The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked
When putting together a list of the 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, it’s like plunging into a spectacular alternate universe of wit, verve, and style. The director of “Rear Window,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho” has a body of work so deep there are endless ways you can parse it: Maybe you could focus on his obsession with mothers, his approach to time, or the way food and painting pop up throughout his films.
But on a basic level, you also run into a challenge with Hitchcock you face with few other filmmakers, full-stop: The Master of Suspense is one of the rare directors to have a filmography with both the volume and the quality to credibly field a Top 25. With what other filmmakers can you do that? John Ford, certainly (Ford had the most films in our recent list of the 100 Greatest Westerns). Godard or Fassbinder perhaps? They have the volume — so many of the greatest filmmakers make their movies few and far between — but there would be a palpable dropoff in quality by the time you get to #25. Certainly, there would be for Akira Kurosawa, even if his own body of work includes many overlooked films worthy of rediscovery.
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For Hitchcock, hard choices have to be made about what even makes a Top 25 at all: Some might advocate for his final film “Family Plot,” or his only R-rated film “Frenzy,” or his Dali riff “Spellbound” — French critics in the ’50s had a soft spot for “Under Capricorn.” Those movies don’t make this list, even though they’re still worth watching. Our picks for the 25 Best Hitchcock Movies nonetheless contain a few surprises, and reveal a body of work that the world will keep coming back to as long as people care about movies.
With editorial contributions from Kate Erbland, Ryan Lattanzio, Tambay Obenson, Harrison Richlin, Sarah Shachat, and Christian Zilko.
25. “Topaz” (1969)
Hitchcock’s swan song of movies, from 1966’s “Torn Curtain” to his final film “Family Plot” just a few short years before he died at age 80, get an undeservedly bad rap. His sophisticated espionage thriller “Topaz,” about a French intelligence officer (Frederick Stafford) tied up in Cold War politics on the brink of the Cuban Missile Crisis, showcases some of his best filmmaking. But this was also, perhaps, a master asleep at the wheel, plotwise, in driving the story of a CIA agent (John Forsythe) on the trail of Soviet interference with U.S. nuclear arms.
Without a James Stewart or a Grace Kelly or a Cary Grant, Hitchcock is working with character actors less recognizable to audiences attuned to his films, which makes “Topaz” all the more mysterious. One of the most beautiful images in any Hitchcock effort is of Karin Dor, as an anti-Castro Cuban and the Stafford character’s mistress, killed for being an accomplice to his Russian spy ties. Dying, she collapses on a marble floor as her purple dress pools around her, and it was a dress Hitchcock directed as closely as any actor: From outside the frame, he had crewmembers, using wires, pull each end of the dress apart like petals on a flower. —RL
24. “I Confess” (1953)
There’s Hitchcock movies where you get the vibe that he must have lost a bet. Single location shooting? Simulate continuous time? Kill the protagonist halfway through the film? You can just picture him rubbing his hands together to figure out how to pull off a frankly ridiculous challenge; and the films that came out of them are some of his most brilliant, and most fun. However “I Confess” is not one of those movies. The challenge that Hitch grapples with here is Catholicism — there’s ultimately no overcoming it, although there’s some truly gorgeous symbolic imagery to be had out of it. Much has been written of how Hitchcock clashed with the method(s) of his lead, Montgomery Clift, playing a priest whose faith is put to the test when he’s bound up in a murder plot as well as his past with Anne Baxter. But the performance from Clift, in spite of his demons and perhaps in spite of Hitchcock, too, has almost this gravitational pull — full of Catholic guilt, yes, but also full of human striving. Combined with some pretty extraordinary location shooting in Quebec and a more deliberate editing rhythm, “I Confess” feels like a very different kind of Hitchcock film even as it deals with the themes that fascinated the director across his work. This one’s a little tortured, sure. But it also finds tiny moments of grace. —SS
23. “Saboteur” (1942)
