Movie Review: The Fog (1980)

Genre: Supernatural Horror  

Director: John Carpenter  

Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Adrienne Barbeau, Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook, Janet Leigh, John Houseman  

Running Time: 90 minutes  

Synopsis: The small coastal community of Antonio Bay is about to celebrate its 100th anniversary. Lighthouse radio host Stevie (Adrienne Barbeau), church leader Father Malone (Hal Holbrook), and community booster Kathy (Janet Leigh) are preparing for the big day, while hitchhiker Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis) partners with fishing boat owner Nick (Tom Atkins). But the quaint town is built on a dark foundation: a possibly intentional foggy ship wreck 100 years ago resulted in the death of many mariners. Now as midnight approaches, a thick glowing fog appears, and death lurks within.

What Works Well: John Houseman provides an epic prologue with a campfire legend to scare the kids, a perfect foundation for director and co-writer John Carpenter to craft a fine small town ghost story. The residents-under-threat are established with admirable efficiency, leaving plenty of room to build a threatening mood punctuated by several effective jump scares. Hal Holbrook contributes a foreboding elaboration on the town's shameful secret, setting the stage for a frantic third act. The visual effects and cinematography are often outstanding.

What Does Not Work As Well: The absence of a main protagonist dilutes focus among three or four characters. Even within the supernatural context, quite a few inconsistencies bedevil the plot, including the fate of the treasure on that shipwreck from 100 years ago.

Key Quote:

Stevie (over the radio): There's something in the fog!

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Naked Spur (1953)

A taut western, The Naked Spur gets under the skin of five distinct characters engaged in a lethal battle of wits.

Rancher turned bounty hunter Howard Kemp (James Stewart) teams up with veteran gold prospector Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell) to track down fugitive Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan), wanted dead or alive for murder. Disgraced ex-soldier Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker) joins Howard and Jesse, and the trio capture Ben and his girlfriend Lina (Janet Leigh).

Howard had intended to use the $5,000 bounty on Ben's heads to repurchase the ranch he lost when his ex-lover betrayed him. Jesse and Roy now want their share of the reward money, and as the tense group make their way to Abilene, the resourceful Ben sets about exploiting the tensions between his three captors. An encounter with Blackfoot tribals adds further complications.

A journey driven by greed, complicated by uneasy alliances, and stirred by a charismatic fugitive desperate to save his neck from the hangman's noose, The Naked Spur is a dark, complex western. Carrying worthy echoes of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, the script by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom presents five flawed character with disparate personal aspirations, and director Anthony Mann conjures up delectable moral dilemmas and psychological gamesmanship.

The third western collaboration between director Mann and star Stewart, The Naked Spur provides Stewart with one of his most intriguing characters, immediately placing the drama on dangerous ground. Howard Kemp is no stand-up hero looking to do the right thing. Instead he is deeply damaged by a love gone wrong, and has now defaulted to a stance of personal greed seeking to redress a sense of deep injustice. Indeed, the script hints Kemp chose Ben as his prey because he is the easiest target compared to genuine hardened outlaws.

While Kemp does his best to dissuade Jesse and Roy from claiming a share of the reward, they have their own issues to deal with. The aging Jesse has dedicated a lifetime to the futile pursuit of gold, a fading dream Ben can easily exploit. And the roguish Roy is on the run and desperate for the additional firepower a group can provide. 

Further intrigue is introduced by Lina and her spiky relationship with all the men. She immediately senses both Howard and Roy making moves towards her; and is shocked when the ever enterprising Ben encourages her to lead them both on, introducing a romantic duel as another potential crack to weaken the already rickety alliance against him.

With just the five speaking parts, Mann is able to delve deep into his characters, the fascinating multi-dimensional conflicts playing out against a lush landscape of forests, cliffs, caves and roaring rivers along the slow but dangerous trail to Abilene. As tensions run high, acts of betrayal and unexpected heroism converge towards moments of truth. With trust in short supply and no unity of purpose, few objectives are fulfilled, The Naked Spur a harsh exposition of the difference between superficial desires and soulful needs.



All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Perfect Furlough (1958)

A romantic comedy about a dream vacation turning to farce, The Perfect Furlough (also known as Strictly For Pleasure) delivers flighty entertainment.

