The Moment of Psycho

It was made like a television film, shot with a tight budget and completed in less than three months. It killed its star off after forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film. Nothing like Psycho had existed before; the movie industry - even America itself-would never be the same. In "The Moment of Psycho", David Thomson - one of America's most respected film critics - situates "Psycho" in Alfred Hitchcock's career and masterfully recreates the mood and time when the seminal film erupted onto screens. Thomson shows how in 1959, Hitchcock, then 60 years old, made "Psycho" as an attempt to break personally with the dullness of his own settled domesticity - a struggle which then mirrored the sexual, creative, and political ferment which would soon overtake the nation. Suddenly sex, violence and horror took on new life. Censorship fell away, and Janet Leigh screaming naked in the shower was its patron saint. "Psycho", all of a sudden, represented all America wanted from a film - and, as "The Moment of Psycho" demonstrates, it still does.

ISBN 0465020704   Pages 192 ISBN13 9780465020706 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 181 Publisher The Perseus Books Group   Published in New York Imprint Basic Books   Height (mm) 210 Format Paperback   Width (mm) 140 Publication date 06 Jan 2011   Spine width (mm) 15 DEWEY 791.430233092   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

"Thomson's close analysis of the film, its context in terms of director and cast and its influence on subsequent movies is another of his five-star movie masterclasses. He should be given an annual Oscar for movie criticism and a lifetime achievement award for being consistently right about film." The Times "Thomson intuits the secret afterlife of Psycho in the American mind, in a short book which is like an inspired, bravura jazz solo... Thomson attempts to place himself inside the fabric of Psycho, floating in its pin-sharp monochrome nightmare, living through its narrative and the narrative of its cultural impact in a sort of subjective real time. Shrewdly, he places it alongside Truman Capote's 1966 true-crime study In Cold Blood, as a work which shows that America's hinterlands are not the places of provincial decency quaintly imagined by popular culture but unpoliced worlds of melancholy and menace. Who are all these lonely men? Good ol' boys? Momma's boys? Thomson playfully asks us to imagine that dutiful son Elvis Presley in the Tony Perkins role: A disquietingly plausible cine-fantasy and the kind of brilliant flush that only Thomson could conjure." The Guardian "a compelling argument from the pre-eminent film critic of the age. I have long been a fan of Thomson's magisterial Biographical Dictionary of Film, and in The Moment of Psycho he is at his most fluent and perceptive." The Mail On Sunday "Ever since I first saw Psycho as a terrified adolescent, I've been replaying it - inside my head for several decades, nowadays on a screen at the foot of my bed - but David Thomson has spotted things that my countless viewings overlooked... At his best, Thomson provides his own deftly poetic equivalents to the film's visual images and wordless sounds... (He) is a metaphysician of the movies who has also always been fascinated by the fantasies and mysteries that play out in the darkened cinema, and he writes compellingly about the snarled relationship between voyeurism and moral responsibility of Psycho." The Observer "A flood of slasher, slice-and-dice and arterial-spray films have dulled Psycho's edge in recent years, but Thomson is right to recall just how scandalous Hitchcock's picture was at the time of its release... Thomson leads us through the film and its release with a sure hand, always smart and provocative..." The Times "In 1960, few wrote seriously about film. Now everybody's at it, and Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 shower shocker could be cinema's most written about movie. Do we really need another Psycho book? Well... yes. David Thomson's slim, densely packed essay adds something new by concentrating on precisely that shift in attitude... Thomson is a magisterial writer. There's enough meat her to keep the Psycho industry rolling on for several more years." Total Film "Forget about assassination, communism and war - an extraordinary new book argues that it was really Hitchcock's masterpiece that sparked global panic, paranoia and distrust." The Sunday Express "Forget about assassination, communism and war - an extraordinary newbook argues that it was really Hitchcock's masterpiece that sparked global panic, paranoia and distrust." The Daily Express "Iluminating... Thomson's own passion for the film is evident." The Evening Standard "Thomson's book represents a refreshing return to the value judgment in Hitchcockian exegesis." The Spectator "satisfyingly controversial" and "persuasive". Sight and Sound Magazine"

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