While at this point in his career, Hitchcock was firmly established in Hollywood following a seven-year contract to David O. Selznick signed in 1939, his concern for his home country of Great Britain and the onslaught they were facing at the hands of Germany was certainly at the front of his mind. Similar to how “Foreign Correspondent” uses an everyman-in-extraordinary-circumstances plot to draw American support for the war, “Saboteur” serves as a warning to those same Americans that pushing out evil forces from our society requires recognizing they lurk around every corner. When a fire destroys a factory where airplanes are being built for the war effort, the finger is quickly pointed at a worker who managed to escape the fire’s destruction. Embarking on a cross-country odyssey to clear his name, the everyman factory worker discovers a secret cabal of saboteurs and wealthy Nazi sympathizers. Selznick ultimately wasn’t a huge fan of the script and forced Hitchcock to sell to Universal, benefiting the producer’s profit margins, but tarnishing his relationship with the director whose best work was still yet to come. —HR
22. “The Wrong Man” (1957)
Though Hitch had been dabbling in color recently with films like “The Trouble with Harry” and “To Catch a Thief,” the multi-faceted director switches back to black-and-white to spin a ripped-from-the-headlines yarn of law and disorder. Based on a true story, “The Wrong Man” stars Henry Fonda as a musician accused of robbery and wrung through the legal system like a rag doll being tossed around between children. All proof of his supposed crime is based on hearsay and yet that’s enough for police and lawyers to pillory him, destroying his feeling of safety and the health of his wife. The film marks an early collaboration with later longtime Hitchcock composer Bernard Hermann and its raw capturing of the New York City landscape would also later inspire Martin Scorsese on “Taxi Driver.” —HR
21. “Blackmail” (1929)
Hitchcock’s first sound feature, as well as what many consider to be the first British film to utilize sound, “Blackmail” is a constantly spinning crime thriller that tracks the actions of an unwitting femme fatale. After murdering an artist in the midst of an attempted rape, the young woman and her Scotland Yard detective boyfriend are blackmailed by a seedy character with a criminal background, but who also carries physical evidence of the woman’s guilt. Rather than admit the killing was an act of self-defense, the woman leads the men into a violent standoff at the British Museum that mirrors his later use of The Statue of Liberty in “Saboteur” and Mount Rushmore in “North by Northwest.” Hitchcock’s developing form is on full display throughout and though he was working with a new technology, his hold on visual language allows the sound elements to act in tandem with the narrative rather than serving as a superfluous detail. —HR
20. “Lifeboat” (1944)
Hitchcock loves a film set in tight quarters. With his later film “Rope,” he keeps the action within one apartment and within the boundaries of his camera frame. In “Dial ‘M’ for Murder” and “Rear Window,” both made the same year, similar confines are put upon the characters, heightening the tension and making for two of his most beloved features. However, his true test of this form was with the wartime survival film “Lifeboat,” which sees a cross-section of British and American citizens forced to share a small vessel with a German survivor of a U-boat sinking. As time goes on and more and more of the survivors start to feel trapped, the question of whether civility or chaos will win out that mirrored the larger conflict at play begins to present itself. While many found the Nazi character too sympathetic upon its initial release, modern critics have come to understand that war ultimately makes enemies and heroes of us all depending on your perspective. —HR
19. “The Lodger” (1927)
Still in his silent era, “The Lodger” marks Hitchcock’s first foray into thrillers and remains a defining antecedent of the genre. Inspired by the work of Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, Hitch harnesses the stylistic traits of German expressionism to craft a story of serial murder and mob mentality that makes viewers question their own predilections, as well as their sense of judgment. Following a string of Jack the Ripper-like killings, a mysterious lodger moves into a boarding house where a young blond woman — exactly the type the still-at-large murderer seems to be hunting — begins showing him affection in ways others seem not to. In fact, the blonde’s beau, a policeman, soon becomes convinced the lodger is the killer he’s after, but not all is as it seems. “The Lodger” carries many elements that would become staples of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, including mistaken identity, blonde obsession, and even the director’s first on-screen cameo around the 5-minute mark of the film. —HR
18. “The 39 Steps” (1935)