Army psychologist Lieutenant Vicki Loren (Janet Leigh) conceives of a vacation competition for one soldier to boost the morale of all 104 batchelors stationed for a long year at a remote army base in the Arctic. After some clever scheming and fast talking Corporal Paul Hodges (Tony Curtis) wins the draw to enjoy three weeks in Paris with Argentinian Hollywood actress Sandra Roca (Linda Cristal), who was convinced to participate by her agent Harvey Franklin (Keenan Wynn). 

Hodges is a rampant womanizer, and even before they arrive in Paris he sets his sights on seducing Sandra. With the army terrified of bad publicity Vicki clamps down, placing Hodges under guard and denying him opportunities to engage in romance. He does not stop trying, leading to unintended escapades with both Sandra and Vicki.

A standard romance-in-the-military comedy, The Perfect Furlough has modest ambitions and rides the magnetism of star Tony Curtis to expected laughs. The Stanley Shapiro script draws predictable lines around a stuffy and somewhat incompetent military establishment clashing with fun-loving sex-starved troops, and Blake Edwards hustles the action along with a combination of deadpan humour and wide-eyed farce.

Despite the CinemaScope production The Perfect Furlough does not exude high budget aspirations. Many of the scenes in Paris are painfully flat backscreen jobs, and most of the action is confined to multiple hotel rooms, complete with the usual window ledge escapades.

Edwards builds his way up to farce-level misunderstandings and packs in a French magistrate, a doctor, an elderly winemaker, his more elderly father, and a few surprise revelations into the mix. And recognizing the delicately thin extent of the premise, all the antics are wrapped up in 93 minutes.

The film treats a woman in military leadership with surprising matter-of-fact respect, but without fully avoiding moments of sexism. Janet Leigh owns the pioneering role and walks a fine line between exerting authority and melting into romance on cue. Curtis aces his lothario persona, bending but not quite breaking the rules and not beyond manhandling a superior to prove a point. Linda Cristal is full of vitality as the exotic Hollywood beauty wringing exposure from the army publicity machine but also hiding a few secrets.

Colourful and charismatic, The Perfect Furlough is frivolous fun.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Jet Pilot (1957)

A Howard Hughes produced cold war drama about defections and romance in the world of Air Force pilots, Jet Pilot is that rare breed of film: a big budget production that is a pure, unmitigated disaster.

At a northern American Air Force base, Russian military pilot Lieutenant Anna Marladovna (Janet Leigh), a stunning beauty, lands her jet and seeks asylum. Colonel Jim Shannon (John Wayne) is charged with keeping an eye on her and extracting whatever military information she possesses. Anna and Jim take many flights together, and Anna proves herself an ace pilot. They also frequently clash about culture and politics, but gradually fall in love. When Anna is threatened with deportation, Jim makes a dramatic decision, and his actions land him in Siberia, where the tables are turned and the Russians try to extract information out of him.

Hughes imagined Jet Pilot as a jet-age update to his famous 1930 classic Hell's Angels, and the film does offer many admittedly impressive and prolonged shots of military jets streaking through the skies. Unfortunately for the aviation buffs of 1957, these images were filmed in 1949 and 1950. The film's troubled production schedule and endless editing by Hughes delayed the release by a solid seven years. With the Cold War accelerating the jet age, the planes on display were archaic and generally out of service by the time Jet Pilot arrived in movie theatres.

Theoretically directed by Josef von Sternberg, the film eventually passed through many hands on its long journey to release. This is ultimately a Howard Hughes film: his agonizingly long editing process squarely emphasizes sleek flying jets and Leigh's shapely curves at the expense of everything else. The final product is an overlong 112 minutes of confused ineptitude.

The real agony resides in the script credited to Jules Furthman. A bewildering and dippy piece of work residing at an intellectual level somewhere between Plan 9 From Outer Space and a horny boy's first adventure with sex, Jet Pilot trawls through the strange space where neither the adult rules of courtship nor the most basic military regulations seem to apply. In the presence of Anna all the men immediately become slack jawed neanderthals, and somehow this is an Air Force engaged in a Cold War but where Anna the defector is allowed unfettered access to fly in whatever jet she chooses. As a result Jet Pilot is awkwardly funny in the worst possibly way, forcing embarrassed laughs laced with guilt at the naive, sexist ineptitude of the entire project.

