The Alfred Hitchcock movies Steven Soderbergh called “fucking unwatchable”
Few filmmakers in the modern era have embraced moving with the times quite like Steven Soderbergh, who always seems to be among the first to try his hand at any new form of emerging technology.
Ever since Sex, Lies, and Videotape put him on the map and won him the Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival at the age of 26 – having a massive impact on American independent cinema in the process – Soderbergh has refused to let himself stand creatively still to keep his creative batteries fully charged.
He’s developed interactive TV shows designed to be watched as one immersive experience across the small screen and dedicated apps, shot multiple features on iPhones to test whether they were equally useful for drama as they were for horror, and re-edits entire movies in his spare time to experiment with the form, so he’s keen to keep his mind constantly busy.
The Academy Award winner is an auteur who’d never run the risk of growing stagnant, then, which is a fate even the all-time greats weren’t immune from in his eyes. Like the majority of self-proclaimed cinephiles, Soderbergh has always been enthralled by the work of Alfred Hitchcock, but only up to a certain point.
During a storied career, the ‘Master of Suspense’ created many timeless titans of the moving image, but nobody can keep up that sort of momentum forever. He was regularly crafting new works from the early 1920s to the late 1970s, so there were realistically always going to be a few bumps in such a long and winding road.
From Soderbergh’s perspective, and indicative of Quentin Tarantino’s greatest fear, he’s adamant the final few films of Hitchcock’s career marked his nadir. Not only that but there’s one title he can’t even bring himself to watch because he holds it in such low esteem.
Branding Frenzy as “the last good Hitchcock film,” Soderbergh told The Playlist even that came “on the heels of a couple of bad ones”. He liked Marnie “more than most people”, and Torn Curtain had “a couple of good things in it,” but Topaz and Family Plot were “fucking unwatchable”.
The Cold War-era espionage thriller and blackly comedic literary adaptation admittedly aren’t in danger of cracking Hitchcock’s best-ever list, but unwatchable seems a bit harsh. In Soderbergh’s defence, the director had been telling spy stories for decades at that point and Topaz failed to bring anything new to a table he’d set so many times before, while Family Plot was also the sort of pulpy, stylish, and noir-tinged tale he’d told on countless occasions and told much better on many of them.
Actively bad Hitchcock was few and far between, so at least there are a cavalcade of classics for Soderbergh to choose from if he can’t stomach the two he despises so deeply.
