(3 of 3)
After a recent issue of France's longhaired movie magazine. Cahiers du Cinema, came out, crammed from cover to cover with drooling eulogies of Britain's famed Director Alfred (Dial M for Murder, Rear Window) Hitchcock, Cahiers' English counterpart, Sight and Sound—not loving Hitchcock less, but resenting Cahiers' adulation more—blew its top: "Hitchcock is compared with Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Bernanos, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Hardy, Richardson, Poe (a "classical" poet, apparently), Meredith, Homer, Aeschylus, Corneille, Balzac and Shakespeare! More marvelous still, all this is done on the strength of a handful of Hitchcock's American films." With smarmy smugness, S. & S. quoted the finale of Hitchcock's tape-recorded interview: "Really."' asked the Cahiersman, "you don't like your American films?" Smiling and shaking his interviewer's hand. Hitchcock allowed: "Not really." Not loving Hitchcock less, but resenting S. & S.'s mockery more. Cahiers, for its current issue, interviewed football-shaped Alfred Hitchcock all over again. Had he really, honestly confessed that his American films were bad? Replied the director: "No, no. That's not true!" His interrogator pounced: "But you did say it! Why?" Weaseled Hitchcock uneasily: "It depends what press it was. In London, for example, certain journalists want me to tell them that everything that comes from America is bad." Then, desperately striving to smooth the ruffled feathers all round, Hitchcock all but wrung the neck of the matter: "What I shall say is that some of my American films are a compromise—on account of the public."