Top Ten Alfred Hitchcock Films

Before college, my movie knowledge mainly consisted of features made after Star Wars and anything by Disney. I cured this ignorance during my freshman year at the University of Florida when I saw a series of films by the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. These classics were an eye-opening lesson to the fact that great live action movies were in fact made before my childhood. If you are interested in getting into classic cinema (and you should be!), Hitchcock’s films are a great place to start. Here’s my list of Hitchcock’s Top Ten movies and recommendations for what order to watch them:

Three Movies to Get Started

Rear Window

Jimmy Stewart is a professional photographer confined to his New York apartment due to a broken leg. He spends his days spying on his neighbors when not being visited by his insanely gorgeous girlfriend played by Grace Kelly. Stewart’s snooping leads him to believe that the man across the way murdered his wife. Kelly doesn’t buy this idea easily but sets aside her uptown girl ways to take action once she does. The movie is a lesson in how to get an audience to care about its characters. Hitchcock once said that a director should “always make the audience suffer as much as possible.” Rear Window becomes a definitive example of this philosophy when he puts the two leads in jeopardy during the last half of the film. By keeping the point of view entirely in Stewart’s apartment, everyone watching becomes a willing voyeur.

Rear Window is currently available to rent for just $3.99 on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and YouTube.

North by Northwest

Hitchcock’s films often revolve around an innocent man being falsely accused. He also loved to use big name movie stars to help the audience instantly identify with a character’s plight. Both of these conventions reach their height in this stylish thriller that has Cary Grant on the run after the bad guys mistake him for a government agent. The scene where a crop-duster chases him through a cornfield is among the most iconic in movie history. The finale on Mount Rushmore is just as memorable. Hitchcock’s use of a train tunnel to get around the film censors when Grant and co-star Eva Marie Saint have a rendezvous is one of his most ingenious set-ups. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman wanted to write “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” He succeeded.

North by Northwest is available to rent right now for a paltry $2.99 on Google Play and YouTube. iTunes costs an extra buck.

Psycho

Even those who have never seen a Hitchcock film probably know something about Norman Bates, his hotel, and the fact that taking a shower there is a risky proposition. After nearly a decade making big and glossy pictures, Hitchcock wanted to do something different. Adapting a novel inspired by serial killer Ed Gein fit the bill. The studio did not share his enthusiasm for this gritty horror story, so Hitchcock improvised. He financed the movie himself, convinced Janet Leigh to work for a quarter of her regular salary, and mostly used the crew from his TV show. Proving again that studios don’t always know best, Psycho was one of Hitchcock’s biggest hits and invented the slasher film genre. If you haven’t seen it, you may think you know the story, but some twists and frights will still surprise you.

Psycho is available to rent rat the moment for only $3.99 on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and YouTube.

Three Movies to Keep Going

Notorious

This post World War Two espionage picture is a showcase for Ingrid Bergman. Playing the daughter of a disgraced German spy, she becomes an undercover agent and infiltrates a group of Nazis in Brazil. As a carefree party girl who captures the eye of G-Man Cary Grant early in the movie, Bergman exudes seductive charm. After marrying villainous Claude Rains while in love with the dispassionate Grant, her vulnerability comes to the fore. Hitchcock famously likened his actors to cattle, but in a rare move incorporated Bergman’s ideas about her character into the film. The camerawork designed by Hitchcock is also superb. It is used to dazzling effect with a sweeping crane shot and tense close-ups focusing on a key that may hold the answer to the Nazi secrets.

Notorious is sadly not currently available on any streaming services. It does show on TCM from time to time, and the Criterion Collection just released a fantastic Blu-ray.

Strangers on a Train

The only Alfred Hitchcock thriller to inspire a Billy Crystal comedy, this movie paints the ideal scenario for a pair of murders. Two strangers meet on a train. Each wants someone in their life dead. If they exchange murders, neither will likely be caught since each victim will have no relationship to their murderer. Unfortunately, one stranger thinks the conversation is just idle talk. The other happens to be a psychopath who takes it all too seriously. What happens next escalates the tension to dizzying proportions. Featuring one of Hitchcock’s most iconic murders, reflected off the victim’s eyeglasses, the movie crackles with intensity throughout. Throw Momma from the Train was a good pairing for Crystal and Danny DeVito. As is usually the case though, the original is better.

Strangers on a Train is actually free to stream on Netflix right now. It’s also available on Google Play & YouTube for $2.99 or a dollar more at iTunes.

