Alfred Hitchcock's Greatest Films of All-Time

Alfred Hitchcock has been considered the acknowledged auteur master of the thriller or suspense genre, manipulating his audience's fears and desires, and taking viewers into a state of association with the representation of reality facing the character. No list of suspense or thriller films can be complete without mention of the English film-maker/director. Although nominated five times as Best Director (from 1940-1960), Hitchcock never won an Academy Award. He helped to shape the modern-day thriller genre, beginning with his early silent film The Lodger (1927), a suspenseful Jack-the-Ripper story, followed by his next thriller Blackmail (1929), his first sound film (but also released in a silent version).

Notable examples of Hitchcock's early British suspense-thriller films included The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), his first great spy-chase/romantic thriller The 39 Steps (1935) with Robert Donat handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll, and the best film of his British period - the mystery The Lady Vanishes (1938).

Extending his work into the 1940s in a number of brilliant black-and-white films, Hitchcock continued to perfect his recognizable brand of suspense-thriller, producing Foreign Correspondent (1940), the haunting Best Picture-winning Rebecca (1940) about the strange romance between a young woman (Joan Fontaine) and an emotionally-distant rich widower (Laurence Olivier) - overshadowed by a vindictive housekeeper (Judith Anderson), Suspicion (1941) about a woman in peril from her own husband (cast against type Cary Grant), Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - Hitchcock's own personal favorite and based upon the actual case of a 1920s serial killer known as 'The Merry Widow Murderer', Spellbound (1945), and Notorious (1946).

In the 1950s, Hitchcock added technicolor to his still-brilliant dark and moody films, now with exotic locales and glamorous stars. He reached the zenith of his career with a succession of classic films: the suspenseful black and white Strangers on a Train (1951) about two train passengers: tennis pro Guy (Farley Granger) and psychopath Bruno (Robert Walker), who staged a battle of wits over a proposed exchange of murders, Dial M For Murder (1954), with Ray Milland as a villainous husband who attempted to murder his wealthy wife (Grace Kelly) - also shot in 3-D, Rear Window (1954) - a masterful study of voyeurism confined to a Greenwich Village apartment complex and courtyard, with Grace Kelly as a seductive girlfriend to beau James Stewart, To Catch a Thief (1955), a lightweight thriller about cat burglars set in S. France, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) - a remake of Hitchcock's own 1934 spy thriller, Vertigo (1958), one of Hitchcock's greatest films, with James Stewart as a retired police detective who became obsessed with the disturbed enigmatic 'wife' (Kim Novak) of an old friend, and the entertaining, romantic comedy/spy thriller North By Northwest (1959) about an advertising executive (Cary Grant) mistakenly acquiring the identity of a fictional governmental agent, and his encounter with icy blonde (Eva Marie Saint).

After Hitchcock's classic films of the 1950s, his films were wildly uneven, although he produced the shocking and engrossing thriller Psycho (1960) about a loner mother-fixated motel owner and taxidermist - with the classic set piece (the 'shower scene'), and the suspenseful and strangely terrifying The Birds (1963) about a invasion of birds in a N. California coastal town and its effect upon archetypal cool blonde Tippi Hedren. His film Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock's first British film in almost two decades, was given an R rating for its vicious and explicit strangulation scene.

Hitchcock's films often placed an innocent victim (an average, responsible person) into a strange, life-threatening or terrorizing situation, in a case of mistaken identity, misidentification or wrongful accusation (i.e., in The 39 Steps (1935), The Wrong Man (1956), and in North by Northwest (1959)). He also utilized various cinematic techniques (i.e., the first British 'talking picture' - Blackmail (1929), the extreme zoom shot of the key in Notorious (1946), the glowing glass of milk in Suspicion (1941), the prolonged cross-cutting between a tennis match and sewer-grating in Strangers on a Train (1951), the virtuoso set-piece of the crop duster in North by Northwest (1959), the montage in the shower sequence accentuated with composer Bernard Herrmann's screeching violin score in Psycho (1960), the dolly-zoom shots in Vertigo (1958), or the heightening of anticipation with the long pull-back shot from inside a building to the outside and across the street in Frenzy (1972)).

He would often interweave a taboo or sexually-related theme into his films, such as the repressed memories of Marnie (Tippi Hedren) in Marnie (1964), the latent homosexuality in Strangers on a Train (1951), voyeurism in Rear Window (1954), obsession in Vertigo (1958), or the twisted Oedipus complex in Psycho (1960).

Hitchcock's Most Popular Motifs:

All of Hitchcock's films contained a number of motifs or themes - the most popular were the following:

• a middle-class Everyman protagonist who was innocent and wrongly suspected of a crime
• a train journey
• a staircase or stairs
• a charming, cultured and respectable villain character
• an icy blonde heroine
• a shocking murder
• the color red
• a frantic chase (or chases)
• scenes in a hotel and/or in a cinema, theatre, concert or music hall (or similar public venue)
• one deeply-religious figure (priest, nun, or ordinary individual)
• some kind of perversity, obsession or fetish (i.e., voyeurism)
• an ending in which the villain was apprehended or died
• a happy ending for a hero and heroine

Visually-expressive motifs were also Hitchcock's specialty (i.e., the surrealistic dream sequences in Spellbound (1945), the key in Notorious (1946), the staircase or the use of profiles and silhouettes in Vertigo (1958), the strangulation-murder reflected in the victim's fallen glasses in Strangers on a Train (1951), the concept of "pairs" and guilt transference in Shadow of a Doubt (1943)), or the making of technically-challenging films (such as Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948)).

[Note: Rope was a film of many 'firsts': it was Hitchcock's first color film and his first film as an independent producer; it was his first film released by Warner Bros.; it was his first and only attempt to make a film appear as a single shot, with a series of ten-minute takes cleverly spliced together; and it was his first film with James Stewart. The basis of the film was the famed Leopold-Loeb case. See detailed analysis of Rope's 'Unique Editing Technique' here.]

In many of his films, there was the inevitable life and death chase concluding with a showdown at a familiar landmark (for example, London's Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the British Museum in Blackmail (1929), the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942), the UN and Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest (1959), the assassination attempt atop Westminster Cathedral's Tower in Foreign Correspondent (1940), and the Golden Gate Bridge in Vertigo (1958)). He also reveled in tight and confined spaces, to heighten emotion (i.e., Lifeboat (1944), Rope (1948), or Rear Window (1954), etc.) or restrictive train journeys (i.e., The Lady Vanishes (1938), and North by Northwest (1959), etc).

Hitchcock's MacGuffins (or McGuffins)
See separate page for listing of all of Hitchcock's MacGuffins.

The famed director often capitalized on a 'red herring' or gimmicky plot element to catch the viewer's attention - dubbed a McGuffin (or MacGuffin), that would propel the plot along its course. Usually, the McGuffin initially appeared to be of utmost importance, but functioned to intentionally misdirect the audience - it then quickly faded into the background and ended up being trivial, irrevelant, or incidental to the film's story. The MacGuffin normally referred to the mystery to be solved (or the fugitive's innocence to be proven), or an object, or some other kind of motivator.

Hitchcock's Cameo Film Appearances
See separate page for listing of all of Hitchcock's Cameos.

Hitchcock would make a signature cameo appearance in his feature films, beginning with his third film The Lodger (1927), although his record was spotty at first. After 1940, he appeared in every one on his films, except for The Wrong Man (1956).