If you are a theater geek of a certain age, it’s likely that your first exposure to one of Hitchcock’s earliest classics is the 2005 stage play version, a silly parody filled with shoutouts and references to many of Hitchcock’s more famous films. It sounds irreverent, but it perfectly exemplifies what makes the early 1935 career gem from the Master of Suspense so good. Zooming by at a breakneck 86 minutes, “The 39 Steps” is perhaps Hitchcock’s zippiest film, telling a fugitive thriller with a light touch that emphasizes the fun over the paranoia. Robert Donat is Richard Hannay, a former army man who gets framed for a murder he didn’t commit and embroiled in a conspiracy involving a cabal of spies. Fleeing London from authorities, he eventually recruits Madeleine Carroll’s skeptical Pamela to help him on his adventure. It’s a simple premise that’s rendered brilliant by Hitchcock’s breakneck pacing, zooming from set piece to set piece, and by Donat and Carroll’s screwball-style chemistry. The original John Buchan novel has received several adaptations over the years, but none can hold a candle to the original’s exhilarating appeal. —WC
17. “Foreign Correspondent” (1940)
If Joel McCrea is a little more earnest than most Hitchcock leads, well, “Foreign Correspondent” is too. The spy story of an American reporter based in Britain who stumbles upon a conspiracy that’s about to lead to World War II is a definite B-side from the Master of Suspense; there’s nothing of the director’s play with film form or his troubling of the audience’s position as viewer which make other films both higher and lower on our list crackle with diabolical glee. But this is a damn good thriller, gobsmackingly germane to a world already at war in 1940, and with a couple key setpieces that are as suspenseful as anything Hitchcock’s ever done. The confrontation at the windmill, in particular, is fantastic. It shrinks down McCrea as he eavesdrops on saboteurs, making him look like he’s creeping around a cloud giant’s castle and not a remote farm in Holland. The timing and depth of the staging are unreal: one precariously low angle shows how vulnerable our hero’s perch is while also illustrating the power dynamics of the baddies, with the bonus of beautiful, slanted shadows. It’s the kind of thing that proves how much fun Hitchcock can have with a spy vs. spy sequence. To its credit, though, fun isn’t really the film’s priority. There’s a sentiment you don’t see in much of Hitchcock on display in “Foreign Correspondent,” and that makes it an interesting outlier, too. —SS
16. “The Trouble with Harry” (1955)
Comedy and suspense are the two modes in filmmaking that require the most exacting precision: A good joke can fall apart if you change even one word let alone fumble the timing, while keeping your audience in nervous anticipation is the cinematic equivalent of a high-wire act. “The Trouble with Harry” is Hitchcock’s most successful outright comedy, and it combines laughs with genuine suspense in a cocktail that only he could shake.
A death is often central in any foundation myth: Where there was Romulus killing Remus in the legend of Rome’s origin, Harry Worp is the sacrificial soul required to bring a true community together in the bucolic rural “Vermont” setting where “The Trouble with Harry” takes place. Before Capt. Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick), Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) and her son Arnie (Jerry Mathers), and artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) each stumble over Harry’s body in a clearing filled with autumn leaves, you get the sense they’ve barely ever interacted before. That all changes when they recognize the need to help each other bury (and then unbury) Harry multiple times: They can be a proper town when they start all having each other’s backs — the community that illegally disposes of a body together, stays together. Which is to say that, like so many occasions in the Hitchcock canon, this is a case where you hope the characters in question “get away with it.” Bernard Herrmann’s cheeky first score for Hitchcock and Robert Burks’ painterly photography of Vermont in Autumn (this is a contender for the most beautiful Hitchcock movie) contribute to the creation of a cinematic tableau mort unthinkable from any other filmmaker. —CB
15. “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943)
Hitchcock’s self-professed favorite film is a movie with themes we consider more aligned with David Lynch than the Master of Suspense himself: This is a film about the rot just underneath white-picket-fence Americana, the corruption underneath a peaceful California town and the ways in which the macabre infects everyday life. Teresa Wright’s Charlie is a recent graduate in Santa Rosa with no clear sense of her future; the first time we see her, she’s lying on her bed, looking up and thinking. Just like her Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton) was doing in the previous shot, if all the way on the other side of the country.
