“Hitchcock is the most overrated director
of all time,” the boss said one day.
At the bookstore I work at aside from
selling lottery tickets, cigarettes, pop, and chips, we also buy and sell used
DVDs. What prompted the boss’s comment was a box set he had just bought of Alfred
Hitchcock’s early works, the crappy public domain stuff that gets sold on
double-sided discs in dollar stores. I love Hitchcock but these bargain-bin
collections are pretty shitty. Sure there will be a few diamonds in the rough (The
39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes) but most of it isn’t worth watching.
But I couldn’t let a comment like that
stand. Up until that point I’d been having a bad day. I don’t remember why.
Maybe I had received another story rejection. Maybe two. Maybe I hadn’t eaten
lunch yet. Whatever the reason, I had resigned myself to the fact that it was
just going to be a bad day and there was nothing I could do about it. The boss’s
comment made me stop and re-examine that. I could take anything the world cared
to throw at me, but I wasn’t going to keep quiet when one of my favourite
directors was being disparaged.
