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 Family Plot, 1976
A few weeks before the summer 1972 release of his next-to-last film, Frenzy (the first film he had shot in England in two decades), Hitchcock received an honorary doctorate from Columbia University. By the time of Frenzy's release, a significant number of influential American critics had come to accept the "new" view of Hitchcock as a great artist. Reflected in their reviews were many of the values that the new generation of critics now looked for: hidden meanings, personal vision, universality, reflexivity, and thematic and stylistic consistency and coherence. While these values could be successfully applied to many of his earlier works, Frenzy was the first recent work, following Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) that critics held up as a shining example of Hitchcock as the "auteur."
On January 3, 1980, Hitchcock received one of the highest honors his native country had to bestow: he was formally invested as a Knight Commander of the British Empire.
When Hitchcock died at home in Los Angeles at the age of 80, on April 29, 1980, he had accomplished professionally what he had always been attempting to achieve--world-wide respect as both a premier popular entertainer and a true artist of the cinema.
Today, neither critics nor filmmakers can escape the Hitchcock influence. He is taught in every university filmmaking program, not only as a master of the thriller, but also as a genius of cinematic form. Hitchcock's reputation continues to flourish more than sixty-five years after the release of his first film partly because of the great range of his work, but also because many of his films have been able to sustain a diversity of interpretations.
The text in the Chronology section has been adapted from "Alfred Hitchcock" by Robert E.
Kapsis, from American National Biography, edited by John Garraty. © 1999
by the American Council of Learned Societies. Used by permission of Oxford University
Press, Inc.
Adapted by Robert E. Kapsis, Kathie Coblentz, and Amy Stoller.
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