In praise of … Alfred Hitchcock

Further proof of how badly the Academy Awards can get it wrong surely lies in this fact: Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar for best director. Yet he has won an even higher public accolade: he's become synonymous with a style. Ask even the most casual of film-goers to define "Hitchcockian", and you'll hear about the stabbing strings in Psycho ; the escalation of panic in The Birds ; the icy blondes and the MacGuffins . Hitchcock was that rare thing: a hugely successful director who learned from the avant garde – and so helped set the standards for all subsequent cinema. Born in the last days of Queen Victoria, Hitchcock gained his technical mastery and economy making silent movies – so full marks to the British Film Institute for restoring nine of those early works. The line between his 1926 debut, The Pleasure Garden, and a masterpiece such as North by Northwest is surely a long one, but it will be a treat for film fans to trace it.