Quote:
Originally Posted by Nemesis  Charles Laughton with Night of the Hunter, perhaps? He did not direct again and the reviews back then did not appear to be kind as they are now. |
Again, its commercial failure was far more significant than its critical failure.
In fact, getting back to
Psycho, it garnered some real stinkers when it opened, not least thanks to Hitchcock's edict that critics queue up to watch it with the great unwashed, a guaranteed way to get their backs up.
But thanks to one of the greatest marketing campaigns in film history (this is where it dramatically differed from
Peeping Tom, whose distributors seemed ashamed of it), it was 1960's second biggest hit (after
Spartacus), and made Hitchcock financially secure for life after years of complaining that people like Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart got paid more than him for what he thought was considerably less work. Because he'd financed it himself (largely because he couldn't get a major studio to bankroll it), he was entitled to a whopping percentage of the gross - so he was quite literally laughing all the way to the bank.