"Hitchcock is the most daring avant-garde filmmaker in America today."

"Besides making previous horror films look like variations of ‘Pollyanna,’ ‘Psycho’ is overlaid with a richly symbolic commentary on the modern world as a public swamp in which human feelings and passions are flushed down the drain."

Wrote Andrew Sarris in 1960, beginning what were to be his lessons in the "auteur theory." He died this morning, at the age of 83.