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.

Hitchcock's audacious masterpiece prefers to explore the recesses of the mind rather than the excesses of the flesh, and in doing so gives us one of the screen’s all-time great characters.