with ref to the "success" of PSYCHO and the awful "failure" of PEEPING TOM, leo enticknap's comments placing this development in historical context is extraordinarily enlightening . . . but i wonder if we need to go to that info in order to explain the reception of the two films . . . for it still seems to me pretty obvious that the narration of PSYCHO brings its "perverse" subject matter much closer to main stream classical genre cinema while the narration of PT encourages the kinds of difficult audeince repsonses that are almost guaranteed to lead to resistance in other words, can't a formal or rhetorical analysis of the films serve as well as a historicist account to explain the differences in reception? mike frank ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]