It’s been ten years since Laika Studios released Travis Knight’s first film under their banner as director, the excellent Kubo and the Two Strings. In the interim, they’ve released the mostly forgotten Missing Link while Knight has directed two big intellectually driven properties, the positively received Bumblebee and, earlier this year, the critical and commercial failure Masters of the Universe. The last five years have been spent on the production of another instant masterpiece, a dark fairy tale that cribs from Rapunzel, The Birds, Labyrinth, and other dark children’s fantasies of yesteryear, ultimately crafting one of the best films of 2026 in Wildwood.
Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is the too-mature-for-her-age, espresso drinking teenage daughter of two Portland hipsters. Despite being forbidden from taking her baby brother Mac out of the house while their parents attend a craft festival, she takes the boy on a tour of the city, getting Voodoo Doughnuts and dealing with unicycling bagpipers. She even bikes past the Legionnaire’s Lament bookstore, a nod to the source novel written by Colin Meloy of The Decemberists, who contributed some songs to the film’s soundtrack. Unable to ditch a more juvenile and naive schoolmate, Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), Prue takes Mac to a playground, where the baby is abducted by a countless number of crows who fly the baby directly into the same impassable forest that her father has warned her about for her entire life. The kids follow, finding themselves in a magical world where they encounter coyote soldiers in service of a “dowager governess” and are forced to split up. Curtis is taken to the governess (Carey Mulligan), who enlists him in her service because when she looks at him, all she can see is her deceased son, Aleksi. Prue, elsewhere, eventually finds her way to the community of South Wood, where she runs afoul of the current governor and his sniveling assistant before being rescued by the leader of the Avian Principality, Owl Rex (Richard E. Grant), and his general (Angela Bassett).
The narrative here is quite dense. The film clocks in at over two hours and is half an hour longer than Kubo, which was already pretty complex. Although the inciting incident bears more than a passing resemblance to Labyrinth, given that it’s a “girl goes into a bizarre fantasy world to save her infant brother” plot, that’s ultimately only a small part of this sprawling story. There are many, many ideas from the wider fairy tale canon: the mechanical recreation of life, a Robin Hood figure, a fertility deal made with a witch, a world covered in magical, possibly malicious kudzu. It also whips out new ideas all of its own, but what really makes this one sing is just how much of a technical marvel the film is. The magical origami creations in Kubo were already masterful, but in Wildwood we witness fusing ivy vines growing like mystical beanstalks, hundreds of birds in flight at once, and dozens of other images that are sheer magic in their scale and imagination before one even considers the intensive labor that went into bringing them to stop-motion life.
Wildwood is already struggling in theaters, which is unfortunate. Laika, one hopes, will continue to provide funding for works like this even if the return on investment continues to fall in the red. In a film year where most of the animation slate is taken up with intellectual property in various stages of descent into slop (Toy Story 5, Minions and Monsters, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Angry Birds 3, PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, and more, if you can believe it), this film’s PG-13 rating is probably hurting its chances with a younger audience. Of course, it’s also not for those audiences, despite what the child-friendly trailers that played before it (for The Cat in the Hat and Cocomelon: The Movie, among others) might have you believe. I attended a midday Sunday screening and I only noticed one kid in the audience of what is already one of my multiplex’s smaller screening rooms, and to be quite frank, I found myself worrying about what that stranger’s child might be experiencing. I always have been and forever shall be a proponent of films for children that are frightening; I’ve seen the kind of adults that kids who never experience fear in a safe, manageable environment grow up to be, and their lives are not enviable. Maybe today’s youth are being exposed to worse things online generally, but without the safety net of “it was all a story” that Are You Afraid of the Dark? had or the overall goofiness of Goosebumps to undermine any long-term trauma, they’re not getting the chance to experience terror and then see how it’s not really that scary after all. Make no mistake: Wildwood is decidedly too dark for a child under the age of eleven or so, and its rating is well deserved. The problem, then, becomes the fact that its more reasonable demographic of teenagers will dismiss it because it’s animated and gets looped in with the Cocomelons and the PAW Patrols. That makes for something that’s hard to market.
