Top 25 Film Directors

[EdgarusQPFC]

I seem to be in the minority but I really enjoyed Death Proof. Granted, without Russell it probably would've been poor.

He is excellent in that film

[Albino Rover]

3. Quentin Tarantino

Just as Hitchcock was the supreme director of the 1950s and Coppola owned the '70s, the 1990s belonged to Quentin Tarantino. His first three films made him the youngest legendary director in half a century, and as well as being arguably among the best writer-directors of all time, he truly is the defining filmmaker of the American Generation X, who after a revolution of dialogue-driven cinema has never stopped treating us to more.

As well as talented he is almost incomparably passionate and knowledgeable. Few directors know as much about movies as this man; from his early years he has been a film fanatic, and from his earliest work he's made movies that are both stylish and substantial- there isn't a single shot in a Tarantino film that's executed lazily or thoughtlessly- right down to the last detail every moment is golden.

He was born in Tennessee and raised by his single mother, who herself was a cult cinephile (it's even rumoured that she named him after Burt Reynolds’ character, Quint, in the TV series Gunsmoke.) She took him to films from an early age, and when he was still very young she made the decision to leave Knoxville for Los Angeles, and having grown up in California Quentin left school at 15 with the ambition of becoming an actor. After two years in acting college he left for an alternative dream job, in the now-famous Video Archives.

Tarantino often says: “I didn’t go to film school, I went to films.” - it was at Video Archives that he learned his trade. While working there he watched as many films as he could, looked closely at which rental movies were the most popular among his customers, and when asked for recommendations discussed them like a professional critic. His colleagues at Archives, including Roger Avary, were big movie fans, and through his connections at work he wound up at a Hollywood party where he met Lawrence Bender, a young, emerging producer, only a few years older than Quentin, looking for some fresh material to work with. It was then that Tarantino had his real education, co-writing, directing, producing, editing and starring in his first film, My Best Friend's Birthday. A large part of the film was destroyed in a fire during editing, but the surviving stock impressed and gained Tarantino a few contacts in the business. He left Archives and scaled up with a new screenplay, which he wrote in under a month.

After finishing his final draft in no time, Tarantino and friends waited a long time for The Money to step in, but regardless of talent no potential financier is willing to invest in a cast and crew of rookies. They were about to resort to plan B, a $30,000, 16mm movie, when it became apparent that the script had been read, and loved, by an A-list actor. Harvey Keitel was the project's saviour: with an established star on board Tarantino had no problem getting the contacts and most of the financial backing he needed to make his feature debut, Reservoir Dogs.

After a memorably entertaining and smooth-flowing opening conversation in a diner on the morning of a diamond heist, Reservoir Dogs skips over the job, focusing on its bloody aftermath, and its characters' behaviour as they try to figure out how the robbery went horribly wrong, and how the cops could have been wise to their perfect plan.

In the restricted environment of a warehouse the film increasingly becomes a matter of morality, it's arguably even a microcosmic examination of good and evil with a lesson that crime doesn't pay. One of the most impressive things about the structure of the film is that, without ever calling our attention to it, Tarantino manages to alter our view of his characters: the criminals are introduced as cool, wise-cracking guys in suits and shades, but our minds are changed as we soon learn some of their back stories, and become first-hand witnesses of their greed, violent mentality and treatment of the police, but the main aspect of the film that got everyone excited was the casual chit-chat, humour and everyday behaviour that other crime films seemed to leave out, showing criminals getting things wrong, losing their cool under pressure and, of course, making scintillating small talk.

With Reservoir Dogs Tarantino became the biggest instant celebrity director since Orson Welles. His work, combined with his own self-promotion on the festival circuit, made him an overnight success. Like Welles, Tarantino's first film is also admirable for its incredible shot range, with all sorts of angles, long tracking shots and circling dolly shots drawing inspiration from all over his encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema and certifying Tarantino as an emerging technical wizard as well as a top class scribe.

Dogs got him recognised on a massive scale but with the praise came the pressure of expectation for what would come next. Immediately audiences wanted more, and after writing screenplays for Tony Scott and Oliver Stone, for his own second film Tarantino fled to Amsterdam and, with some assistance from his friend Roger Avary, got to work on something on another level, looping through time, juggling a handful of interlinked stories through an inventive non-linear structure, with some of the best-written dialogue of all time, all built on the bedrock of American pop culture. Pulp Fiction is a series of ingenious and completely original Los Angeles crime stories filled with humour, ironic comedy, parody, subtle anticipative tension and sudden bursts of action, based around the lives of small-time crooks, professional gangsters, a mob leader's wife and a corrupt prize fighter.

A pair of gangsters are sent to retrieve a stolen briefcase and execute the thieves, a normal day for them, until they suddenly cheat death, have an accident in a car and encounter a stick-up in a diner. Later that night one of them has to take the boss's wife out for dinner and dancing. Meanwhile the boxer, paid up front to take a dive, plans to win the fight, take the money and skip towns, but runs into severe trouble while trying to retrieve his family heirloom before he goes.

While he tells us of their actions and experiences, Tarantino lets us spend some quality time with his characters. On the way to their job the hitmen discuss fast food and foot massage. At dinner, Mrs. Mia Wallace talks about uncomfortable silences and challenges her companion to think of something interesting to say. Even on the run from the mob, Butch the boxer observes to a Colombian taxi driver that: "I'm American, our names don't mean shit." Rather than a simple vehicle for plot and characterisation, the dialogue is fluid and interesting conversation that brings the story to life like nothing before it. There's also an underlying sense of mystery in the film, with a "stroke of luck/act of God" debate, and the briefcase whose unseen contents have a gold glow, and are protected by the security combination "666".

