The Great Directors Tournament—The Championship

The final pairing in the great directors tournament is set. The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, squares off against the greatest action director of all time, Akira Kurosawa.

Actually, the match-up has pretty much been set for one long anticlimactic week. Both Hitchcock and Kurosawa won blow-outs against their Final Four competition, silent film pioneer D.W. Griffith and comic genius Woody Allen, respectively. In retrospect, I should have allowed about ten minutes instead of ten days for those contests.

But no matter.

I assume Hitchcock and Kurosawa need no introduction. Indeed, if you don't know who Alfred Hitchcock is, well, you're still more than welcome to read this blog, but I'm not 100% sure why you would. In fact, if by some chance you've never seen a Hitchcock movie, go get Rear Window, North By Northwest, Psycho and Notorious and watch them, right now—we'll wait for you.

As for Akira Kurosawa, his movies are so good even the remakes of his movies are good. You like the classic western The Magnificent Seven starring Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen? That's a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Prefer Clint Eastwood in A Fistful Of Dollars? That's Yojimbo. And if you've ever plopped yourself down in front of a little ditty we like to call Star Wars—well, that's The Hidden Fortress.

And I haven't even mentioned Rashomon, Ikiru or Ran yet.

You have until Halloween night to finish voting. Go to it.