Word: hitchcocked
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dicected by Alfred Hitchcock...
Most of you have probably seen "Psyho," Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece of suspense and lunacy, at some time or another. It's one of those films that has achieved the status of American institution, like "Casablanca" or "Citizen kane." The Shower Scene. The screech-screech noise. Need I say more...
...course, a movie like "Psycho" still freaks you out even in a well-lit living room with the remote control safely in hand. It manages to maintain suspense from the opening scene until the end (with one notable exception)--something that no one, Hitchcock included, has been able to do before or since. This feat is accomplished by multiple layers of suspense via different plot structures, For the first half hour of the film we do not even meet Norman Bates or his mother: the plot concerns a woman, Marion Crane, who steals forty thousand dollars from her boss...
Unfortunately I can't delve too much further into the plot, for the sake of the few of you who haven't seen "Psycho." The twists of this story--in particular, one final twist--are so shocking and bewildering that Hitchcock felt the need to include a scene with a shrink to explain it all at the end. This is the one scene where the suspense, held so masterfully up until this point (and afterwards in Norman's final soliloquy), breaks. Some silly guy swings his finger around and ties it all up nicely for us. But keep in mind...
...looked out on the day before the suit was filed last November. He remembers seeing a few reporters huddled below near the canopy of the Barclay hotel, peering up at his office. Every time he glanced down, there were more of them until, like the birds in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller, so many had gathered that he knew the situation had grown ominous...