I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on the man and his work
I might be alone but my all time favourite Hitch film is Frenzy. Some of his others (The Birds for example) I have liked less the more I watch them but Frenzy I seem to like more. Sleazy, suspenseful and tightly constructed. Classic Hitchcock elements.
I can’t help but feel he would have made some cracking Gialli if he’d been Italian.
I also think his being touted as an auteur doesn’t help his legacy now. He was fundamentally a genre film maker not an artist and as such he was very good if a bit dated these days.
2 Likes
That’s like saying John Ford would have been great spaghetti western director.
Not really, imo. Ford’s movies were about the community, the save haven in the Wilderness, that are not the tropes spaghetti western directors were interested in. Hitchcock’s thrillers often have a real Giallo feel, most probably because many directors of gialli were trying to look Hitchockish
Maybe my parable was poor but that’s what I meant. There probably wouldn’t be a giallo genre at all without Hitchcock. Would there be a spaghetti western genre without Ford? quen sabe…
Yes, definitely.
Ford was important for the genre, but he was only one director of many. And the US Western went before 1960 already in many directions, and Ford’s style and themes were not represented in all of them. And the US westerns which probably influenced Leone the most are legion.
??
Ha ha, ok that’s then most likely a wrong translation into another language.
If a German says that it means that there are many of them, that there is a great number of something, more than you can count. I think you can find a similar sentence already in the bible (but not about Ford).
Hmm, but is that really uncommon in the English language? It sounds somehow familiar though.
It comes from the bible, possessed man says “My name is Legion, for we are many”.
Yes, that it is, I remember that now.
But here is Legion a name, while in the common use as a saying the substantive legion is transformed into an adjective. And as that a short form for “as many as a legion”.
English is not my native tongue, so I’m curious what native speakers have to say 
I know, but your English is far better than mine.
Legion here is exclusively of a Roman Legion, or army, but Roman. Yes means many, but we don’t use it in that way, to express many
Stanton’s use of “legion” there was fine, perfectly understandable to a native English speaker. It’s a fairly formal, antiquated phrase for sure, but not so uncommon that it wouldn’t be recognised. 
I haven’t seen Frenzy or Notorious for years, so need to revisit them. Les Diaboliques would have been his masterpiece, if he’d directed it. 
His English is often better than mine too and I am a native speaker.
But, as Asa, says, your use of the word legion in that context is perfectly fine.
No, the directing is not the problem of Les Diaboliques.
The film, as it is, and I do not know if the novel is better in that regard, uses exactly these cheap surprises which Hitch mostly had avoided. Note that Hitchcock was not a fan of Whodunits, even if some of his films used Whodunits, then when it was in favor of the story.
The surprise ending of Psycho is so much better than the foreseeable ending of Les Diaboliques.
Ha ha, I don’t buy that, but I know what you mean …
I’m not good at anticipating plot twists. Even though I’d seen it years before, it caught me off guard again when I recently viewed it. I guess once you’ve seen the end of Psycho, you never forget it. That said, I found other aspects of Clouzot’s film - performances and style - more subtle and affecting than Hitchcock’s.
Had a fun time rewatching O Brother, Where Art Thou? with my Dad last night. Wish the Cohen Bros. made more like it, though they have deservingly done well since.