The original cut of Psycho which Alfred Hitchcock delivered to Paramount ran just under nine hours. Hitchcock lobbied hard to have the film released at this length, in a special day-long presentation with two intermissions, but violent reactions from audience members who saw test screenings of the nine-hour version (including, reportedly, at least two unpublicized suicides) convinced the director to cut the film drastically and release it at a normal length.
All prints of the original cut were thought to have been destroyed -- until early this year when one somehow turned up in the basement of a house under demolition in St. Louis. The house had once belonged to a man who owned a small chain of movie theaters in the Midwest, and apparently at least one print had made it to one of those theaters, presumably for test purposes.
Robert Harris, who has restored several classic films, including Hitchcock's Vertigo, and will be restoring the uncut Psycho, is one of the few people who's watched the new footage in its entirety. Harris reports that the famous shower scene runs to forty-five minutes in Hitchcock's original cut and personally made him sick to his stomach. "It's film history," says Harris, "and needs to be preserved, but I can't say I'm happy that this new version has survived. The world would be a better place without it."
Picture negative and original sound elements for the new footage do not survive, so the reconstruction will be uneven. Universal, which now controls the film, plans to release the uncut Psycho in a three-disc special edition late in 2008.
