Anniversary of Psycho
On June 16, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's movie "Psycho" premiered at the DeMille and Baronet Theater in New York. 6 days later, on June 22, the film was shown in three more cities in the United States, and the wide release of the picture throughout the country started only on September 8, 1960. Apparently, it took time to prepare the special conditions for the demonstration of the film.
These special conditions were as follows. In the lobby of every cinema that showed this film, there was a cardboard figure of Sir Alfred Hitchcock pointing to his wristwatch with a note that read:
“The manager of this cinema has been instructed at the risk of his life not to admit any persons to the cinema after the picture has begun. Any false entry attempts through side doors, fire escapes, or ventilation shafts will be thwarted by force. The whole purpose of this extraordinary policy, of course, is to help you enjoy PSYCHO more. Alfred Hitchcock".
The film is based on the novel “Psycho” by Robert Bloch (1959). The basis of the novel by Robert Bloch formed on the real facts about Ed Gein. Both Gein and the film’s protagonist, Norman Bates, were lone killers in isolated rural areas. Both were heavily influenced by the imperious mothers, both took the locked room as a sanctuary in their homes, both used to be dressed in women's clothes. However, unlike Bates, Gein, strictly speaking, was not considered a serial killer, since he was accused of only two murders. Also on the image of this maniac partially based the following films: "Frenzy" (1972), "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974), "The Silence of the Lambs" (1990).
Alfred Hitchcock purchased the film rights to Bloch's novel for $9,000 (the equivalent of $91,600 today) and then spent a lot of effort and money buying the published print of the novel wherever he could. However, he could not prevent the management of the Paramount Pictures film company from getting acquainted with this novel, which they did not like at all. Therefore, being confident in the failure of the picture at the box office, the film company's leaders allocated a meager budget of 806 thousand dollars to Hitchcock. At the same time, Alfred Hitchcock's fee was set not as a fixed amount, but as a percentage of the fees.
The film "Psycho" received 5 film awards and 14 nominations. However, all the awards received did not have particularly high significance and prestige, and of all the nominations, the most significant was the Oscar nomination for Alfred Hitchcock in the category of Best Director. In this nomination, the American Film Academy preferred Billy Wilder for the film "The Apartment". The same film also received the main Oscar - as the Best Picture.
However, financially, Hitchcock's film surpassed Wilder's. If "The Apartment" with a budget of 3 million dollars raised 24.6 million dollars, then “Psycho” with a budget of 806 thousand dollars earned 50 million dollars.
The film "Psycho" was highly praised by film critics. According to the site Rotten Tomatoes 95% of reviews of professional film critics were purely positive. Roger Ebert, who rated the film with 4 out of 4 possible stars and included it on his list of Great Films, wrote about the film in his review:
"What makes "Psycho" immortal, when so many films are already half-forgotten as we leave the theater, is that it connects directly with our fears: Our fears that we might impulsively commit a crime, our fears of the police, our fears of becoming the victim of a madman, and of course our fears of disappointing our mothers."
The film was not shown in the cinemas of the USSR. If anyone is interested in why, the answer can be obtained in the review of the head of the foreign department of the State Film Fund of the USSR Alexander Alexandrov from 1963. This review ends with the following paragraph:
"Along with entertainment, the viewer of a Hitchcock film (and he sees dozens and hundreds of similar films created by Hitchcock's imitators) receives a drop of slow-acting poison. A poison that kills the Man in him."
Half a century later, already a Russian film critic, Yevgeny Nefedov, in his review, gives a directly opposite assessment of Hitchcock's film:
"A story worthy of the fate of a sensational note in a" yellow "provincial newspaper, served only as an excuse for a grandiose message to humanity - a warning about the danger of total psychosis, gradually taking over the mind about the danger of inevitable and irreversible immersion in the bosom of a total, dissolved in the midst of everyday life, so familiar that it is practically unnoticed sinfulness (not so much in the religious, but in the moral, ethical and metaphysical sense of the word)."
The official premiere in Russia took place in 1998, when most film fans and fans of Hitchcock have already watched this film on VHS.
78% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated this film from 8 to 10. Given this indicator and the above, the rating of Alfred Hitchcock's film "Psycho" according to FilmGourmand was 8,387, thanks to which the film took 374th place in the Golden Thousand.