Pulp Fiction has come under more critical and theoretical study than any other film of the last 25 years, from shot-by-shot analysis to religious and spiritual interpretation, and it's now compulsory reading in practically every film school worldwide. But what makes the film such an important masterpiece is its bold and insurgent statement on the tired, conventional, formulaic, boring filmmaking that was all over most of Hollywood. The best way to criticise a film is to make a better film, and with Pulp Fiction Tarantino showed that originality is what breathes life into cinema, making a high quality version of exactly the kind of material most mainstream films choose to leave out. It turned Tarantino into a one-man new wave of American cinema, redoubling his cult following and inspiring a number of imitations, of varying quality but all with the same important principle.

Tarantino is also one of the kings of the needle-drop. His choices of music in his first two films make up some of the most iconic movie soundtracks in recent history, and as a music lover he assembles each one very carefully and personally, to the extent of recording a track from his own copy of a record, and even in the writing stage setting key scenes to a particular song.

The soundtrack is all soul in his third film, the completion of his trio of ‘90s hits, Jackie Brown. It's the most plot-based of the three, but it combines a fresh and exciting crime plot with more fascinating characters, cool conversation, dark comedy and a strong flavour of the Blaxploitation B-movies of the 1970s. The film also appears to offer a genuine insight into the underworld of criminal politics, where the professional criminal liaises with his couriers, a bail bondsman and an old cellmate.

Jackie is our sassy, black heroine: a middle-aged flight attendant who helps a gun dealer get his cash through customs, but getting caught red-handed by the police she becomes a potential problem to her illegal employer. She knows he wants to silence her, so she seizes the chance to get out, and get her hands on some serious money at the same time, right under the noses of her boss and the LAPD. Tarantino conjures up an intelligent heist plot, which he unravels very cleverly- even as the film uncovers more of the story to us, Jackie remains further ahead in the game than anyone. The sharply-observed character-based drama is just as important as the plot, and sexual and romantic chemistry find their way into the subtext of the film without ever playing to any clichés and conventions, but it's all sewn together by the writing and delivery of the dialogue- Tarantino creates characters that could sit and talk for hours, and we could happily sit and watch them.

After directing three films in five years in his late twenties and early thirties, he didn't release another until after his 40th birthday. When he came back it was with back-to-back productions, released 6 months apart but together making a revenge epic.

The concept of "The Bride" came from a bit of fun between Tarantino and Uma Thurman while working on Pulp Fiction, but the idea stuck and as they remained friends after Pulp they developed the character together at great length, and over the following years Tarantino wrote the complete script to go with it. He had toyed with making the story a 4-hour epic, his "Once Upon A Time In America", but, inevitably, producers had reservations about that, so instead he thought of it as his "Dollars trilogy".

Over the course of the two films The Bride, shot and left for dead along with her entire wedding party, emerges from a four-year coma and goes to extreme lengths to get even with the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad: Elle Driver, Vernita Green, O-Ren Ishii, Budd and Bill.

Kill Bill is almost as much a celebration of cinema as a story of its own: Volume 1 is a beautiful and bloody tribute to the great samurai and martial arts films of Japan, with endless references to its inspirations, and an unmistakable Tarantino factor that had entered a new zone, both in technical achievement and, beneath all the action, a very strong emotional line and a deep and complex lead character more sympathetic and engaging than any of his previous protagonists.

Volume 2 picks up where the first left off, skipping between Asia and America in both style and setting, showing The Bride's past: her gruelling martial arts training and survival of the wedding massacre, as well as continuing her quest for revenge with the remaining Deadly Vipers: an athletic, blonde, one-eyed femme fatale; a strip joint bouncer, beer-bellied but wily and ruthless, and finally, the elusive Bill. Vol. 2 is more of an homage to the Western than the classic Far-Eastern, with large parts of the action taking place in Texas and Mexico, but the location extracts nothing from the incredible choreographed fights and scenes of dramatic tension.

Kill Bill is probably the most graphic of Tarantino's work, almost to the point of parody with hacked limbs, spraying blood and squished eyeballs, but it was also an evolution in Tarantino's visual direction. The films were his first with Robert Richardson as cinematographer, and together the two achieved insane tracking shots, wonderful fight scenes, black-and-white, silhouettes, time lapse photography, even animation and, ingeniously, squashing the screen to emphasise the claustrophobia of being buried alive. It's also an important saga for the action heroine in American film, with enthusiastically emasculating scenes of fighting, motorcycles and trash-talking without a typecast alpha male in sight and every bit as entertaining.

In 2005 Tarantino guest-directed a scene in his old friend Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, and the two joined forces again for their next films, which combined to make a two-part tribute to 1970s Grindhouse cinema. Intended to be released as half of an old-style double bill along with Rodriguez's Planet Terror, Tarantino's sixth film was Death Proof. Death Proof was an indulgence but it was Tarantino's own twisted take on the "slasher" exploitation films he went to in his teens. The first half of the film takes place in Texas, where a group of drunk young women are followed to a roadside bar by a grisly but smooth-talking stunt driver. The friends stick together but the stuntman seduces another young lady into a ride home, claiming that his stunt Chevrolet is so safe it's "death proof". Rather than driving her home brings his helpless passenger along as he tracks down his original targets, but the psycho driver meets his match months later in Tennessee when he plays the same game with another group of women, who duly deliver the action, excitement and delicious poetic justice.