The performances are down at the speechlessly dumb level. Janet Leigh looks stunning and Hughes makes sure to place her in and out of a succession of revealing outfits. But she makes no attempt to even pretend to be Russian, while Wayne seems to have no idea whether he's in a comedy, drama, or a grade 9 student play at the local high school.

Jet Pilot does not even explode into awfulness. It just falls straight down and disintegrates into disarray.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

The Movies Of Janet Leigh

All movies starring Janet Leigh and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Holiday Affair (1949)

The Naked Spur (1953)

Jet Pilot (1957)

Touch Of Evil (1958)

The Perfect Furlough (1958)

Psycho (1960)

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Harper (1966)

The Fog (1980)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Touch Of Evil (1958)

A stylish film noir, Touch Of Evil is an unpredictable mystery propelled by cultural tensions, compelling characters and a central murder that serves as a catalyst for all manner of sordid events.

A bomb is planted in the trunk of a car on the Mexican side of a border town. Soon after the car crosses into the US, the bomb explodes, killing an influential businessman and his floozy. Mexican detective Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston) and his American wife Susie (Janet Leigh) are among the first on the scene. But police captain Captain Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) and his partner Menzies (Joseph Calleia) soon arrive and take over the investigation. Vargas wants to help solve the case since the bomb was planted in Mexico, but Quinlan isn't too welcoming.

Vargas is embroiled in a battle with the corrupt Grandi family. Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) starts a campaign of intimidation targeted at Susie, distracting Vargas from the bombing case. An increasingly morose, overweight and out of shape Quinlan visits his old flame Tanya (Marlene Dietrich), but she's shocked by how badly he's aged. Quinlan's investigation then leads to the arrest of a Mexican man called Sanchez (Victor Milan), the secret lover of the dead man's daughter. But Vargas questions the methods used by Quinlan and Menzies, and starts to delve into Quinlan's history, uncovering plenty of dubious behaviour. Quinlan and Grandi form an uneasy alliance as they now both have a reason to get rid of Vargas, as Susie finds herself isolated at a remote motel and threatened by drug-fuelled thugs.

Directed and written by Welles, Touch Of Evil is celebrated for its brilliant single-take opening sequence. In a remarkably fluid and uninterrupted three minutes and twenty seconds, Welles' camera tracks the bomb as it is placed in the target car and crosses the border, while Vargas and Susie, out for a walk, unknowingly and on several occasions stroll in and out of the ticking bomb's path. The scene ends with a powerful explosion, an artistic exclamation mark that sets in motion the events that will define the film.

The bomb and the double murder turn out to be a relative sideshow in an intensifying battle of wills featuring Captain Quinlan, detective Vargas and the extended Grandi clan. Quinlan instantly learns to dislike Vargas, maybe because he is a Mexican poking his nose in Quinlan's affairs, but more likely because Vargas appears to be incorruptible. Joe Grandi does not need any more reasons to dislike Vargas, the Grandi family's drug business having been the target of Vargas' enforcement efforts. It does not take long for Quinlan and Grandi to recognize their common interests, except that Quinlan is usually a few steps ahead of everyone else when it comes to games of deceit.

Captain Hank Quinlan is one of Welles' greatest creations. Fat, sweaty, grumpy and just plain tired, Quinlan crosses the ethics line as a matter of routine, his mind plotting the downfall of his enemies in multiple dimensions concurrently. Quinlan speaks with a deep rumble at the start and end of every sentence, reluctantly sharing his thoughts and acerbic opinions only in fragments. Less impressive but still interesting is Charlton Heston as a Mexican. The most American of epic heroes does his best, but his stature, accent and overall attitude remain entrenched in the Heston persona, the actor unable to impart sufficient cultural nuance to break away from his established base.

Welles fills the film with sharp shadows, asymmetrical lighting, plenty of nighttime activity, edgy, tilted camera angles, and no shortage of creepy characters even in the secondary roles. Dennis Weaver is unforgettable as the shifty, terrified night manager at the motel where Susie ends up, while Marlene Dietrich is the ghost from Quinlan's past; except that he is so long past his prime that she doesn't bother with trying to recognize him. Zsa Zsa Gabor gets a small role at the Mexican strip club.

