The movie Orson Welles called a “masterpiece”
As one of the most innovative and transformative masterminds of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Orson Welles is a frontrunner in the contest for the ‘Most Important Filmmaker of All Time’ award – if such a trophy existed. Welles’ directional debut, Citizen Kane, was released in May 1941, just before his 26th birthday. The movie’s progressive story development and cinematography earned it a rightful place as one of the most influential in cinematic history.
Although Citizen Kane was a critical success, an unsatisfactory promotional campaign led to net losses at the box office. Undeterred, Welles pushed on to become one of his generation’s most successful and respected directors, with subsequent accomplishments including The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, The Trial and Chimes at Midnight.
Meanwhile, the legendary British director Alfred Hitchcock made similarly seismic moves in the horror genre. His groundbreaking approach to tension-building offered audiences nightmare fodder for the foreseeable with his seminal classics, Vertigo, The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and Psycho.
Although Welles seldom dipped into the horror category, he and Hitchcock shared a passion for nailbiting thrillers. The pair had a complex relationship personally, however, with Welles once calling out Hitchcock’s “egotism and laziness” in making movies “all lit like television shows” later in his career.
“I think he was senile a long time before he died,” Welles added regarding Hitchcock’s supposed late career dive, explaining that “he kept falling asleep while you were talking to him.” Welles’ criticism wasn’t just consigned to the latter part of Hitchcock’s career, either. He once cuttingly appraised the seminal Vertigo as “even worse than Rear Window“.
Despite Welles’ candid appraisal of Vertigo, a film widely regarded as Hitchcock’s masterpiece, he did describe one of the Brit’s less well-known movies as a “masterpiece”. In a conversation with Henry Janglom, as published in My Lunches with Orson, Welles once reacted to Hitchcock’s 1935 movie, The 39 Steps: “Oh my God, what a masterpiece”.
Although Hitchcock’s directional debut was 1925’s The Pleasure Garden, The 39 Steps arrived ten years later as one of his earliest feature-length sound films. Based on the John Buchan novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, which was released in 1915, the year Welles was born, the spy thriller follows the story of a Canadian civilian who visits London and becomes inadvertently swept into the espionage underworld.
Watch the trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps below.
