Happy 5oth, Psycho!

The Alfred Hitchcock horror thriller, still creepy after all these years, is remembered in a piece by Los Angeles Times writer Susan King, who interviews the film’s first assistant director Alfred E. Green, now 79.

King writes, Green actually got to shoot the sequence in “Psycho” when ill-fated private detective Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam) goes into the Bates house while searching for Marion. ‘The morning we were going to do the scene where he goes into the house, looks around and comes up the steps, I got a call from Mr. H. He said, ‘I’ve got the flu. I can’t come in today’. I said we can close down. We have insurance. He said, ‘No, we have got to continue on. I don’t want to stop. You shoot it. You know what to get. So I shot the scenes where he comes in the door, looks around and starts up the stairs.”

Psycho‘s anniversary is being celebrated Saturday night in L.A., with two screenings being presented by the Alex Film Society.