Death Proof was Tarantino's first and only feature film as cinematographer, and as well as calling his own shots on set, in post-production he added lots of deliberate glitches and a grainy, filmic '70s look for the complete authentic feel. He captured the look precisely, but after the Grindhouse films were completed they became a source of relative disappointment: the films weren't widely released as a double bill, in fact they were released a few months apart, and Death Proof was by far Tarantino's least financially successful film. Of course, he was, and remains in a position where he can make films for himself, and despite achieving below his usual profit margins his film achieved everything he wanted it to, and the critical reception was mostly enthusiastic.

For years Tarantino had been working on a World War II screenplay, but even when he completed the script it looked like he wouldn't be able to make the film, because he had written his villain as what he believed could be his best ever character, an intimidating, cruel and eccentric SS Colonel fluent in German, French, English and Italian, obsessed with hunting Jews- a role so good that it was simply unplayable. Having held a number of days of auditions and with most of the rest of the cast in place, Tarantino and his producers were a few days away from having to cancel the production when in stepped his Standartenfuhrer, a middle-aged Austrian actor who would prove to be one of his career's greatest miracles. As he put it, "Christoph gave me my movie back."

The movie was Inglourious Basterds, an utterly audacious and completely unique war film that breaks every rule in the book to bring us entertainment, excitement, tension, heroism, villainy, comedy and action during the roughest period of the last century, without paying attention to the petty details.

In Nazi-occupied France, a group of Jewish guerillas live to kill and scalp Nazi soldiers, practically for fun, but have a much bigger agenda when they become an integral part of an operation that could end the War. Their plan is complicated by Jewish escapee Shoshanna, who has a opened a cinema under a new identity. Shoshanna's life under the radar is complicated by a constant pestering from a dashing but very arrogant German war hero, Frederick Zoller, who wants her cinema to host the première of a Nazi propaganda film. All of this happens under the watchful eye of the event's head of security, Colonel Hans Landa, who conducts his investigations and interrogations using twisted logic, and doesn't miss a trick. He ambushed Shoshanna's refuge, a dairy farm, years ago.

The film has some of Tarantino's most original and best-written scenes, remarkable for the dialogue cutting between languages even back and forth in mid-conversation, lending itself to a range of comic styles, and creating great drama and tension. Suspense is crucial to the film from its opening scene (strangely enough Tarantino is the third director in a row on this list to have a tense scene involving a glass of milk.) As well as its sheer greatness in writing, Basterds is masterfully-shot, with a distinct visual atmosphere and very strange beauty even in its most graphic scenes. Due to its visceral bloodshed, and historical inaccuracies, it was one of Tarantino's most provocative and controversial pieces, along with his eighth film, released three years later.

In 2012 he took to the deep South to film his latest work, Django Unchained, a courageous, outrageous film looking at a nation of slavery 150 years ago, and one slave's pursuit for freedom and revenge, with Tarantino paying a very stylish tribute to the many Westerns that have inspired so much of his career.

Django is freed from his chain gang by dentist-turned-bounty-hunter Dr. King Schultz, who needs Django's help to identify a group of wanted outlaws who were once his masters, but as the man who bought a slave's freedom Schultz feels too responsible to abandon him. He gives him a paid job and the two form a rousing partnership as Schultz helps his friend find his long-lost wife, and form a plan to get her back from sadistic slaver Calvin Candie and his housekeeper, Stephen.

The intrigue and complexities of the characters and plot are matched in the quality of the dialogue, which together set mood, characterise and entertain in a screenplay that could only have come from a true master. Technically Django is well-paced and laid out, with ingenious set-pieces, in-your-face action and violence, but of all Tarantino's films it's possibly his finest achievement in cinematography, both landscape shooting:

and plentiful audacious camera work, like this introduction of the villain:

The film is self-aware and flamboyant but throughout the Tarantinian style on screen the important historical content is never unauthentic, and the portrayal of the horror of the treatment of the American slave is handled in a way that's both brutal and respectful. The extent of the subject matter caused a lot of controversy but Tarantino makes no apology for the exploitation, bondage and over 100 mentions of the word "nigger" in his film, because he takes no shame in deliberately forcing us to look at the tragic reality of a 19th century Holocaust as horrific as the one he touched upon in Basterds, delivering a serious message amongst the sensational action and comedy.

His ninth film, The Hateful Eight, is a completed script, now in the pre-production stage.

He's as one of the best screenwriters working today and as a director he's every bit as accomplished. He now writes almost exclusively for himself, and although some of his screenplays have been realised by other directors he's always been his own muse, and saved his best work for himself- appropriately, because he's the best director he's written for.

His influence over the last 20 years has been massive: right from his introduction he's been hot property. QT fanatics fawn over his creation of a parallel Tarantinoverse, noticing fake brands incorporated in several films and characters from different films who appear to be related, and while that might not be the pinnacle of film genius, it touches on perhaps the key to Tarantino's work- the personal touch. Whatever the style or story, he references himself as much as he applies himself, and is proud to put his own stamp on all his work with about a dozen trademarks to look out for. Worldwide he's one of the most-loved filmmakers currently working; in attempt to emulate the effortless coolness of his style he's also one of the most-copied directors among young filmmakers, and he's now statistically the most-studied director among English-speaking film students. Quentin Tarantino is this generation's cinema superstar.

