All in the Family: Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt James mclaughlin

He was one of the greatest geniuses in the history of the medium,' says Sacha Gervasi, the director of an ambitious, period-soaked new movie, Hitchcock (in theaters Nov. perfection of the life is an age-old conflict, but in Hitchcock's case the dichotomy resists convenient parsing, because the facts of his life are so tightly raveled with the big themes in his work: the thwarted desire that darkens into monomania, the tense duality of inhibition and violence, the exalted vision twinned with the near-sadistic drive for total control, especially over the actors he said 'should be treated like cattle.' These warring impulses shaped Hitchcock's ceaseless striving 'to manipulate an audience's sensibilities to the utmost,' as Donald Spoto wrote in The Dark Side of Genius, his biography of the director.

But good news was followed by bad: in October, The Girl, a 90-minute HBO biopic, depicted Hitchcock (Toby Young) as a sexual harasser who destroyed the career of a fresh-faced Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) after she refused to submit to his demand that she make herself 'sexually available' to him when the two paired up to make The Birds.

This past August, 846 critics and professionals from the film industry voted Hitchcock's Vertigo the greatest film of all time, toppling Citizen Kane from its 50-year-long perch, in the prestigious Sight and Sound poll (conducted once a decade).

The British Film Institute, in its largest-ever undertaking, has been diligently restoring eight of the nine films Hitchcock made in the silent-film era, when he was in his 20s. Thirty-two years after his death, he has become more relevant than ever, the subject of fresh and contentious speculation, his reputation as a director soaring to new heights even as a campaign seems underway to expose him as a bully and beast. Now something new is going on with Hitchcock. No popular film-maker has been more admired by critics in his own lifetime. Stylish, literate, beautifully constructed, visually opulent, they showcased the period's most fetching stars (including Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, and James Stewart). Alfred Hitchcock's place in the pantheon of great directors has long been secure, thanks to a string of classics stretching from the 1930s, when he created gems like The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, to the films that conquered Holly-wood in subsequent decades, including Notorious ( 1946 ), Rear Window ( 1954 ), and The Birds ( 1963 ). To say he's making a comeback would be misleading, because he never went away.

All in the Family: Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt James mclaughlin