The French got Alfred Hitchcock well before the Americans did. In the 1950s, when the tubby director's Hollywood overlords still regarded him as a producer of light entertainment — the Robert Zemeckis of his day, perhaps — the writers at France's Cahiers du Cinema magazine recognized his deeper genius. A pugnacious young critic named Francois Truffaut ranked Hitchcock alongside Jean Renoir and Ingmar Bergman as prime examples of his "auteur theory," which viewed films not as group endeavors but as conduits for their directors' creative visions.