Alfred Hitchcock, a $63,000 debut movie, and the New Hollywood legend he hand-picked for greatness
Alfred Hitchcock didn’t just change filmmaking, but selected another brilliant artist who could shape its future.
Although Hitchcock’s name has to be brought up during any discussions of the greatest director of all time, what’s not discussed enough is just how long his career was, where he began making films in the 1920s in England before developing a global reputation and winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’ with his masterpiece, Rebecca.
Although the ‘50s would be the most fruitful decade of his career creatively, as it saw the debut of all-time classics like Rear Window and Vertigo, he continued to make films until the early 1980s. Not every Hitchcock film was as great as Notorious or Spellbound, but he retained a consistency to his work that led to many surprising developments. 1960’s Psycho didn’t just change the way that films were marketed, but practically invented the slasher horror subgenre that would take off in the next decade with Black Christmas, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, and Alien.
Though Hitchcock had a reputation for not always being the most gregarious, he was also a filmmaker who could detect genius when he saw it. It was in 1957 that the director saw a tiny drama film set in Kansas City, Missouri, which had been rejected by the British Board of Classification. Although it had a budget of $63,000 and was never given a substantial release, Hitchcock took a liking to the film’s young director, Robert Altman.
Altman had gotten United Artists to distribute a film that he had helped finance, but the endorsement of ‘The Master of Suspense’ gave him the confidence and backing he needed to start being taken more seriously, and most critically, Hitchcock offered him a job directing episodes of his television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which gave him even more experience behind the camera.
Altman had a career similar to Hitchcock’s because it took a few years before he started getting the reputation of being one of the best in the business. When he returned to directing features a decade after The Delinquents, he didn’t necessarily earn much traction for Countdown or The Cold Day in the Park, but it was his Korean War comedy M*A*S*H that became a breakout hit, a major awards contender and one of the highest-grossing films in the world.
The younger director’s career had peaked at just the right time, as it was in the midst of the New Hollywood era, when, after facing disappointments in the prior decade because of inflated budgets, studios began investing in younger, fresher directors who were given more capacity to make stylistic changes.
It is what led Altman to make deliberately subversive films, such as the romantic western McCabe & Mrs Miller, the gambling drama California Split, and the satirical detective mystery The Long Goodbye, thereby courting a career that lasted decades, as he never gave up his passion for being on set, much like Hitchcock.
Although he earned a significant amount of praise when his 2001 masterpiece Gosford Park became his most acclaimed film in years, he died only a few months after the wide release of his film, Prairie Home Companion. Like the veteran, he too had developed a protégé of his own, as he had been an early advocate of an up-and-coming director named Paul Thomas Anderson.
