“He made pure movies”: the most complete director in cinema history, according to Roger Ebert
There’s no specific way to quantify what makes anyone the best at anything. Do we measure greatness in the awards an artist has won? What about the number of people who buy tickets for their shows or the number of times they’ve been paid homage to?
I think the best way to reflect on greatness is through endurance. If an artist can find success that spans decades – even centuries – and is continuously talked about, then there’s probably something great to be found within their practice. Of course, objectivity and art aren’t words that go well together, but it’s certainly possible for us to come to an agreement on an artist whose work is simply timeless, and Roger Ebert makes a great case for Alfred Hitchcock.
The filmmaker’s career spanned decades, from the infantile days of the silent era to the 1970s, in which he made his final film, Family Plot. Between then, he made classic British thrillers and some of Hollywood’s most iconic and influential pieces of cinema. I mean, isn’t Psycho one of the films? Everyone knows it, even if they somehow haven’t seen it.
Everyone is familiar with the shower scene, Bernard Herrmann’s score, and Janet Leigh’s screaming face, which has forever been immortalised in popular culture.
Always experimenting – even if he was never what you’d consider an avant-garde filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination – Hitchcock brought unusual techniques to the mainstream, like the long, uninterrupted shots of Rope or the voyeuristic lens of Rear Window, and with Vertigo, he allowed Technicolour to directly inform the narrative, while he popularised the concept of the MacGuffin in The 39 Steps. His influence has been endless.
Ebert wrote about the filmmaker when picking out what he considered to be the ten greatest movies of all time, choosing Hitchcock’s Notorious to sit alongside movies like Raging Bull, La Dolce Vita, and Citizen Kane. “I do not have the secret of Alfred Hitchcock, and neither, I am convinced, does anyone else. He made movies that do not date, that fascinate and amuse, that everybody enjoys, and that shout out in every frame that they are by Hitchcock,” he said.
There’s a widespread appeal to much of Hitchcock’s work, but while many Hollywood movies with mass appeal often feel a little hollow, the Master of Suspense’s movies were in an entirely different league of their own. “In the world of film, he was known simply as ‘The Master’. But what was he the Master of? What was his philosophy, his belief, his message? It appears that he had none. His purpose was simply to pluck the strings of human emotion – to play the audience, he said, like a piano.”
One of the greatest things about Hitchcock, Ebert suggests, was his ability to create endlessly rewatchable films despite them hinging so greatly on suspense. You’d think that once you’d seen one of his movies and you knew the twist, they’d become less interesting, but with Hitchcock, that was just not the case.
“Hitchcock was always hidden behind the genre of the suspense film, but as you see his movies again and again, the greatness stays after the suspense becomes familiar. He made pure movies,” Ebert concluded.
