Films

When I was a kid I went to the cinema a few evenings a week and again on Saturday morning when it was full of kids of all ages up to about 13; they showed a cartoon or two, a "main feature" - usually one of the B pictures shown in the week (which I had already seen!) - and a serial: Flash Gordon or Buck Jones or The Lone Ranger. We never knew who had directed these films. I doubt in those days if anyone knew. Directors' names were not known. Maybe you'd see the name on the screen at the start of the film but you took no notice of it. When you went to see a film you went because you liked the actor or because someone had told you it was good. The newspapers' reviews, if there were any, weren't read. I doubt if most people knew the name Alfred Hitchcock.
Then something happened. In France. The New Wave of critics and film makers came along and began talking and writing about directors as creative artists. Indeed it was in France that Hitchcock became revered first. Then gangster films were glorified - "Film Noire" became the descriptive term for them, surely coming from the New Wave gang.
I'm not sure the same sort of trend is relevant today because there are so many directors out there who are technically brilliant. I have seen four or five excellent films over the past decade or so which are brilliant in most respects for their scripts. Get a good script, maybe, and anyone with any feeling could direct it.
That's a bit of a simplicity maybe but directors these days don't seem to have a particular style about which you can say that his second or third films are examples of it. Good directors like Ridley Scott do such variable work. The director of "The Usual Suspects" has not made a better film yet (he had a superb script for that film).
But against this I have to say that Roman Polanski's latest film "The Ghost" shows he hasn't lost his touch.