This is the creepiest uncle-niece relationship this side of George R.R. Martin: Young Charlie has an almost worshipful reverence for her uncle (as does her mother, Patricia Collinge) until discovering he’s a serial killer, wanted across the country for murdering elderly widows and taking their money. But as she, Jeffrey Beaumont-like, slowly discovers the full extent of his criminality, the love shown for Uncle Charlie by the rest of the family — and soon the entire town, it seems — never diminishes. The critic Robin Wood likened Uncle Charlie’s arrival in Santa Rosa to that of Shane in the classic Western, as someone who revivified a slumbering community and gave it new energy. Imagine the darkest possible version of the wandering stranger who makes a difference, and that’s Uncle Charlie. By the end, the way in which everyone turns out to honor him is almost a commentary on a fascist cult of personality and how easily so many of us can be swayed by the absolute worst among us. —CB
14. “Dial ‘M’ for Murder” (1954)
“Dial ‘M’ for Murder” was Hitchcock’s sole experimentation with 3D filmmaking (a phenomenon that he later dismissed as a gimmick, quipping that “It’s a nine-day wonder, and I came in on the ninth day”). And while the film is rarely viewed in its original intended format anymore, its status as a masterful 2D suspense saga remains unchanged. Ray Milland shines as a retired tennis star (a frequent profession for Hitchcock protagonists) whose ill-conceived plan to off his adulterous wife (Hitchcock favorite Grace Kelly) results in a tangled web of unintentional murder that pushes everyone to their breaking points. The end result is vintage Hitchcock — and even if it lacks some of the differentiating factors that separate his top-tier works from the crowd, watching the undisputed master of his genre play some of his greatest hits never ceases to be a cinematic treat. —CZ
13. “The Lady Vanishes” (1938)
In “The Lady Vanishes,” Hitchcock masterfully blends suspense with humor to craft a thriller set against a deceptively tranquil train ride through the fictional country of Bandrika. Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), on her way back to England to marry, finds herself in the unexpected company of a motley crew of stranded passengers. Among them is Miss Froy (May Whitty), a governess whose sudden disappearance from the train thrusts Iris into a web of espionage. The plot thickens with the introduction of various passengers, each adding intrigue. With the help of Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave), a fellow traveler, Iris steers through layers of deceit involving a brain surgeon who dismisses her concerns as hallucinations, a disguised nun, and several secretive passengers. The stakes escalate when it is revealed that Miss Froy is not just a governess but a spy carrying crucial information. The film’s blend of suspense, humor, adventure, romance, and innovative use of narrative and single-location setting creates a taut atmosphere that builds tension and engages throughout. Notably, the film incorporates elements that would become hallmarks of Hitchcock’s style and thematic preoccupations, including identity, deception, isolation, paranoia, conspiracy, and the “MacGuffin” that drives the story forward and draws the characters into a deeper mystery. Collectively, they link Hitchcock’s early British filmmaking period and his subsequent Hollywood career, which “The Lady Vanishes” serves as a bridge between. —TO
12. “The Birds” (1963)
Hitchcock is, was, and always will be the “master of suspense,” but with 1963’s enduring classic “The Birds,” he took that concept to ambitious new ends. What happens when suspense doesn’t dissipate? When tension doesn’t ebb? When a wonderfully wild premise – birds gone wild! – doesn’t offer any answers for all the carnage? Movie lovers may still marvel at the inventive effects that brought the titular birds to life (and, of course, the many actual avian stars who helped bolster its realism) or the starry cast (Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, Jessica Tandy, oh my), but the real thrill of “The Birds” is what that all leads to. Which is… no answers whatsoever. No explanations. No neat endings. Why did the birds go crazy? Well, why not? –KE
11. “Rebecca” (1940)
To really appreciate how great an adaptation Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” is, do yourself a favor/disservice and suffer through Ben Wheatley’s execrable 2020 version, which somehow saps all of the darkness out of Daphne du Maurier’s iconic gothic novel. That failure only puts into perspective how well Hitchcock was able to preserve the twisted heart of the central romance, his first American production never coming across as a Hollywoodified take on du Maurier’s tale of a second wife haunted by the specter of her husband’s original love. Laurence Olivier and Jean Fontaine are perfectly detestable as the brooding Maxim de Winter and his spineless new love, a pair so toxic and unhealthy that it’s both painful and enrapturing to watch them against the gorgeously atmospheric world that cinematographer George Barnes creates. Yet the film is dominated by the love story between the dead Rebecca and the obsessive Mrs. Danvers, played by a terrific Judith Anderson as a menacing vampire who sucks the life out of her prey. “Rebecca” was the only film in Hitchcock’s legendary career to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and it was an award well deserved; this is psychological gothic storytelling at its most sublime. —WC
10. “Suspicion” (1941)
“Rear Window” is the most recognizable example in cinema history of using a camera to simulate a subjective point of view: We see Jimmy Stewart, and then Hitchcock cuts to what he sees. But subjectivity had been a theme in Hitchcock for quite some time before, most powerfully in “Suspicion,” where it’s the outright theme of the movie. In “Rear Window,” everything Jimmy Stewart suspects, everything he pieces together somewhat feverishly, turns out to be right. Let’s be real, in real life that’s highly unlikely… and as much of a masterpiece as “Rear Window” is, there’s something a little flattering and unchallenging about that.