As such, the film is already being pulled from some markets, and that’s a shame. This is a sprawling, expansive, beautiful movie, and one that you truly should treat yourself to seeing in a theater. It won’t be the end of the world if you see this once it comes to home video and/or streaming, but it won’t be the same. See this one on the big screen if you can, while you can.
Welcome to Episode #276 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of horror titles from India & Indonesia, starting with the unsanctioned Child’s Play remake Papi Gudia (1996).
00:00 Welcome 02:13 Soulm8te (2026) 05:40 Savage House (2026) 09:08 Killer Condom (1996) 17:00 The Appointment (1982) 22:30 The Devils (1971) 25:15 Dracula (1958) 26:55 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
31:55 Papi Gudia (1996) 1:04:04 The Ornate Lock (Manichitrathazhu, 1993)
1:17:40 The Queen of Black Magic (1981) 1:28:35 Santet (1988)
Dear reader, you can be forgiven for mistaking Swampflix for an Alfred Hitchcock blog lately. At the beginning of the year, I had three major projects in mind to guide my film-viewing for 2026. The first was to watch all of the films that had made Swampflix’s annual collaborative top-ten lists that I had not yet seen for myself (which resulted in the publications found here and here); the second was to watch and write about all of Ann Sothern’s Maisie films; and the third was to get the site to a place where all forty of the thriller films directed by Alfred Hitchcock had some kind of coverage, in the lead up to an overall Hitchcock ranking. That final project is now complete, and I’ve successfully ranked all forty of Hitchcock’s thrillers below.
Even if one only limits their viewing of his films to his forty thrillers, that’s still a daunting number for the average person. Were they all worthwhile? Were there any that were overlooked classics forgotten to time because they didn’t have the name brand recognition of a Psycho or a Vertigo? Were there any that people shouldn’t even bother with? I made it my mission in 2026 to finish watching and, in the case of movies I hadn’t seen in over two years, re-watching all forty in order to generate a definitive (subjective) ranking. At last, the great work is complete.
The Bad
40. Frenzy (1972) – The bottom of the barrel. Not just a bad movie because it’s ugly, cruel, and nasty, although it certainly is all of those things, but because of the pall that it casts over the rest of the director’s career. The subtleties, nuance, and clever handling of studio and censorship boards is gone; with nothing to restrain him, this is Hitchcock unbridled, and the film is craven, base, and vile in a way that makes one wonder if he would have always been this way if he had free reign from the beginning. If he had, we wouldn’t still be talking about his work, and this film’s very existence undermines the entire oeuvre.
39. Under Capricorn (1949) – An overlong period piece costume melodrama shot, like Rope, in a series of long takes, which causes the pacing to suffer mightily. Possibly the worst performance in Ingrid Bergman’s storied career. Shot in Technicolor, which is a waste, given that the Australia of the 1830s is a dull, brown place. Attempts to touch the hem of Rebecca’s garment and misses utterly. Not really a thriller at all, despite a last minute borrowing from Gaslight.
38. The Trouble With Harry (1955) – An unfunny comedy about eccentric New Englanders burying and unburying (multiple times) a corpse that all feel responsible for. John Forsythe’s Sam Marlowe is the most annoying character in the entire Hitchcock canon, and not a single person feels like a real human being. A stagey movie that benefits from being gorgeous, as it effectively captures the beauty of autumn in Vermont, but has no other noteworthy qualities. Some mystery, no thrills.
37. Secret Agent (1936) – The worst of Hitchcock’s 1930s spy thrillers, and the only one that is a period piece, being set during WWI. A novelist/army reservist’s death is faked in order to send him behind enemy lines as a spy, where he is assisted by “The General,” who is played by Peter Lorre in brownface; you feel ashamed watching it play out on screen. Features a train bombing sequence that might look good if this were ever restored, but its problematic elements move this one to the back of the line for consideration for that honor, which is for the best.
