Alfred Hitchcock at 100

Queen Victoria was still on the throne when Sir Alfred Hitchcock was born in London a hundred years ago this month. A massively fat man of relentlessly old-fashioned demeanor, schooled by Jesuits and formal to the point of paralysis, he spent his entire adult life working in a medium that barely existed in 1899, but has since come to be regarded as the very essence of modernity. From 1939 until his death in 1980, he lived in Hollywood, …

…longing: We expect more of a genius than that. Yet his iconic images lodge permanently in the minds of all who see them, and surely that is a kind of greatness that cannot be denied. Call him, then, a major minor master, one who succeeded in spinning out of his tormented inner life a body of work incapable of expanding our own imaginative worlds, but that nonetheless retains its dreamlike power to frighten and enthrall.