Hitchcock

Screenwriters, I don't know, they seem to be a lower literary life form. How do they write such dreck? I have read a lot of literature and, it is true, Dickens, spontaneous combustion, not good. But Dickens was, in Nabokov's terminology, an "enchanter" in his story-telling and an exquisite master craftsman in his writing. Now, Hitchcock's Vertigo was based on a literary work!  D'entre les morts (From Among the Dead). Per the Wikipedia, "the novel received generally positive reviews" upon its seeing the literary light of day in 1954, four years before the film was released, although this scribe is unfamiliar with the book's merits, such as they may be. Nor is he knowing of the author, Boileau-Narcejac, two authors in actuality, Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud, whose names were combined into the one, such joint literary entrepreneurship being a novelty to this writer although perhaps peculiar to the French arts. Be that as it may, D'entre les morts and its creators do not seem to have had their names etched in granite among the greats with Shakespeare or Baudelaire, or even Proust or Dickens and, polymath though he was, it is mysterious that Englishman Alfred Hitchcock reached for the French and such an obscure work of same that one generally negative review termed it an "unfortunate result", and another merely "a modestly competent psychological thriller", when he, Hitchcock, had such robust produce to pick in his native orchards. In the American patois, Vertigo did not float this writer's boat.