
It includes three neglected films from his English period in stunning new restorations, and five from his first decade in the United States, all but one reflecting his uneasy yet fruitful collaboration with David O. At the same time, MGM has produced an enlightening eight-film, loose-leaf folder called Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection. Universal has issued authoritative two-disc editions of Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho, complete with feature-length documentaries, various supplements, and one Hitchcock-directed episode each from his television series. But a few recent releases up the ante, the packaging indicating that these are classics-in the way books and music become classics, to be stored on the shelves of all civilized homes. They may be frostily schematic, but long after we know who did what to whom, we return repeatedly for the nuance, the humor, the stylishness, the daring, the frisson.Ĭonsequently, most Hitchcock films have long been available on DVD. His films have achieved something better than timelessness the older they get, the more astutely they function as social critiques. But Hitchcock-cold, sharp, irreverent, gripping, rarely poignant (his audience has no fear of ever tearing up)-continues to draw crowds across the board, generation after generation. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton require a fondness for silence John Ford for Irish knockabout Orson Welles for operatic amplification Ernst Lubitsch for continental manners Howard Hawks for masculine codes and John Huston for bemused pessimism.


#Bankhead of lifeboat crossword professional
Biographers and critics gnaw at his personal peccadilloes and professional limitations, yet he remains the most durably popular studio-era film director in the English-speaking world. (Credit: Everett Collection)Īlfred Hitchcock has had the last laugh-a long, posthumous howl.