By contrast, “Suspicion” revels in the unreliability of subjectivity. A huge portion of the movie consists simply of close-ups of Joan Fontaine’s face, with cuts to what she sees: Her subconscious drives her to create the word “Murder” when playing Scrabble with her husband, Cary Grant. She’s starting to think he’s capable of anything and imagines him possibly pushing his best friend, Beaky (Nigel Bruce), off a cliff. And ultimately, she thinks that he’s going to murder her. Everything is a little distorted in “Suspicion” to reflect an external projection of Fontaine’s inner turmoil: Towering shadows cast by the windowpanes cover the rooms of her modernist house, a glass of milk that may contain poison seems to glow — Hitchcock famously did put a lightbulb in it so that it really would glow. The ending has often been maligned. But if it’s not especially well-executed, it’s a tantalizing wellspring of ideas that reframes the entire movie that came before it and makes us realize the difficulty all of us face in piecing together our reality. “Suspicion” is a film about where internal life and external life meet and that, much of the time, truth is so much less clear-cut than we’d like it to be. —CB
9. “To Catch a Thief” (1955)
Alfred Hitchcock’s moniker as Hollywood’s “Master of Suspense” was a well-deserved acknowledgment of his unique talents, but it also made it easy to limit one’s perception of his films to shadowy chase scenes and tense backroom deals. The French Rivera-set “To Catch a Thief” is a firm repudiation of that line of thinking, as Hitchcock paints a portrait of European glamor filled with shimmering oceans, colorful parties, and perhaps the two most beautiful people of his generation, Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. Grant is at his suavest as a retired cat burglar who decides to put his old skills to good use catching a new thief praying on the region’s wealthy tourists as a means of proving his own innocence. Kelly and Grant’s chemistry is predictably electric, resulting in a thrillingly seductive portrait of high-class crime that stands out as one of Hitchcock’s true masterpieces. —CZ
8. “Marnie” (1964)
Critical appreciation in this century has helped lift 1964’s “Marnie” out from the then-perceived ruination of Hitchcock’s career. Despite Tippi Hedren’s unhappiness over the shooting of “The Birds” the year before, Hitchcock still had his discovery under contract and, in essence, under his glass jar of psychosexually tortured blondes. And “Marnie” marked the last true “Hitchcock Blonde,” a movie maligned at its time for its portrait of an emotionally broken con artist (Hedren) blackmailed into marrying Sean Connery. Marnie’s issues, especially around thunderstorms and the color red, come to a lurid head in one of Hitchcock’s most stylish films, as her childhood trauma informs her present-day fears around sex. Hedren remains proud of the movie even as it pushed her to a limit even beyond the birds that pecked her to a pulp in the eerie Bodega Bay “The Birds,” and audiences and critics in 1964 were unsure how to handle such a damaged protagonist. As toxic as the Hedren/Hitchcock dynamic was by the time cameras rolled on “Marnie,” it’s proof of what a wonderfully twisted partnership they had — and how slinky and slippery Hitchcock could be with both his actors and his audience. —RL
7. “North by Northwest” (1959)
Iconic for all the right reasons – smart writing, wicked humor, impeccable craft, and that cast – “North by Northwest” was initially hatched by screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” Done and dusted! A heady (and extremely entertaining) blend of mistaken identity, high-stakes romance, and government conspiracy thriller, the film stars a never-better Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive who is very much not the smooth-talking government agent he, by way of some thrilling miscommunications, is mistaken for. Embroiled in an outrageous plot that just might sink the country (and will definitely sink Thornhill), this everyday guy is forced into extraordinary situations. The thrill? He – with some help from the divine Eva Marie Saint – finds a way to navigate out of them with serious aplomb. No one ever made running from low-flying planes look quite so suave and oddly relatable, all the charm of the film wrapped up in one indelible image. —KE
6. “Rope” (1948)
Alfred Hitchcock’s first stab at Technicolor, “Rope” stars John Dall and cinematic pretty boy Farley Granger as Brandon and Phillip, two bored and indifferent pals who strangle a former classmate in their apartment. And almost as a lark, an experiment to test their capacity for murder, as they then stage a party in their apartment for the victim’s friends and fiancée. Meanwhile, the corpse stiffens in a chest at the center of the room. Then enters Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), a philosophe and former mentor of Brandon and Phillip’s who, it turns out, inspired the idea of killing as an intellectual exercise to begin with.