[Ludo*1]

What's the list looking like so far then?

Cracking write up Albino.

Scorsese I'd imagine has to be in the top 2. Has Spielberg been mentioned? If he has, then I hope, but doubt it's a director famous for his horrors.

[AberdeenBud]

Berg 2 Marty 1, I would imagine.

[Albino Rover]

Here's a reminder of the list so far:

25. Darren Aronofsky

24. Sam Peckinpah

23. Wes Anderson

22. Bill Forsyth

21. James Cameron

20. Clint Eastwood

19. David Lynch

18. Orson Welles

17. David Lean

16. John Ford

15. Sergio Leone

14. Danny Boyle

13. Ridley Scott

12. Peter Jackson

11. Ken Loach

10. David Fincher

9. Christopher Nolan

8. Paul Thomas Anderson

7. Stanley Kubrick

6. Francis Ford Coppola

5. Joel & Ethan Coen

4. Alfred Hitchcock

3. Quentin Tarantino

I'll also add this list to the OP for easy access.

[Ira Gaines]

I'd need to go with Spielberg at #1, but Scorsese would be more than a worthy guy to take it.

[Ludo*1]

Scorsese as number one for me. Both are fantastic directors and whilst I think Spielberg is perhaps more ambitious with his choice of genres, when he disappoints he really disappoints A.I for me being the prime example but that may have been because I expected better from something that was adapted from Kubrick's ideas. Scorsese's method of storytelling is just sublime. It's marginal, but I prefer Scorsese's work.

[Ira Gaines]

Someone like Spielberg taking from someone like Kubrick was never likely to go well.

[EdgarusQPFC]

Personally id have Spielberg over Scorsese, i do enjoy both considerably and both are in my list, but the majority of Scorsese films i only learned to appreciate as an adult, while i appreciate the Spielberg films both as a kid and for different reasons as an adult.

If the top 2 are who we think they are then only 4 of my 10 will be on this list!

[Rabbi Williams]

Spielberg, Scorsese and Tarantino were all in my top 10, never got on with Hitchcock but I have only seen a handful of his films although they were allegedly meant to be some of his best ones. Good list though and it looks like my picks all look set to be mentioned except Tom Hooper which I don't blame others for not picking, he's only made 3 films.

[AberdeenBud]

Remember watching PulpFiction as a teenager and being utterly blown away. I didn't have a clue that films were capable of this kind of shit and it opened up a whole new world for me.

[Bold Rover]

Making the (safe) assumption that Scorcese's still to come, then 9 of my ten are in there. Only Jim Sheridan unrecognised.

[EdgarusQPFC]

Inspired by the great write up im currently firing through the Tarantino films, just finished Reservoir Dogs and up to SLJ's iconic Ezekiel 25:17 on Pulp fiction.

[happysouth]

any chance someone could quote the hitchcock write up? it doesnt show up on my phone for some reason.

[Ludo*1]

Albino Rover, on 15 Jun 2014 - 15:43, said:

4. Alfred Hitchcock

A young girl discovers her favourite uncle may be a notorious murderer. A wealthy man tries to recreate his first marriage with an innocent young woman. A businessman is mistaken for a spy and kidnapped by a group of criminals. A secretary steals $40,000 and crosses paths with a creepy motel owner. A college professor suspects a murder at a dinner party. An elderly woman on a train seems to have disappeared into thin air without a trace. An acrophobic retired police detective falls in love with a dead woman. A housebound photographer attempts to solve a murder from his living room. The residents of a seaside town are terrorised by a flock of deadly birds.

“Some movies are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake.”

He knew that many of his plots were not at all plausible or realistic, but the films of Alfred Hitchcock don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are. With deceptive simplicity he can ease an audience into the palm of his hand and, as he liked to say, "play them like a piano." Always innovative and consistent, with universal appeal, he had the ability keep us entertained and enlightened in equal measure with his films always rich in plot and action, but deeper than that is Hitchcock’s setting of mood and atmosphere, in a style that was unprecedented, and remains unmistakable and unmatched.

Probably the most influential director of all time, his great films have proven to be timeless. From his earliest works, even his silent films, they're always acted and narrated very naturally, with realism, everyday behaviour, liberal humour and ordinary people, whom we can relate to, getting caught up in bizarre and dangerous situations. Of course, in suspense, the audience knows the danger long before the hero. It's the waiting that's the scariest bit: if we know a bomb is set to go off at 1 o'clock, Hitchcock would show a watch ticking to one minute past 1, two minutes past, before resolving the situation. Importantly, he knew that suspense is nothing without relief, and like no other director he knew his audience, what we want from a film and how to give us exactly that. He gives us the poison and doesn't supply the antidote until the very last minute.

Born in 1899, son of a grocer, he was brought up a Roman Catholic, sheltered and protected throughout his childhood but always deeply fascinated by cinema. After his father’s death, when he was 15, he went to engineering school and became a draftsman and designer. He was fat even as a young man and was rejected when he tried to enlist to serve in the first World War, so continued in graphic design. He wrote short stories for his company’s in-house magazine, and around that time, after the war, the motion picture industry in the UK was growing very quickly. He jumped at the chance of his first job, designing titles at Islington Studios.

Once he had some experience Hitchcock contributed in writing, editing, set design and, when filming in Germany in the middle of one of the most important movements in cinema, he became fascinated by camera work. His first job as a director, Number 13, was in Berlin but was cancelled halfway into production due to lack of funding.

