Alfred Hitchcock made commercial pictures — from the ‘40s onward, the English director of Psycho, Vertigo, and North By Northwest established himself in America as a sterling, reputable producer of terrific genre fare on the scale and timeline required by Hollywood studios. It doesn’t matter what type of classic thriller you’re in the mood for, be it wartime espionage, Gothic romance, devious wife murderers, or paranoid mysteries — there’s a Hitchcock version of it, each filled with his trademark wry, dark humor and psychosexual intensity that set it apart from the average Hollywood thriller.
While many Hitchcock films saw success at their time of release, it wasn’t guaranteed: while Rear Window, North By Northwest and Psycho were smash hits, the classic that preceded them, Vertigo, was a flop. Hitchcock’s reputation of the “master of suspense” threatened to categorize him as a craftsman of scandalous, “lesser” cinema. But we can thank, in part, the work of the French New Wave critics at Cahiers du Cinéma for demanding that Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and a slew of other Hollywood directors were bestowed with the auteur status traditionally reserved for silent era theorists.