Working with DPs Joseph A. Valentine and William V. Skall and editor William H. Ziegler, Hitchcock stitched together 10 takes to create an illusion of real time, pushing the art form to its brink at a time when cameras could only house up to 10 minutes of film. Famously in interviews with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock wrote off the film’s technique as a gimmick, but we should never take the words of Hitchcock at face value. “Rope” also came out in high time for the dominance of the Hays Code, and whether his intention or not or something we only read thoroughly in retrospect, Hitchcock managed to launder into his movie a creeping homosexual subtext (Brandon and Phillip are obviously lovers) that makes for his most dread-filled and illicit portrait of male anxiety outside of “Vertigo.” —RL
5. “Vertigo” (1958)
“Vertigo” is such a canonical classic, a movie so universally beloved that it can make it to No. 1 on the Sight & Sound poll, that it’s easy to forget how much of a messed up, ugly story lurks beyond its iconic surface. It begins, like most Hitchcock films do, simply enough. James Stewart’s Scottie is a police officer retired due to an event that left him with crippling acrophobia, expressed by Hitchcock through a stunning visual effect so revolutionary it’s still sometimes called the Vertigo Effect, that takes on a private eye job tailing an old college friend’s wife (Kim Novak, in maybe the most iconic Hitchcock blonde performance). The twists and turns that come as Scottie grows obsessed and in love with his enigmatic mark are probably common knowledge now, but “Vertigo” is a film that benefits from the surprise and discovery of a first watch, as viewers get wrapped in the all-consuming desires that propel Scottie to questionable and detestable behaviors. In many ways, it’s Hitchcock at his most immediate and honest, a chronicle of male desire and objectification of women that feels startling personal and uncomfortably reflective of the complicated man behind the camera. You might call it his most personal film, if that cliché didn’t do justice to the weird, singular achievement that is “Vertigo.” —WC
4. “Psycho” (1960)
Hitchcock’s black-and-white shocker “Psycho” challenged and changed us in 1960 by introducing a whole new language for how thrillers (or any movie for that matter) can be structured onscreen. We get very comfortable with the familiar notion that Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), introduced early on as a Phoenix real estate secretary who steals a loot of cash from her boss and is now on the lam, is our heroine. She’s got a hunky boyfriend (John Gavin, shown in the afterglow of a tawdry-for-its-time hotel tryst after the Bernard Herrmann-scored opening titles) waiting for her in California, and she’s on her way there to start life anew and hopefully fix his debts. Tired from the long drive and a traffic cop run-in, she stops at the Bates Motel just a few miles out from her destination, and before the first act is through, she’s brutally murdered by the mother-loving hotelier (Anthony Perkins) in a shower sequence that needs no further comment.