His first released films were The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle, which is now a lost film. Neither really took off but he came into his element with his first thriller, The Lodger, based on the Jack the Ripper murders. The film was the first script Hitchcock chose himself. Visually it's easily one of the most inventive and original British films of the silent era, ingeniously designed so, through close-ups and clever insert shots, we can almost hear the action, bearing similarities to the directors of German Expressionist movement from whom Hitchcock learned his trade.

The success of The Lodger gave Hitchcock the chance to make another thriller, The Ring, and his growing reputation continued through silent films like Downhill, Easy Virtue, Champagne and The Manxman. In 1929 he achieved a landmark in British cinema, directing Blackmail, the first ever British talkie. It was also the first in a Hitchcock tradition of staging a grand, climactic suspense scene in a well-known landmark, with a chase scene at the top of the the British Museum.

His work in the 1930s includes many thrillers and mysteries: in the first half of the decade he made Murder!, The Skin Game, Mary, Rich And Strange, Number Seventeen and Waltzes From Vienna. Hitchcock's efficiency and consistency got him a contract with the Gaumont-British production company, whose trust and financial support took his work to a new level. His first film with them was The Man Who Knew Too Much, and although Hitchcock described it as "the work of a talented amateur", the public disagreed and, at the time, it was his biggest hit. That title lasted all of a few months, because Hitchcock followed it with a classic, which was one of the most successful films of the decade in the UK, and its director's first big hit in America.

In The 39 Steps an ordinary man finds himself out of his depth as he unwillingly becomes a murder suspect and gets involved with conspiracy regarding a secret society, leading to a cross-country chase in the Scottish highlands. As well as an early masterclass in thrill and entertainment, for a film made in 1935, when kisses could last no longer than a few seconds and it was compulsory for unmarried couples to sleep in separate beds, The 39 Steps was a very risky exploration of fleeting romance and sexual tension. Audiences loved the film's humour, its confusion, mystery and the anticipation of the suspense, which was on a whole new level, and a nationwide scale.

Hitchcock's next three films, Secret Agent, Sabotage and Young And Innocent were all exciting and original thrillers, released within the space of 18 months, each masterfully directed and again applauded by audiences. He had another huge hit in 1938 with The Lady Vanishes, a strange, light-hearted thriller, fuelled by an intelligent and genuinely confounding mystery and ingenious camera work, almost entirely set on board a train following the search for a missing passenger, and an explanation for her disappearance.

Hitchcock used to say "The hardest things to photograph are dogs, babies, motorboats and Charlie Laughton." When working on Jamaica Inn Laughton brought problems, so much that Hitchcock described his work on the film as more refereeing than directing, but the product is of the same extremely high quality as Hitchcock was beginning to establish, a 19th century gangster thriller, centred around a pub in Cornwall. By the end of the 1930s Hitchcock was the number 1 British film director. Working in the British film industry with its limited audience and financial restrictions to further his career he only had one choice. He set sail for Hollywood.

His first American movie was set in England, and followed a heartbreakingly excited and innocent woman who marries a rich man haunted by a troubled past, and, unknowingly, his evil housekeeper. Rebecca was an instant hit, a powerful romantic drama but also one of the earliest Hitchcock films which, if looked at closely, examines a huge number of themes in human psychology, aristocracy, guilt, loss of innocence, true love and true happiness. The heroine is so instantly loveable that there's nothing but dread about her descent into a dark mystery, but, although not as consciously, we're equally as emotionally engaged in her husband, who must let go of his past.

Rebecca is a time-honoured masterpiece, but in the same year Hitchcock released his second American production, another resoundingly successful film also set in Europe, Foreign Correspondent, a thriller inherently supportive of the British war effort, although it carefully makes no references to Nazis, or even Germany. After massive hits with a drama and a war film to start off his career in Hollywood, the following year Hitchcock turned his hand to romantic comedy with Mr. And Mrs. Smith, and made it four films in two years with Suspicion, an exciting and ambiguous thriller which, like Rebecca, was set in England and filmed in California. A man's wife thinks he may be a murderer but is unable to prove it. Her suspicion is raised by some strange actions, so much that she can no longer trust her husband, reaching a pinnacle with one of Hitchcock's best and most famous suspense scenes, when a man brings his wife a glass of milk.

In 1942 came another suspense thriller, Saboteur, with which Hitchcock continued his ambitious outdoor location shooting, against the Hollywood norm of the time. With a leading cast of mainly comedy actors, Saboteur is a tense and fast-paced film which follows a man striving to clear his name with some serious consequences and a memorable set-piece atop a landmark- one of Hitchcock's best examples of high-tension entertainment at that time, and a direct prototype for some of his future work.

His greatest film of the 1940s was possibly Shadow Of A Doubt, a disturbed and very intense psychological noir-thriller about a fascinating family relationship between a teenage girl, Charlie, and her uncle Charlie, who comes to visit her in small-town California, but deposits a large sum of cash in the bank, talks about his dislike of rich widows, doesn't like his brother-in-law talking about "the perfect murder" and won't allow his photo to be taken by two men claiming to be census takers. Meanwhile, the police search for the Merry Widow Murderer.

