Alfred Hitchcock is a major figure of popular culture. He was one of the founding fathers of the cinematic art and, together with Eisenstein and Murnau, helped define its visual language. So fruitful was he that a single film could spawn an entire genre, as "Psycho" helped create the modern horror film and "North by Northwest" the style and tone of the James Bond films--not so much cloak and dagger as tuxedo and irony. Hitchcock is one of those titans who did not merely work within a medium but utterly transformed it. While the author disagrees with how the work is approached today, he makes a case for why Alfred Hitchcock and his films do deserve to be studied in college classrooms. (Contains 3 footnotes.)