I suppose what strikes me, aside from the sheer power of the shower scene and the suddenly artier camerawork with Marion’s corpse, something which is profoundly effective- and brave, doing something so arty in a film pitched at such a mainstream audience.
But the genius of the film isn’t limited to individual scenes or shots, or indeed to the gloriously radical decision of killing off what we’re implicitly told is the main protagonist halfway through. No; it’s the masterful code-switching between parts of the film which feel like ordinary drama and parts which ramp up the tension and unease- and the sheer mastery of switching between them.
This is a Hitchcock film, of course; you expect tension. Janet Leigh is superb, and carries the film, in thosezearly scenes where she’s on the run and evading the ever-present police. But once we reach the Bates Motel, the mood changes- or rather, it doesn’t, at least not immediately. The excellent Anthony Perkins comes across as lonely, weak, a little dorky perhaps, but he feels normal at first, and we (and Marion) feel at ease.
And then we don’t.
The sudden switch where Marion says the wrong thing to Norman- about putting his mother away- is deeply effective, and that’s certainly down to the performance but also down to the direction; suddenly the entire visual grammar of the film changes and the way the camera is used- the very thing that controls our sense of reality- suddenly becomes uncomfortable, unnerving. And stats that way whenever Hitchcock wants it to.
What lingers, though, is that extraordinary final shot of Bates looking as scary, through sheer acting, as anything in all of cinema. Superb.
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