The Birds

It took three years for Hitchcock to release his follow-up to Psycho. Much of the delay can be attributed to the fact that The Birds would prove to be Hitchcock’s most technically challenging work. The film used a combination of trained, wild and mechanical birds to amplify the mystery and terror of the situation as the animals strangely congregate and then attack. Each shot had to be meticulously planned in advance. The entire movie was drawn on storyboards before the first shot. No original music appears on the soundtrack. Bird sounds are used instead, though ironically these were mainly created on a synthesizer. The result of all this alchemy is one of Hitchcock’s creepiest concoctions.

The Birds is available to rent at the moment for just $3.99 on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and YouTube.

Four Movies to Dive Deeper

Vertigo

The British film magazine Sight & Sound polls critics once a decade to rank the top 250 movies of all time. Their last list came out in 2012 and Vertigo was at the top. Many critics consider it Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece. It is no doubt a monumental film, but I also don’t think it’s the right Hitchcock picture for someone to start with. That’s why I’ve placed it in the deeper dive section of my list. The story is a haunting one with former police detective Jimmy Stewart becoming obsessed with a disturbed Kim Novak who he is hired to follow. Tackling both suicide and mental illness, the story finds its ways into some very dark territories, especially considering it was made in the late 1950s. The movie demands multiple viewings to reveal all of its mysteries. This is perhaps why it was one of Hitchcock’s few box office failures and has taken so long to garner acclaim.

Vertigo is available to rent right now for only $3.99 on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and YouTube.

To Catch a Thief

Some movies are a confection of pure charm. To Catch a Thief is Hitchcock’s best example. Cary Grant plays a supposedly retired jewel thief in the French Riviera who catches the eye of Grace Kelly. Some critics consider it to be too light and lacking in the suspense that marked many of Hitchcock’s other films. This misses the point entirely. It’s closer to a romantic comedy than anything else the director ever produced and proves just how flexible a filmmaker Hitchcock could be. The scene where Kelly and Grant’s slowly simmering passion cuts to fireworks going off is another example of the master’s genius.

To Catch a Thief is currently available for rent on Amazon, Google Play and YouTube for $2.99 and iTunes for the obligatory $1.00 more.

The Lady Vanishes

Before heading to America, Hitchcock had a successful career in the United Kingdom in the 1930s. The Lady Vanishes is probably the film that did the most to draw the attention of Hollywood. A young British woman befriends a kindly old lady on a train journey through a fictional Eastern European country. When the old lady goes missing, no one else in her train compartment will admit that she was ever there. The young woman teams with a dashing musician she had a meet-cute with to solve the mystery. There’s certainly an element of propaganda at play here, with the Western European characters initially staying out of the conflict but eventually banding together to stop the vaguely Nazi-like threat. This plotting serves to keep the film historically interesting eighty years later.

The Lady Vanishes is available for rent right now at Amazon and iTunes for $3.99. The Criterion Collection has also released a typically superb Blu-ray.  

The 39 Steps

Another of Hitchcock’s British classics, this 1935 gem is another innocent man on the run flick. The crisp tale of an ordinary citizen falsely accused of murdering a British agent also introduced another of Hitchcock’s famous plot devices: The MacGuffin. This is something of vital importance to the characters in a movie but bears little impact to the story beyond that fact. In The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin is the design for a silent aircraft engine. Watching nearly one-hundred-year-old films is a different experience than seeing something made recently: Filmmaking technology was certainly more primitive. Plotting can be slower. Character attitudes may be radically unlike what we would expect today. It’s important to go into older films with an open mind, but great ones like the last two on my list have universal appeal and help us better understand not only film history but our shared history as well.

The 39 Steps is free on Amazon Prime and on iTunes for $3.99 currently. The great people at The Criterion Collection have also produced a fantastic Blu-ray for this one as well.

Wrapping Up

I hope my list gave you some ideas of great Alfred Hitchcock movies to watch and will inspire you to check out some classic films.

Creating a Top Ten list for any of the great film directors is an almost impossible task. Sorry to Lifeboat, Rebecca, and Frenzy for just missing my list. What do you think I got wrong? Let me know.

I listed the streaming options available when this was published, but all of the titles should be available on DVD or Blu-ray. One particular Blu-ray set of note is the Alfred Hitchcock Essentials Collection containing Rear Window, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, and Vertigo. There may not be a better five-disc Blu-ray package on the market.