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, …showed first 75 words of 1352 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1352 total…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.