Alfred Hitchcock is a person.
Alfred Hitchcock . Hitchcock became a highly visible public figure through interviews , movie trailers , cameo appearances in his own films , and the ten years in which he hosted the television programme Alfred Hitchcock Presents ( 1955 -- 1965 ) . In 1978 , film critic John Russell Taylor described Hitchcock as `` the most universally recognizable person in the world '' , and `` a straightforward middle-class Englishman who just happened to be an artistic genius '' . His flair was for narrative , cruelly withholding crucial information ( from his characters and from the audience ) and engaging the emotions of the audience like no one else . '' His 1929 film , Blackmail , is often cited as the first British sound feature film , while Rear Window ( 1954 ) , Vertigo ( 1958 ) , North by Northwest ( 1959 ) , and Psycho ( 1960 ) are regularly ranked among the greatest films of all time .