Quote:
Which is what Hitchcock did and is why there is more written about Hitchcock and his films than any director in history. So, he uses visual shortcuts and cues that allow the viewers to piece together enough character backstory or emotional state of mind throughout the film without losing momentum in storytelling of the larger plotline within the film.
But primarily, that only happened after Hitch was dead, before he was dead he just made a bunch of popular films that had very little artistic merit. Crowd pleasers is all films like Rear Window, North By Northwest and Psycho were--according to the critical consensus of the time.
Spielberg and Cameron are really the only directors who make movies like Ford and Hitch did, respectively--for the popular audience with a great deal of content smuggled through the visual design. To a degree Scorsese does it, but in order to keep making films he needs to foreground it enough (jumping up and down and waving a really long long take through the backdoor of restaurant) that film writers and cineastes are capable of noticing it and then raving about how incredibly genius the self-conscious showiness was.
Because there is one hard and fast rule in film writing, if the masses like it, you know automatically it has no merit and that everything in it is hackneyed, thoughtless, and worthless.
