But the Hitchcocks were rare, and in the last analysis they were indulged not simply because their movies made money but because they were skilled at self-promotion and studio infighting.

It must be grimly amusing to American directors of Hitchcock's vintage that their films are studied devoutly by college film societies and serious film magazines. A generation ago it was an artistic triumph to sneak them intact past the front office. It has only been in the last decade or so, as Sarris notes in his introduction to Interviews with Film Directors (Bobbs-Merrill, $10), that the role of the director has come into prominence in the United States.

The Europeans, of course, have always had reverence for directors, especially ours. It was that brilliant and perverse French film journal, Cahiers du Cinema, which first developed the "auteur" theory of film criticism to embrace Hollywood pros as well as esoteric European artists. The true "film author," Cahiers argued, leaves a personal stamp on everything he does, even low-budget action pictures, and there is an indelible quality in a grade-B Western by Howard Hawks that cannot be found in any other film by anyone else.

In pushing the "auteur" theory, Cahiers had to indulge in some silliness like pretending that all Hollywood directors have had meaningful control over their films. But Cahiers put to pasture for once and all the belief that "entertainment" could not be "art." In the process, as Sarris observes, "it became possible to speak of Alfred Hitchcock and Michelangelo Antonioni in the same breath and with the same critical terminology."

That is precisely what happens in Francois Truffaut's Hitchcock (Simon & Schuster, $10). Truffaut began as a movie critic before striking out on his own as a director, and it was as a critic that he first interviewed Hitchcock in 1955. He and the other young Cahiers critics had become deeply interested in the kinds of movies they thought only Hollywood could do supremely well: suspense films, Westerns, detective stories, action adventures. Their own films, when they began to make them in the early 1960s, were homage of a sorts to the most interesting Hollywood work of the 1930s and 1940s. Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" (1960) was a tribute to Bogart, and Truffaut's own "Shoot the Piano Player" (1960) and "Farenheit 451" (1966) were influenced by Hitchcock's style.