – with a cinematic sensibility so rarefied that it bleeds into art-house territory. Think about it. The opening half-hour of the film, in which Leigh's office worker steals $40,000 from her employer, trades in her car and drives deep into the desert, features long dialogue-free sequences in which the only sound is the jarring chords of Bernard Hermann's all-string score. It was, in 1960, not often that mass audiences paid to watch silent movies accompanied by shrieking variations on Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

The justifiably lauded shower sequence is assembled with the sinister abstraction you'd expect from a video installation. Indeed, four decades after the picture's release, Douglas Gordon, the celebrated Scottish artist, slowed down the film and presented it as 24-Hour Psycho(the title tells you all you need to know).

Four years before Richard Lester meshed the avant-garde with the populist in Hard Day's Night, Hitchcock had defined one of the key cinematic manoeuvres of the coming decade: the amalgamation of high and low art. A decade later, when Hollywood finally caught up, you couldn't move for populist films that gestured towards the French new wave.

AS PSYCHOREACHESits half-century we can therefore celebrate a rare artistic phenomenon that actually announced a decade in its first year. Cower as the RTÉ Concert Orchestra accompanies a screening at the National Concert Hall on October 31st. Watch it again on DVD and revel at Hitchcock's audacity in killing off his heroine halfway through the picture.

Ah, yes. Here's the thing. It has often been said that Psychobroke all conventions by annihilating its only star within an hour of the opening credits. How brave. How original. Yes, it was both those things, but watch the film again and you get some sense why directors so rarely dispatch their protagonist in the first few acts.

The opening section of Psycho remains, perhaps, the best thing that Hitchcock ever did: nothing else in suspense cinema can boast that perfectly modulated career towards catastrophe. The second half of the film is, however, as clumsy and dull as anything in the director’s back catalogue. We all remember the killing of Arbogast – Martin Balsam careering down the stairs – and the final absurdly melodramatic denouement, but we tend to forget the endless, directionless dithering that takes up most of the picture’s final 45 minutes. There are lessons here about the dangers of breaking taboos.

Anatomy of a shower scene Body doubles, icy water and other ‘Psycho’ legends

No single scene in Hollywood history has spawned quite so many unreliable legends as the shower sequence in Psycho.

The most pervasive argues that the scene – a mere three minutes long, featuring 50 busy cuts – was actually directed by the mighty Saul Bass. The graphic designer, creator of cinema’s most iconic title sequences, made the claim in 1970. Both Janet Leigh and Hilton Green, assistant director, have denied it repeatedly. “I was in that shower for seven days, and, believe me, Alfred Hitchcock was right next to his camera for every one of those 70-odd shots,” Leigh said.

It is also untrue that – shades of a similar rumour about the chest-buster in Ridley Scott's Alien– when Leigh stepped into the shower she had no idea her character was about to be butchered. Though famously callous to actors, Hitchcock did not force icy water through the shower head. Leigh has also denied that a body double was used during the sequence.

Few of these myths are now seriously argued over, but there is still dispute about whether, as Hitch claimed, the knife is never seen touching flesh. Look very closely and you appear to see the blade briefly puncture the victim’s abdomen. Happily, it is certainly true that Hitch used chocolate syrup for the blood trickling down the plughole.