The champagne afterglow of Rear Window is the reverse image of the romantic desolation of Vertigo. It’s difficult to think of any director living or dead who could express either joy or abandonment with such a fine wallop, much less both. (Brian De Palma, Hitchcock’s most imaginative imitator, can sow devastation—see Blow Out and Casualties of War—but is too cynical a bystander to portray bliss. He can work only one side of Love Street.) Cool operator though he may have been, Hitchcock worked both extremes of the emotional spectrum.

Unlike field-commander directors, whose ambitions lure them like siren songs toward bigger budgets, wider canvases, all-star casts, and loftier themes (Terrence Malick, for example, breaking his 20-year sabbatical with the thick vegetation and poetic voice-overs of The Thin Red Line), Hitchcock wasn’t afraid to divest himself of Hollywood pomp and start with a clean slate. Psycho was the cinema-altering product of Hitchcock’s experimental primitivism; it’s an exploitation film that turns into a threshing machine of Eisensteinian montage. Inspired by the box-office payoff of American International’s cheap quickies, Hitchcock decided to do a cut-price horror film of his own, based on a pulp novel by Robert Bloch about a homicidal mama’s boy. He and the screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, spent six weeks consulting about the film, piecing it together scene by scene, then Stefano went off and wrote. Hitchcock shot the first draft (something almost unheard of in second-guess Hollywood) with the camera unit from his TV show. The famous shower scene, which took seven days to shoot with 70 camera setups (for 45 seconds of footage!), was done with a nude body double for Janet Leigh, since nudity didn’t conform with Hitchcock’s notions of proper use of a star. The movie was shot in black and white “to avoid a wash of Technicolor blood,” according to Hitch. (That is one reason among many why Gus Van Sant’s recent color reproduction was a mistake. Anne Heche’s orange outfits were also an affront.)

Psycho is a half-movie which itself is divided neatly in two. The opening sequences of Janet Leigh with her lover lounging in bed after enjoying a matinee, her embezzlement and flight, the rainy drive in the dark (windshield wipers have never had such a threatening rhythm), have a classic noir propulsion. Once Leigh steps into the shower of her room at the Bates Motel, the movie enters a different aesthetic dimension. Shadows are banished in a white blare of hospital light. The images are wrested from their social milieu into pure abstraction. The slashing knife, which mimics the editing cuts, introduces a formal virtuosity for which the routine functionality of the embezzlement story has left the viewer totally unprepared. The shower scene isn’t just a trap sprung on the unwary; it’s an art piece, the shower itself an art installation—an upright sacrificial altar. The Zapruder clip of Hollywood horror, the shower scene is one of the most parodied sequences in cinema (Mel Brooks took a limp stab at it in High Anxiety), yet copycat versions and 20 years of slasher films have not dulled its impact.

Critics were divided on the shock tactics of Psycho (Dwight Macdonald called it the product of “a mean, sly, sadistic little mind”), but it was a popular smash. One of the interesting finds in the otherwise verbatim tedium of Hitchcock’s Notebooks is that after the humiliating failure of Torn Curtain, a clunker starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews (a film in which Hitchcock also had a falling-out with Bernard Herrmann), Hitchcock considered another, even bolder return to basics. In 1967, Hitchcock and the screenwriter Benn W. Levy, with whom he had collaborated on his first sound film, Blackmail (1929), began planning a film based on the true-life story of Neville Heath, a soft-spoken young man who seduced his victims before murdering them. Suave knockoff artists were nothing new in Hitchcock—Joseph Cotten’s “Merry Widow” killer in Shadow of a Doubt comes to mind. What would make this treatment unique was Hitchcock’s intention to shoot the film on New York City streets cinéma-vérité-style, using unknown actors in natural light and actual locales and showing bohemian nudity, like in them fancy Antonioni films. The most remarkable item is that Hitchcock planned to shoot the film with a portable camera, a radical break from his cinematic principles. As he told Bogdanovich, “Hand-held [camera] is against all the rules of cinema—cinema is montage—it’s pieces of film, three frames long if you want it, placed next to other pieces of film.” Hand-held camera took one into Cassavetes territory, where snapping, unruly heads go in and out of focus and frame. Hitchcock hired the photographer Arthur Schatz to conduct film tests using faster color stocks by shooting a rough draft of the script. “This footage, shot without sound and, to this day, still unknown actors, is an incredible glimpse into what could have been,” the author of Hitchcock’s Notebooks writes. Had this project, originally called Kaleidoscope, been produced, “its brutality and cinema verité style would have been ahead of the films from this period that did break down the studios’ stylized violence: Bonnie and Clyde, even Easy Rider. Here was one of cinema’s greatest directors (perhaps the greatest) proposing a groundbreaking film that would have eschewed the American studio style for the kind of filmmaking Hitchcock was seeing in France and Italy.”