Variety Names Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO the Greatest Movie Ever Made
Variety recently listed the hundred best movies ever made and ranked them. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho ended up being ranked the number one greatest movie ever made. I’m actually very surprised by this! Most lists have Citizen Kane or The Godfather listed as number one. While I love Psycho, and it’s a freakin’ incredible film with a fascinating behind the scenes story, it’s one that I just didn’t expect to see at the top of a list like this. But, I’m happy it is.
Why did they choose Psycho as the all-time best? Here’s the explanation they provided:
There’s hardly a frame of Alfred Hitchcock’s cataclysmic slasher masterpiece that isn’t iconic. If you don’t believe us, consider the following: Eyes. Holes. Birds. Drains. Windshield wipers. A shower. A torso. A knife. “Blood, blood!” A Victorian stairway. Mother in her rocking chair. For decades, “Psycho” enjoyed such a cosmic pop-cultural infamy that, in a funny way, its status as a work of art got overshadowed.
Hailing it as Hitchcock’s greatest movie — let alone the greatest movie ever made — wouldn’t have seemed quite respectable. Yet there’s a reason that every moment in “Psycho” is iconic, and that Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, as Norman Bates and Marion Crane, became fixed in our imaginations like figures out of a dream. The entire movie, while shot on late-’50s TV sets and conceived by Hitchcock as a prank-the-audience Gothic trapdoor thriller, came to exist (and, really, it always had) on the level of riveting mythology.
In 45 seconds, the shower scene rips the 20th century in half; what Hitchcock was expressing was profound — that in the modern world, the center would no longer hold. And once the movie kills off its heroine (killing off, in the process, the very idea that God will protect us), it turns into the cinema’s most hypnotic, seductive and prophetic meditation on fear, lust, innocence, violence and identity.
More than perhaps any movie ever made, “Psycho” is a film you can watch again and again and again. It’s a movie that speaks to us now more than ever, because it shows us, in every teasingly sinister moment, how life itself came to feel like a fun house poised over an abyss.
You can really argue with that! They make some very good points there and it’s a strong argument as to why the movie deserves to be at the top of the list.
The rest of the Top 10 include The Wizard of Oz, The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Pulp Fiction, Seven Samurai, 2001: A Space Odyssey, It’s a Wonderful Life, All About Eve, and Saving Private Ryan. To see the full top 100 list, you can click here.
Do you think Psycho deserves to be at the top of the list? Are there any other films you think deserve it more?
Also, I just have to pint out that the original trailer for Psycho is one of the best trailers ever made! You can watch it below!