The three Alfred Hitchcock movies Orson Welles despised: “Everything is stupid about it”
Orson Welles was very understandably granted the status of one of the all-time greats when he wrote, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane when he was just 25. It’s one thing to do all of that and make a half-decent film, but Citizen Kane put him in an entire league of his own.
Yet, just because he made an incredible movie doesn’t mean his opinions about cinema were always right. Of course, opinions are subjective, and what makes a good film will always divide movie lovers, but some of Welles’ hot takes were genuinely awful, and many of his worst came in the form of his feelings on Alfred Hitchcock.
The British auteur was a master of his craft – no question about it – and from his silent era beginnings right through to his swan song in the ’70s, he proved himself a proper innovator. He had bold ideas and wasn’t afraid to roll the dice on them. Just take Psycho, for example. The studio didn’t want to touch it, so Hitchcock had to shoot it on a tighter budget than usual and in black-and-white rather than colour. In the end, it made a mockery of the suits, pulling in huge numbers at the box office and changing cinema for good – pioneering the slasher genre and pushing a new kind of cinematic violence right into the mainstream.
Welles couldn’t really see Hitchcock’s brilliance in the same way as everyone else, it seemed. Perhaps he felt some sort of rivalry between them? Or was it insecurity, because that’s surely the only reason for Welles’ infantile jabs at the Master of Suspense?
One of his most brutal opinions on Hitchcock’s films came when he decided to take aim at Rear Window, a title regularly labelled one of the best movies ever made. Not to Welles, though, who bitterly spat out some pretty vitriolic sentences against the classic 1954 thriller. “Everything is stupid about it. Complete insensitivity to what a story about voyeurism could be,” he said.
“I’ll tell you what is astonishing. To discover that Jimmy Stewart can be a bad actor. But really bad. Even Grace Kelly is better than Jimmy, who’s overacting. He’s kind of looking to the left and giving as bad a performance as he ever gave. But, then, you see, the world was so much at Hitch’s feet that the actors just thought, ‘Do what he says and it’s gonna be great,’” he added, as noted in My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom by Peter Biskind.
Welles’s attitude is the most astonishing thing here, because there is no way you can dislike Rear Window that much. Even if you somehow don’t enjoy it, you can still appreciate Hitchcock’s classic to be a well-made film. The Citizen Kane director clearly let all the praise he received go to his head, because he seemed to think he was far beyond Hitchcock, even though he failed to make half as many great movies in his career compared to the English director.
“Vertigo. That’s worse,” Welles quipped, before slagging off The Trouble with Harry, which he labelled an example of “senility”.
It’s OK to admit that the latter isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but come on, Orson, Vertigo is incredible. From its Technicolour palette to its intoxicating exploration of obsession, Vertigo is truly one of Hitch’s finest works, but to Welles, it was just slop, apparently.