Hitch shot “Psycho” much like his television series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” on a low budget and working with the same key crew, stripped of the high style and below-the-surface implication of his previous movies. Call it the original shoestring-budget slasher, but “Psycho” did not just reinvent its own genre — it totally toppled the grammar of moviemaking. And so it did with movie marketing, Hitchcock himself commanding theaters to reject late moviegoers so as not to ruin its nasty surprises. What we’re left with after the death of Marion Crane is no clear center, no character to anchor the audience, who instead are dropped unmoored into the world of Norman Bates. Maybe Hitch undid himself with an ending that offers just a bit too much exposition about Norman’s psyche, though there is still much Freudian madness to pore over. And without any true sympathetic lead, we learned never to feel safe in a horror movie since. —RL
3. “Strangers on a Train” (1951)
Few films in Hitchcock’s filmography are more formally impressive than “Strangers on a Train” — which turns the simplest of premises into an unimpeachable filmmaking masterclass. The two eponymous strangers, played by Farley Granger and Robert Walker, appear to be polar opposites. One is an acclaimed tennis star who lives his life by the book, the other is a walking embodiment of chaos who lures a stranger into a scheme to murder each other’s targets to ensure they both remain blameless. While the plot that unfolds is brilliant in its own right (thanks to screenwriters Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde, who adapted Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 novel of the same name), Hitchcock elevates the stellar material into a cinematic meditation on good vs. evil and chaos vs. sanity, using eerily similar actors and a gradually blurring line between light and darkness to reveal that the concepts aren’t nearly as polarized as we’d like to think they are. Hitchcock was rarely credited as a screenwriter on his most notable works, but “Strangers on a Train” may well be the best example of his authorship and an agonizingly nuanced exploration of the themes that haunted him throughout his entire career. —CZ
2. “Rear Window” (1954)
It’s only a few feet of an apartment courtyard, but the world of “Rear Window” is one of the most transporting and absorbing in all of cinema. While James Stewart’s Jeff and his quest to crack the case of the possible murder he witnessed from his window forms the main push of the thriller, there’s so much going on in the lives of the cast of characters outside his apartment that proves just as captivating, from Miss Lonelyheart’s (Judith Evelyn) quest for love to the squabbles of lovesick newlyweds. They feel like characters we know and love, even if we barely even hear them speaking from the point of view of Jeff, constrained to his home by a broken leg. “Rear Window” and its crackling detective story — which also features career-best work from Grace Kelly as Jeff’s fashionable but resourceful Girl Friday/girlfriend — has often been read as a metaphor for moviemaking and movie watching, for the voyeurism of creating and viewing stories about other people. It’s most interesting, though, when it’s a story about community — how those who live with each other don’t always see each other, and how even a tragic murder can slide under the radar when people are wrapped up in their own lives. —WC
1. “Notorious” (1946)
Like any spy worth their salt, there’s a lot more going on in 1946’s “Notorious” than meets the eye. It’s famed for the way in which Hitchcock got around the Hayes’ Code’s limitation of 3 seconds of onscreen kissing by using blocking and dialogue to keep Ingrid Bergman’s, and Cary Grant’s make-out session going for over two and a half hot, hot minutes. There is also the final shot of the film, one of the most beautifully constructed black and white images ever committed to celluloid and equally one of the most devastating (at least for Claude Rains). But these peaks barely scratch the surface of what makes “Notorious” such a great movie, and maybe the quintessential Hitchcock film. Both the director’s visual genius and his storytelling obsessions come together in their sharpest, most elegant form in this post-war spy thriller. If the compositions in each scene feel like the click of a trap snapping tighter around a vulnerable blonde who a man in charge is deliberately sending into danger? Well, that’s Hitchcock for you.
The story is one of love and duty and the sexy misunderstandings that arise from both. Bergman plays Alicia, the American daughter of a convicted Nazi spy who masks her shame (and patriotic heart) with promiscuity; Grant plays Devlin, the upright secret agent who recruits Alicia to go down to Rio to infiltrate Nazis who’ve escaped justice in Europe. By the time they get to Brazil they’re in love with each other, but she needs to make former flame Sebastian (Rains) love her enough to spill his Nazi secrets. Screenwriter Ben Hecht constructed many stories that have the precision of a Swiss watch, but his and Hitchcock’s powers combined make this one look as impressive as the Astronomical Clock in Prague. We never lose track of who knows what and who’s looking where and how long before an opportunity will collapse inside crowd scenes. And yet Hitchcock’s camera can atomize our attention down to the most minute details. During a huge party sequence where Devlin and Alicia need to sneak away to the cellar to find the German spy ring’s secrets, Hitchcock does both these things in one, sweeping, virtuoso camera move — the showoff.
More than a story that tests Grant and Bergman’s love for each other — though both are at the height of their powers — “Notorious” is almost an exercise in getting us to fall in love with the power of the camera itself. Hitchcock gets us to give ourselves over to the way great visual storytelling can express a much deeper and more sinister idea just by showing you a cup of coffee. It’s an example of the director in complete control — conveying as much information visually as possible without deflating the suspense, cutting to maximize a specific emotional response without ever loosening the tension, and painting with light and shadow in such a way that we want to stay in the danger. “Notorious” is beautiful, of course. But it also gets us to be what Alfred Hitchcock always wants us to be: complicit. —SS
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