Touch Of Evil benefits from a sense of genuine uncertainty, the cast encouraged during rehearsals to improvise and enhance their events and characters. With Quinlan, Vargas and Grandi all working at cross-purposes and with an international border limiting their reach and authority, anything can and does happen. Susie is unknowingly trapped by Grandi in a creepy motel (just a few years before Janet Leigh checked into even more dangerous accommodations), Vargas ends up investigating Quinlan in the Captain's own back yard, an illicit cross-cultural love affair may or may not be the reason for the bombing, Sanchez may be innocent or may be framed by Quinlan and Menzies, and Quinlan is busy plotting against all to save his reputation.

What is certain is that evil is at play, trust is in short supply, long-standing alliances will be tested, reputations are at stake, and more lives are likely to be lost before a measure of peace is restored to a small community on either side of a once-quiet border crossing.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Holiday Affair (1949)

A spry Christmas romantic comedy with a sharp streak of humour, Holiday Affair is a perfect little film, capturing the complexities of love with an elegant touch.

It's Christmas time in New York, and Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh) is a department store comparison shopper assigned to surreptitiously check out competitors' prices and quality. A war widow deeply committed to her six year old son Timmy (Gordon Gebert) and the memory of her deceased husband, Connie is friends with lawyer Carl Davis (Wendell Corey), who wants to marry her.

Attempting to check the price of an expensive toy train, Connie's cover is blown by store clerk Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum). He is both intrigued and smitten, and refuses to report her to his bosses, and so gets fired for his troubles. With Carl pressuring Connie into marriage despite Timmy's protestations, she discovers a new spark through Steve's honest approach to life, while Steve establishes a strong bond with Timmy.

Edgy dialogue, a mean streak of comedy and memorable characters distinguish Holiday Affair. The John D. Weaver script, directed by Don Hartman, actively seeks out awkward moments, and uses them to great advantage. Carl and Steve meeting for the first time and sizing each other up with small talk in Connie's apartment is a hilariously uncomfortable scene, and the film's love of irreverent humour is sustained through to the climax, a New Year's Eve drunk interfering with a cleverly filmed lovers' meeting on a train.

Connie is an unusually well-rounded character for a romantic comedy, struggling to overcome the loss of her husband, and transposing onto little Timmy everything she yearns for in a life companion. Connie lovingly calls Timmy Mr. Ennis and he has learned to call her Mrs. Ennis, in an example of a seemingly playful gesture saddled with emotional baggage.

The absence of a villain or any sort of unsavoury character is another bonus in Holiday Affair. Carl and Steve are both good men, and they both want to make Connie happy. But they each define her happiness quite differently, Carl offering domestic stability and an accommodation of her emotional state, while Steve wants Connie to shake off her past and regain a lust for life. The conflict for Connie is not just about choosing a man, but rather choosing a life, as the film effortlessly ratchets up the stakes.

Janet Leigh has rarely been better, portraying Connie as a survivor buffeted by life but possessing the strength to stand up to both Carl and Steve as she sorts through her choices. Robert Mitchum finds the romantic application of his no nonsense persona, Steve living life on his own terms as only Mitchum can define them (including having his meals in the company of a loud seal at the park), but with enough caring to try to both rescue and win Connie's heart.

At 87 minutes Holiday Affair delivers impeccable entertainment, the magical Christmas spirit skillfully deployed to create a classic for the ages.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

A Cold War thriller packed with psychological intrigue, The Manchurian Candidate dances artistically on the nerves of a home front confronting an unseen and therefore omnipresent enemy.

In the Korean War, Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) and his platoon, including Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), are lured into an ambush, captured by the enemy, flown to Manchuria, and subjected to sophisticated Russian mind control techniques. Shaw and his men are brainwashed into believing that Shaw is a war hero deserving of the Medal of Honour. The reality is that Shaw has been programmed by the communists to kill without emotion, once he is triggered into accepting commands by exposure to the queen of diamonds in any deck of cards.