Visually the film is like nothing else at the time, another technical piece of genius and a beautiful portrait of the picturesque American small town, with an innocence that makes the suspect stand out so clearly. It's a perfectly composed film, seamlessly assembled so that the camera never breaks out of the story, and with some of the best use of one of Hitchcock's favourite features in visual storytelling- the staircase. Shadow Of A Doubt was Hitchcock's personal favourite of his films. He summed it up with the philosophy: "Love and good order is no defence against evil."

The following year, still during the Second World War, he made Lifeboat, ambitiously set in the middle of the North Atlantic, telling the story of the survivors of a U-boat attack, with the action restricted to a small boat. Most ward films of the time were part-propaganda but Lifeboat was pure Hitchcock. It actually got bad reviews for being about a successful U-boat attack, and not portraying a German character unsympathetically enough. His next film, Spellbound, beginning with a mysterious figure, tells a love story with a seemingly supernatural influence set in a mental institution. The love story between doctor and patient involves both mystery and psychoanalysis, which allow for some of the most incredible visuals of the time, including an unforgettable dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali.

Despite the mixed reception of Lifeboat, after the War Hitchcock decided to work on another topical script, Notorious, in which the wife of a war criminal, protected by her notoriety, becomes an American agent, working with a male agent in Brazil. The espionage is complicated by love, and the split priorities of the agents endanger the situation, but as well as a tense thriller Notorious is always a rich and elegant film, with some of the most iconic cinematography of the black-and-white era, where one close-up speaks a thousand words, and a staircase is the gateway between life and death.

Hitchcock has also always been able to recreate a state of mind with what we see on screen, like this shot when the heroine wakes up the morning after a party:

His next film was courtroom drama The Paradine Case. Because of the content, Hitchcock's direction was a little more subtle with this film, and so the cast received most of the critical praise, but he couldn't have been less subtle with the camera with his next effort, his first colour film, Rope. Restricting the action to a single apartment, the film involves many long, uninterrupted takes with seemingly impossible camera movement, made all the more admirable remembering it was filmed in Technicolor, on massive, heavy cameras. The film takes place in real time and was designed to be made in one unbroken shot but that was impossible, because the three-strip film reels could only record about 10 minutes of footage, so to weld the shots together, at the end of most reels there are strange close-ups on the characters' suit jackets, which were matched at the beginning of the next shot before restarting the story.

The element of suspense in Rope is simple but extremely effective. A couple of old school friends commit a murder just minutes before a dinner party, and hide the body under their guests' noses. The tension of the party is created by the classic "dead elephant in the room" suspense that Hitchcock mastered, but the arousal of suspicion and the characters' expressions of guilt and fear unfold very cleverly, in a brave and completely experimental style.

In 1949 he reunited with the lead actors from some of his masterpieces from earlier in the decade: Joseph Cotten, from Shadow Of A Doubt, and Ingrid Bergman, from Spellbound and Notorious, rejoined Hitchcock on the sub-tropical mystery Under Capricorn, a strange and secretive film set in 19th century Australia, with more rich Technicolor and long takes. Upon release, Hitchcock's first two colour pictures were not particularly successful, but as the '40s came to a close he hit his peak era as a creator.

In 1950 he went back to black-and-white, and to the UK, with Stage Fright, a strange, noiresque thriller about a murder mystery which involves two actresses, the female protagonist (whose friend is a classic Hitchcock wrongly-accused man), and the exotic femme fatale. The darkness of the film is neutralised by scenes of pure comedy as the tension mounts. Again the criticism of Hitchcock's direction was outweighed by praise for his cast, and much of the film's financial success was probably down to the name of the director.

With his next thriller, Strangers On A Train, Hitchcock examined the idea of a deluded maniac plotting a murder out loud to a non-suspecting stranger and getting him involved against his will. Beginning with a conversation which begins very casually, the film unfolds into a tense nightmare for the protagonist as he interacts with a range of interesting and important characters, including one of the most memorable Hitchcock weirdos, all narrated by some of the director's finest technical mastery and very nervous suspense in the final act.

Strangers was immensely popular on release and has since become one of the all-time classic thrillers. Hitchcock followed it with I Confess, in which a murderer confesses his crime to his priest, testing the priest's confidence as he becomes a suspect himself. For the first time Hitchcock drew on his Catholic background as a major theme in a film, with a troubled main character struggling with loyalty to his religion, although he had trouble with Montgomery Clift in the lead role, as he did with most method actors.

Clift- "What's my motivation in this scene?"

Hitch- "Your salary."

He returned to colour with one of his most satisfying slices of cake, Dial M For Murder. Adapted from a stage play it drew a lot of inspiration from its original source, bringing theatrical elegance into Hitchcock's unmistakable brand of cinema, with a perfect murder plot - gone wrong - and its consequences making for perhaps Hitchcock’s most gripping piece of cinema as one of his most sympathetic heroines becomes an unsuspecting victim of attempted murder, and then a victimised suspect of the real deal. Most of the film takes place in a single apartment which only intensifies the suspense, even long after the murder and blackmail: keys, curtains, scissors and all, Dial M is Hitchcock at his majestic best: pure cinema gold. It was also something of a milestone for Hitchcock technically: it was one of a handful of films made in the original polarised 3D process and, reportedly, arguably the most effective use of it, although most distributed reels were in 2D only, because between the film's pre-production and its release the 3D craze had gone out of fashion.

