Hitchcock was a wonderful director, but it's occurred to me that several of his movies are terribly overrated.

The Birds is awful. Psycho is okay; far from the classic it's supposed to be.

Tha being said, I really like a lot of his British-produced B&W stuff. The 39 Steps is a cool, strange little picture. Sabotage is wonderful (but, then, I'm a sucker for Joseph Conrad).

And a good number of his big-budget American films are great.

But my favorite remains Rope. But, then, I'm a sucker for Dostoyevsky.

Edit: I changed my statement ``Psycho is simply fine'' to what you see above. I intended to mean that it's nothing more than fine (where ``fine'' is descriptive of mediocrity), but colloquialism tended to lose that meaning.