Back in the United States, Marco and other men in Shaw's platoon start to have nightmares about their brainwashing experiences. Marco befriends the sympathetic Eugenie (Janet Leigh), and turns to his army commanders for help in deciphering his nightmares. Meanwhile, Shaw is activated as a communist assassination machine. He harbours particular hatred for his conniving mother (Angela Lansbury), a rabid right-wing political activist busy manipulating the career of her dim-witted husband (and Shaw's step-father) Senator Iselin (James Gregory). Mrs. Iselin prods the Senator to instigate a McCarthy-style witch-hunt for phantom communists who have infiltrated the US government, raising the Senator's profile and placing him in contention for the Vice Presidential ticket. Marco has to uncover the mind control conspiracy to try and avert a national crisis.

Based on the Richard Condon novel, The Manchurian Candidate is a thought provoking, complex thriller, expertly preying on the fears bubbling under the surface of the Cold War. The threat of advancing communist science is combined with wild McCarthy-style accusations to create the perfect storm of paranoia, programmed killers blended with undercover agents plotting to secretly take control of key government functions.

The Manchurian Candidate enjoys a dramatic, unforgettable plot twist, as the communist threat is revealed to be deeply embedded and camouflaged into the United States political landscape. The extreme left and the extreme right always eventually meet in the spherical world of twisted ideology, and the devious plot brings this merge to life as Raymond Shaw falls into the clutches of his controller.

Director John Frankenheimer colours the nightmare in black and white and plays with chilling flashbacks, Shaw's soldiers enduring nightmares from their experiences in Manchuria, imagining themselves in attendance at a dreamy gardening club meeting while in fact they are being presented in their brain-washed state to leading Russian and Chinese intelligence agents. Frankenheimer does not back away from sharp violence, the final proof of mind-control requiring Shaw to commit murders in cold blood, the camera capturing the horror of a killing machine carrying out programmed orders.

The three central performances are persuasively understated. Frank Sinatra delivers a mature performance as Marco, a man struggling with puzzle pieces that don't quite fit, trying to square his nightmares with his sudden admiration for Shaw, a man who was previously detested by his men for being a rigid disciplinarian. Laurence Harvey is perfectly cold as Shaw, wearing the title of hero heavily, fully aware of his previous unpopularity and tracing the cause of his misery to a domineering mother.

And finally Angela Lansbury is extraordinary as Mrs. Iselin, a calculating, power-hungry woman who demands complete control over her environment and is willing to pay any price to achieve victory. Lansbury was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.

Janet Leigh is somewhat wasted in a sketched-in role, while Henry Silva makes an eerie appearance as a North Korean agent who shows up in all the wrong places.

The Manchurian Candidate heats up the cold war, with new weapons, old power grabs, and a countdown to an insidious government overthrow.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Harper (1966)

An attempted homage to 1940s detective movies, Harper falls quite flat. Despite the presence of Paul Newman and Lauren Bacall, the convoluted story and the derivative characters never come close to their intended target, while stylistically the film is simply bland.

Private detective Lew Harper (Newman), struggling to reunite with his wife Susan (Janet Leigh), is summoned to the house of wealthy socialite Elaine Sampson (Bacall). She hires him to find her missing husband Ralph, although Elaine seems unperturbed that Ralph is missing and would be quite pleased if he were to turn up dead so she could outlive him. The characters swirling around Elaine include free-spirited daughter Miranda (Pamela Tiffin), her boyfriend and the Sampsons' private pilot Allan Taggert (Robert Wagner), and the family lawyer and Harper's friend Albert Graves (Arthur Hill).

Harper follows a trail leading to an assortment of distasteful characters: Ralph Sampson's possible lover, overweight former starlet Fay Estabrook (Shelley Winters); her husband Dwight Troy (Robert Webber); drug-addicted lounge singer Betty Fraley (Julie Harris); and phony cult leader Claude (Strother Martin). Harper uncovers multiple tangled plots involving kidnapping, blackmail, illicit affairs, unrequited love, the smuggling of illegal immigrants, and bad guys turning on each other. With $500,000 in ransom money at stake and Ralph Sampson still missing, Harper is frequently at gun-point or being beaten-up as the body count begins to mount.

