The impeccable craft of Alfred Hitchcock is showcased even more effectively here, in the director’s take on a B-movie, than it is in many of his loftier projects.

Not that [Marion] or we are guilty of the horrors [Norman] is, but this is a movie fundamentally about shame, of which guilt is an inextricable component.

Psycho comes nearer to attaining an exhilarating balance between content and style than anything Hitchcock has done in years. Of course, it is a very minor work. But its virtues of tension, surprise, virtuosity and control are all major ones.

Murder might have been rife in Hitchcock's earlier work, but the gutting sense of random mortality in 'Psycho' is as far as one can get from the semi-jocular bloodless deaths of 'Strangers on a Train' and 'The Trouble with Harry.'