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By Lewis Beale
New York Daily News
Happy birthday, Hitch. You would have been 100 years old this year, and even though you died in 1980, it's as if you never left us.
It's not just that the term "Hitchcockian" - used to define a stylish suspense film - has become a permanent part of movie language. It's more that very few directors have equaled your ability to make thoroughly entertaining films that also qualify as art. No wonder your movies look as fresh today as when they were produced.
A lot of this can be attributed to the incredible range you showed, and your willingness to experiment. You made obsessive love stories such as "Vertigo" (probably your masterpiece) and "Notorious." Horror films such as "Psycho" and "The Birds." There was the witty comedy of "The Trouble With Harry" and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." And the desperate realism of "The Wrong Man."
You even shot one film set entirely in a lifeboat and made another using 10-minute takes. Then there's the famous shower scene in "Psycho" which, with its screeching Bernard Herrmann score and furious intercutting, has influenced every horror and suspense flick made since.
So it's really no surprise that directors such as Brian DePalma, Claude Chabrol and Roman Polanski have been ripping you off for years. That Mel Brooks made an entire movie ("High Anxiety") parodying your films. And that all sorts of hacks keep trying to remake your work - in 1998 alone there was a TV version of "Rear Window," a redo of "Dial M for Murder" called "A Perfect Murder" and the widely panned shot-for-shot remake of "Psycho."
Hitch, you're still the master. And those who worked with you know why - because like all great artists, you knew exactly what you wanted.
"(Hitchcock's) degree of planning and preparation was about 500 percent over any producer or director I ever worked for," says Gregory Peck, who starred in "Spellbound" and "The Paradine Case." "He had the picture made inside his head, which made it a lot easier for the actors."
"(Hitchcock) had planned the whole film before he did one shot," adds Farley Granger, star of "Strangers on a Train" and "Rope." "You would...