<DIV>It killed its star off after forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film. The shrieking strings of the soundtrack seared the national consciousness?nothing like <i>Psycho</i> had existed before.<p>Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood, renowned film critic David Thomson vividly shows how, in 1959, Hitchcock masterfully made <i>Psycho</i> to reflect the sexual, creative, and political ferment that would soon overtake the nation. <i>Psycho</i>, all of a sudden, represented all America wanted from a film?and, as <i>The Moment of Psycho</i> brilliantly demonstrates, it still does.</DIV>