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How the Filmmaker Reshaped His Reputation Among the Critics
As late as 1960, it was common for American critics of Alfred Hitchcock to say, "After all, the man made thrillers, didn't he? And you can scarcely call a thriller a fine art, now can you?" The reputation of an artist who routinely works in a particular genre reflects, in part, the consensus of the art world about the extent to which serious and important work can be done in that genre. Hitchcock's work in and contribution to the thriller genre is a case in point. Until the 1960s, film critics and estheticians, particularly in the United States, did not believe that serious work could be done in the thriller genre. Because of this attitude, Hitchcock, who worked primarily in the thriller format, was not regarded as a serious artist through much of his career.
By the late 1960s American critics began to take Hitchcock seriously as an artist rather than as a mere technician or popular entertainer. Many of Hitchcock's films were reappraised. For instance, Vertigo, which was regarded as a seriously flawed film when first released in 1958, became viewed by many American writers as the crowning achievement of a great film director. Indeed, the most recent Sight and Sound international critics' poll in 1982 selected Vertigo as one of the 'top ten' films of all time. Today many of America's major film critics such as Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael and Gene Siskel characteristically attack the kinds of films that earlier influential critics such as Bosley Crowther of The New York Times had endorsed - the earnest, liberal 'social problem' pictures that still usually run off with most of the Academy Awards - while praising the once disreputable genre film such as the Hitchcockian thriller that earlier critics had maligned or simply ignored. Indeed, the story of how Hitchcock's reputation and that of the thriller genre improved over the past twenty years is also the story of how film esthetics have changed.
The story described below of how Hitchcock's reputation as an artist improved during the 1960s is based primarily on documentation drawn from Hitchcock's personal papers which were recently donated by his daughter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences....