Leigh's principal subject is the thriller Peeping Tom, which drew excoriating reviews upon its release in 1960 before finding a second wave of support among a later generation of filmmakers and critics. But you could go back decades further, from Buster Keaton's silent masterpiece The General ("[B]y no means as good as his previous efforts," wrote the NYT) to Metropolis ("Six million marks! The waste of it!", said another NYT review), or jump decades ahead to The Shining or any of Stanley Kubrick's coolly received work, for that matter, and find scores of classics initially earmarked for the scrap pile. It's a fascinating phenomenon: Was it simply taste that torpedoed things like Vertigo among critics who were paid to "know better," or was there something about the contemporary zeitgeist that disinclined those same critics from believing the film could be relevant then or ever?
Moreover, advancing the story to today, what are some future classics you foresee that maybe didn't get the hottest critical reception? Will we eventually determine that Ang Lee's Hulk is actually the comic-book adaptation to define all comic-book adaptations? Is the maligned oeuvre of Kevin James really the most significant comic output of our age? Let's move beyond contrarianism -- there is no goddamn way Armond White is right about Jonah Hex, for example -- and into the space of what may have, in fact, been ahead of its time or simply misunderstood on a scale too large to overcome when it was new. I'll stand by Jennifer's Body, myself. What's your pick?
ยท Peeping Tom was not the first cinematic masterpiece to get a critical slating [The Guardian]