Anthony Perkins college-boy, jerky blitheness is excellently suited to the plot development. He seems the least ominous of all screen villains, a little effete, a little lost, all of which slowly build up to a sinister personality with few parallels. We are thrown hints, of course: digression on "eat like a bird", the professed passion for "stuffing things", taken-for-granted convictions like "a boy's best friend is his mother", and "we all get a little mad sometimes , etc, etc. The beauty of these tidbits is that we recognized the implied horror only in retrospect.
What ruins it for me is the film's heavy-handed use of half-baked Freudian psychology, the same excesses as in "Spellbound". The smugness of the court-appointed pschiatrist makes me want to kill HIM in shower, indeed.
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