![]() ![]() In March 1926, British film magazine Picturegoer ran an article entitled “Alfred the Great” by critic Cedric Belfrage, who, in response to having seen a film called The Pleasure Garden made the previous year, praised its 26-year-old, first-time director Alfred Hitchcock for possessing “such a complete grasp of all the different branches of film technique that he is able to take far more control of his production than the average director of four times his experience.” Ironically, by the time this review was published, the head of the film’s distribution company, Charles Woolf, had made the decision not to release it, believing its artistic embellishments would confuse audiences. ![]() But how and why did critical perspectives of Hitchcock change over time? And why did Hitchcock, in particular, become the focus for such singular attention? Young Alfred Hitchcock and his future wife Alma on the set of The Mountain Eagle, 1926 This slow but inexorable ascendency, it could be said, mirrored Hitchcock’s own rise in critical esteem throughout his career and after his death in 1980. ![]() It had first appeared in 1982, when it came seventh by 1992 it had climbed to fourth in 2002 it was rated second. ![]() Did Hitchcock, a director of genre thrillers, really deserve to be held in higher esteem than the genius Welles and his Shakespearean-scale tragedies? In fact, however, Hitchcock’s San Francisco-set mystery, far from being an upstart contender, had been rising up Sight and Sound’s influential, ten-yearly list for years. Newspapers, trade magazines and websites all reported that for the first time in fifty years, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1940) had been knocked from the top spot, and many questioned if Vertigo truly deserved its new consecration as the best film ever made. When, in September 2012, Sight and Sound magazine announced that Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1957) had been voted the greatest film of all time in its poll of critics, it caused an immediate media response. James Stewart and Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo ![]()
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