Not six months later he released Rear Window, a mid-Summer mystery in which a man in a cast is stuck in his living room and has nothing to do all day but watch the lives of his neighbours, including a dancer, a musician, a lonely woman, a pair of newly-weds and a middle-aged couple who appear to be conspiring behind each others' backs. Originally his neighbours are a source of entertainment and a reflection of his own love life in limbo, until one night a woman screams, and alarm bells ring. Our hero senses the possibility of a murder but has no proof and no way of finding out on his own. He needs the help of his straight-talking insurance nurse and his girlfriend, the precious, angelic socialite.

The final act of Rear Window is one of the most gripping and frightening in Hitchcock's history, with heart-in-mouth suspense as again the innocent young heroine finds herself in grave danger. The film is one of Hitchcock's best-loved and most memorable masterpieces, but like all his greatest films its value goes way beyond simple entertainment. Rear Window exploits the voyeur in its audience, playing on an element of eavesdropping that, for better or worse, is fundamental in all movie-goers, as well as drawing on prominent themes of loneliness, romantic confusion, obsession and finding the right things to focus on in life.

He wasted no time in hitting cinemas with another double-header, released in quick succession in 1955. The first was To Catch A Thief, a large-scale "mistaken identity" jewel heist thriller, which completed his Grace Kelly trilogy. The second was The Trouble With Harry, a comedy about a small-town man named Harry, a quiet man who does no harm, but the problem, and the joke, comes when Harry dies, his body won't disappear, and nobody knows what to do with it. 1955 was also the year Hitchcock created and first presented his television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, each episode of which told short stories of mystery and suspense. The series has since been regarded as one of the best programmes of all time, running on American television all the way through to the mid-1960s.

In 1956 he remade his own 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much, in a much more Hollywood-friendly fashion, with bigger chases, more thrills, Marrakesh, a set-piece in the Royal Albert Hall and a very famous original song. It was the fifth of the six films he made in the years 1954-1956.

"The Wrong Man" is a common aspect to many Hitchcock films; from an early age being wrongly accused of a crime was one of his own biggest fears and it remained an idea that fascinated him. It's a theme in much of his fiction but he used the phrase as the title of his first real-life horror story. With as much dread and sympathy as suspense, and black-and-white New York photography, it tells the true story of a musician, arrested for a robbery he didn’t commit, who struggles to prove his innocence, and relies on actions beyond his control in order to be released. Hitchcock's own fear is very prominent in the film, as the nightmare scenario worsens he focuses more and more on the hero's state of mind and the emotional strain on his wife, until relieving the suspense with a twist of fortune.

In 1952 Sight & Sound magazine conducted its first decennial "Top 10 Films Of All Time" poll, as voted for by film directors and critics worldwide. In 60 years three films have topped the list: In '52 De Sica's Bicycle Thieves; from 1962-2002 Welles' Citizen Kane; and in 2012, Hitchcock's Vertigo.

With hypnotic melancholy and an irregular obsessive control, Vertigo examines a mystery that is solved but not fully resolved, and a tragic relationship between two fascinating lead characters- a decent man wrecked by guilt and obsession, and an enigmatic woman who is seen as nothing more than an object of desire, and never allowed to be her true self.

The protagonist is hired to follow a man's wife, a young woman who appears to be influenced by a supernatural spirit. He saves her life and, from a distance, falls in love with her, but the impending dread of the romance and the hero's vertigo lead to tragic consequences. His obsession with bringing back his lost love takes over his own life, and as he descends into madness the film grows in emotional complexity, with an impact that remains powerful long after its rooftop conclusion.

With extended periods of no dialogue, much of the film's emotions are in Hitchcock's visuals and Bernard Herrman's score. Technically it's one of the most masterful films ever made, not only the source of the invention of the reverse dolly zoom:

but that haunting, romanticised location shooting in San Francisco:

and a mysterious focus on the characters, played by Kim Novak and James Stewart:

(a little more obviously with Stewart.)

As a work of fiction Vertigo is in many ways the ultimate suspense mystery, but the plot also draws similarities with Hitchcock's own obsessive, controlling nature, especially professionally, and perhaps on another level this film was his own personal confession. At first it was not a big success, but in years to come, now more than ever, more of us have come to understand and appreciate that Vertigo is a rich and strange experience to be savoured several times over for its deep mystery, unique strangeness and bewitching, obsessive perfection. It is a genuinely mesmeric piece of film, a heart-wrenching story of loneliness, psychological torture and doomed love.

Hitchcock filled his next film with so much excitement he felt it has to be considered a comedy. Told on a bigger scale than anything he'd done before, with several big-budget set-pieces, North By Northwest tells a "wrong man" story like no other; a chase where, after being kidnapped, every move made by businessman Roger Thornhill suggests that he is a secret agent. He lives out a nightmare, being framed for murder, chased in all sorts of situation, including on board a train and, of course, atop a landmark. It's certainly one of the least realistic plots Hitchcock worked with, but with its snappy screenplay, stunning action and grand location shooting, all assembled effortlessly with wit, humour, action, mystery and Hitchcock's most intense and shameless sexual tension, the film was a thrilling crowd-pleaser and a stellar success. It was intended to be "the Hitch movie to end all Hitch movies", but even after a decade with seven or eight undeniable masterpieces, he was able to enter the 1960s with something on another level.

