reviewed by Jesse Garon
Thirty-five years after the release of Psycho, Janet Leigh offers a mini-memoir, an enjoyable bit of fluff that offers up her memories of working on the film, and some basic comments on what its effect has been on the people who worked on it, and on our culture as a whole.
Leigh has nothing but the fondest of memories for the fellow members of the Psycho crew, from director Alfred Hitchcock to the two actors with whom she shares most of her screen time in the film, John Gavin (as Sam, her lover) and Anthony Perkins. Even when describing the difficulties of shooting the shower scenes, she puts on a good face. The discussion of the pre-production and production stages of the film are fairly interesting, as they shed light on Hitchcock's directorial technique and the ways in which he worked with actors; co-writer Christopher Nickens interrupts Leigh's remembrances at various points to fill in various technical details relating to the making of the movie.
The book becomes less compelling as Leigh and Nickens move away from the making of the film and closer into the present. In keeping with the upbeat tone of the book, Nickens dismisses a comment made by Hitchcock in his interview with Francois Truffaut disparaging the importance of the actors to his filmmaking by nearly asserting that Hitchcock must have not meant what he said. And in the final chapter, "The Effect," Leigh is too quick, in my opinion, to blame every lunatic who has ever bothered her or the Perkins family on the film. She may be correct, but the case as presented is too slight, and does little more than attempt to unnecessarily boost the significance of the movie and set up a brief gratuitous comment on violence in contemporary cinema. Fans looking for insights into Hitchcock's technique will probably start getting bored around the time Leigh lists every movie she's made since Psycho in which she appears in water; those interested in celebrities will no doubt find much to entertain themselves.