Trying to borrow heavily from the plot of The Big Sleep, even Bacall's resonant presence cannot liven up the William Goldman screenplay (an adaptation of the Ross MacDonald book A Moving Target, with Lew Archer changed to Harper). A significant shortfall is the lack of any charm, charisma or genuine evil among the large assortment of unsavoury plotters scheming to profit from Ralph Sampson's disappearance. They all come across as low level riff-raff, more likely to intimidate each other than to harm their intended victims, lowering the movie down to an uninteresting level of scuzziness.

Director Jack Smight fails to add any panache to the battle of the low lifes, the film's look and style pedestrian at best.

With Bacall's role marginally above the level of a cameo, it is left to Newman to grapple with the inferior material. While he enjoys a few solid wisecracks, for the most part Newman appears ill-suited to the role of a private investigator bumbling around the lives of the rich and poking at the scum gathered in the corners. Newman almost comically overacts his more puzzled moments, and when it's time to stop chewing and kick ass, he simply does not bring enough intensity. The overriding theme of the movie is of Newman being heavily pushed around by others, not a good premise to hang any film on.

Pamela Tiffin almost saves the day with a dazzling portrayal of Miranda as the spoiled 1960s rich girl, certain that she could not care less about her father but almost oblivious to the carnage that her mere presence is causing among the crooks around her. While Janet Leigh is underused in an interesting role, Robert Wagner, Arthur Hill, Robert Webber, Shelley Winters, Julie Harris and Strother Martin are an example of quantity over quality resulting in so much wasted talent, limited and poorly defined roles sinking Harper ever faster with each additional unconvincing snarl.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Psycho (1960)

A masterpiece of horror film-making, Alfred Hitchcock invents the spooky slasher genre and packages it with lust, larceny, and the mother of all personality disorders. Psycho is disturbing, terrifying and unforgettable.

Secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is having a steamy affair with married man Sam Loomis (John Gavin). Desperate for money, she steals $40,000 in cash from her Phoenix-based employer and heads for the highway towards California. After an unwelcome encounter with a highway patrol officer, Marion takes the back roads and finally stops for the night at the isolated Bates Motel. She is the only guest at the 12 room facility, while owner Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) lives with his reclusive mother in the large mansion overlooking the motel.

Over dinner, Norman takes an unhealthy interest in Marion, while she notices that Norman's shrill mother seems to still have an unusually stringent hold on him. After dinner, Marion is attacked and brutally knifed to death while taking a shower. A private investigator (Martin Balsam), Marion's sister Lila (Vera Miles) and Loomis are soon snooping around the Bates Motel and the adjoining mansion, trying to uncover what happened to Marion.

Hitchcock starts Psycho with illicit love, progresses to theft, marches into multiple murders, and ends with an examination of the damage that severe psychosis can cause. As the film progresses, the unfolding criminal acts gain in intensity and damage, until Hitchcock finally takes us into the murderous mind, busy constructing its own reality and capable of unimaginable horror.

The shower murder is rightfully one of the most celebrated scenes in the history of the movies. With rapid editing heightened by Bernard Herrman's shrieking music score, the knife is never shown to make contact with Marion, and only the killer's stabbing arm is ever revealed. By showing less yet willing the eye to imagine more, Hitchcock creates terror more with what is imagined than what is actually seen.

The Bates family mansion, brooding on the hill above the motel, is a classic setting for resident evil. The dark and mysterious house, with Norman's mother holding court in the upstairs window, oozes unadulterated malice, and Hitchcock maximizes its impact by keeping most of the action in its shadow. Few scenes in Psycho take place inside the house: most of the dastardly deeds, from murders schemed and committed to bodies dumped in the swamp, take place under the mansion's approving gaze.

Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh create roles that became forever intertwined with their names. Perkins is simply chilling as Norman Bates, a character pretending hard to be normal but clearly afflicted with an odd behavioural disorder that just cannot be properly pinpointed.

Leigh is superb in portraying a conflicted Marion, easily seducing a married man but unable herself to resist the temptation of easy money. Marion regrets her actions when a seemingly straightforward road journey starts to unravel. She eventually makes the decision to return to Phoenix and make things right, but her criminal act has already condemned her to a grotesque destiny.

Psycho is an encounter with a deeply unhinged individual skulking in the most ominous of locales. The genius of Hitchcock lies in making Norman Bates a compelling character worth conversing with, and the Bates Motel an instantly recognizable, must-visit destination to shower in.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.