Psycho isn't like his other pictures. It was a return to black-and-white, filmed cheaply, with the Alfred Hitchcock Presents crew rather than his usual production team, with a very different visual style from Hitchcock's other work, but most crucially, as well as suspense, Psycho uses shock. It begins with Marion Crane, an office worker in Phoenix who is trusted to make a cash deposit for a client but impulsively steals the money and runs away, trading her car and hiding out in the Bates Motel. Early in the film something unexpected happens, something unmissable: a scene shocking and frantic to the point of terror, but executed so tactfully and artistically that graphic violence isn't even necessary. It's an exercise in reading between the images, that inference which we call film language. That scene is the most famous of dozens of pieces of mastery in the film but, like all Hitchcock's masterpieces it achieves an incomparable visual perfection throughout, applying great care even to the least important scenes.

The famous scene led directly to a new policy that would change cinema experience for mass audiences forever. Until then it wasn't uncommon for cinema-goers to come in in the middle of the picture and watch the second half before the first, but Psycho came with a "No late admission" warning, in accordance with his film's early shock. We still wait in line today, because Hitchcock told us to.

Psycho is Hitchcock's scariest film, but amongst the slashing, screeching black-and-white excitement is a direct line to every viewer as we each face our nightmares: not only the fear of being the unsuspecting victim of a crime, but the consequences of spontaneously committing one. Even thought the film's loose ends are eventually tied up, the true horror is that it leaves an lasting unease with the viewer, and 50 years on it still continues to make people feel scared in their own bathrooms.

From 1925 to 1960 Hitchcock never went more than two years without releasing a film, but after Psycho and its massive success he took three years before releasing his next work, a very different horror, The Birds. Set in Santa Cruz, CA, with no music, a soundtrack of squawks is all we hear as the town is suddenly and inexplicably infested by a thousands-strong force of natural evil. Confusion and frantic urgency motivate the characters and power the plot, but most effective is Hitchcock's horror technique, where the build-up creates dread in his audience, the overwhelming shocks make us scream, and, rather than supplying complete relief, he left an ambiguous ending to keep a few questions on our lips, and a few lasting doubts in our minds.

His next film, Marnie, is a character film about a liar and compulsive thief whose words are every bit as dangerous as some of the weapons we see in other Hitchcock films, but whose disturbed nature is explained when she tries to rob her employer. Hitchcock followed it with two films based around political intelligence- Cold War espionage thriller Torn Curtain, and Topaz, about an investigation of the events leading up to the Bay of Pigs missile crisis.

One of his favourite films to make was a 1973 return to the London serial killer thriller that kick-started his career almost 50 years earlier. In Frenzy, circumstantial evidence in the famous "Necktie Murderer" case leads to the wrong man, forcing him to find the real criminal, whom we know right from the start. Sometimes Hitchcock didn't enjoy shooting films but there's a sense of fun written all over Frenzy in its excitement and cold, black humour, as well as his most indecent language and nudity.

Around this time Hitchcock, as an elderly man, decided to get his estate in order, and so he took five of his films, including some of his most important work, out of release as an insurance policy. Rope, Rear Window, The Trouble With Harry, the second The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo were made unavailable, just as the new wave of European film critics and directors (and Andrew Sarris in America) were beginning to uncover the theories of authorship, film language and visual storytelling that have enhanced our vision of cinema, all of which started with Hitchcock.

But he kept working, if only one last time. After a few years out of filmmaking he came back with Family Plot, a suspense comedy, following the antics of a phony psychic and her taxi driver boyfriend on the search for a rich friend's nephew, the heir to her family fortune. The film plays out of the hands of Hitchcock very naturally and amusingly until the final act, when the surprises come thick and fast, with a cheeky and unexpected but very appropriate conclusion to what would be his final film.

Alfred Hitchcock made over 50 feature films, quite an incredible amount of work, each with at least a few moments of original genius and visual innovation. He was, of course, a gentleman, a showman, a real entertainer and a legend throughout his own lifetime. He died, aged 80, in 1980, and a few years later the rights to his withdrawn films were resold and re-released to the public, after ten years out of circulation, and the next generation was able to fully appreciate the Hitchcock genius, a peerless master of storytelling, simplicity, structure and suspense.

Someone wrote: "You haven't truly seen Vertigo until you've seen it again," and in a way that extends to all of the Hitchcock films. Each of them is a matter of mood and emotion as much as plot, with great depth and more to them that can meet the eye in one viewing. His best works have a long-lasting impact even at face value, but the closer you look at his great films, the more you will take from them: not only in the stories and characters, but an ever-improving technical genius to be appreciated all over his work, as well as something deeper in the visuals, all down to his fluency in film language, which simply can't be appreciated in full in one viewing.

In the last 50 years, as we've uncovered and learned more about the fundamentals of film we've discovered that Hitchcock did more to shape filmmaking as an art than any other individual. From his earliest work, 90 years ago, he has been a puritan and an immortal worldwide movie icon, whose genius and influence is still embedded in most films being made today. There is no doubt that modern cinema would be utterly different without him, but in his own work all Hitchcock's visual and narrative expertise counted toward one goal: engaging the interest and the emotions of the viewer. He loved making great films, but he always put us first. A great filmmaker knows how to direct his cast and crew, but Alfred Hitchcock knew it was much more important to direct his audience.

That work for you?

[happysouth]

ludo have you just quoted it for me? if so that doesn't show up either. just an empty post from yourself. will have to find a laptop later. cheers anyway.

[19QOS19]

Don't thin Tim Burton is making this particular list

[Ira Gaines]

Good.

[Florentine_Pogen]

No.2 - Costa Gavras ?

No.1 - Andrei Tarkovsky ?

[Ira Gaines]

The #1 is clearly Tommy Wiseau.