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QUEEN VICTORIA was still on the throne when Sir Alfred Hitchcock was born in London a hundred years ago this month. A massively fat man of relentlessly old-fashioned demeanor, schooled by Jesuits and formal to the point of paralysis, he spent his entire adult life working in a medium that barely existed in 1899, but has since come to be regarded as the very essence of modernity. From 1939 until his death in 1980, he lived in Hollywood, a city that inverts every value of the lost world into which he was born. He made movies about secret agents and serial killers, and peopled them with debonair gentlemen who slept with cool blondes, thereby amusing millions of unsuspecting filmgoers with his own hopeless fantasies; he longed to be the witty, unflappable Cary Grant of North by Northwest, but knew he was really the Jimmy Stewart of Vertigo, haunted and desperate.
Today, when the tempo of cultural change has accelerated beyond the wildest dreams of the maddest prophets, Hitchcock remains a fixed star of American popular culture, the only director of his generation whose name is still as familiar to ordinary moviegoers as it is to the film-studies cranks who churn out ponderous tomes with titles like Hitchcock as Activist: Politics and the War Films and Hitchcock's Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory. But it was not always so. Witness, for instance, this testy review of Secret Agent, his 1936 adaptation of Somerset Maugham's Ashenden:
His films consist of a series of small "amusing" melodramatic situations: the murderer's buttons dropped on the baccarat board; the strangled organist's hands prolonging the notes in the empty church; the fugitives hiding in the bell tower when the bell begins to swing. Very perfunctorily he builds up to these tricky situations (paying no attention on the way to inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities) and then drops them; they mean nothing: they lead to nothing.
This review, as it happens, was written by a novelist, Graham Greene, and it is interesting that he should point with distaste to the aspect...