The Boring
36. Number Seventeen (1932) – Only sixty-three minutes long but feels like it goes on for hours. A group of people all find themselves at the titular address, a ramshackle house that happens to sit above a rail line, where some number of the parties present intend to board a train later in the evening with a stolen diamond necklace. Attempts at farce are made, but they fall flat, and the men all look too much alike to untangle any of it. The last fifteen minutes, however, are extraordinary, as the final action sequence in isolation is a master class in tension, suspense, and miniature work.
35. Suspicion (1941) – Cary Grant is a useless lump of a man who latches onto the hem of a future wealthy heiress who is approaching old maid status (Joan Fontaine). Following their wedding, she (repeatedly) runs into townies and tells them about her new husband’s latest ventures, only to get an “Oh, honey,” followed by the revelation that he’s actually at the betting track or pawning her family heirlooms. Notable for featuring a character who is essentially Agatha Christie and for executive meddling that “softened” the ending from the source novel, but it doesn’t really matter. Skippable.
34. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) – Hitchcock remakes his own 1934 film, shifting the central focus from Peter Lorre’s fascinating villain in the original to Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day’s boring “heroes.” The film spends its first half hour meandering around Morocco before the plot finally starts, not that the pace improves once it does. You will hear “Que Sera Sera” over and over again, and be increasingly bored every time.
33. I Confess! (1953) – Montgomery Clift is a priest who takes the confession of a gardener who slew a local lawyer. When suspicion falls on Clift’s character because the victim was blackmailing him regarding an (unconsummated) pre-seminary affair, he is unable to break the confidentiality of the confessional and thus must seek other means to prove his innocence. Clift is stiff and wooden, and there’s very little of note visually here, but, like Number Seventeen, it picks up speed at the end when the true killer goes on the lam and the priest must assist in his pursuit. Not enough to save it, however.
32. Topaz (1969) –North by Northwest is often credited with introducing and popularizing many of the tropes that would appear in the early James Bond films. A decade later, with several Bond films having hit the market, Topaz is a spy thriller that answers the question of what a Hitchcock Bond film would look like while raising the further question, “Boy, Hitch sure was tired at this point, wasn’t he?” Not a bad movie per se, but meandering and lifeless. The only readily available version is 143 minutes long; perhaps the 127 minute theatrical cut trimmed some of the fat, but whether that would improve Topaz or not is an open question.
The Noteworthy
31. Murder! (1930) – The director’s first fully “talkie” picture, Murder! is an experimental work, not as we commonly think of the term, but in the sense that we get to go along for the journey as Hitch devises ways to incorporate the new technology into the film. Features first appearances of some of the master’s recurring narrative conceits: instead of a wrongfully accused and pursued man, this picture is about a woman who is sentenced for a murder that she didn’t commit, and follows a juror who experiences a change of heart and seeks to find the real killer before her execution, officially kicking off Hitchcock’s investment in stories of miscarried justice.
30. Blackmail (1929) – Sound technology was invented during the production of this one, resulting in two different versions: one talkie, one silent. While considering two-timing her boring Scotland Yard boyfriend, a young flapper defends herself against a would-be sexual assailant with deadly force. Her flight from the scene is witnessed by a man who tries to extort her for money. Expressionistic and exciting even when it’s not always engaging, this is the first time we see Hitchcock set his climax in/near a monument.
29. Jamaica Inn (1939) – Hitchcock’s last British film before he moved to Hollywood. Charles Laughton plays a dastardly local official whose scheming with a band of murderous thieves that operate out of the titular location is undermined by the arrival of Maureen O’Hara and the interference of an undercover naval officer. Often dismissed as a lesser Hitchcock, the sumptuous visuals (in the 4K restoration, at least), Laughton’s hamminess, and a sufficiently compelling romance narrative make up for a sluggish middle section.
28. To Catch a Thief (1955) – Cary Grant is a retired cat burglar whose old crew still resents him for escaping prosecution. When a series of thefts that copy his style break out along the French coast, Grant has to prove his innocence; to that end, he solicits information from an insurance investigator (John Williams—the actor, not the composer) that leads him to potential future theft victims Grace Kelly and her nouveau riche mother. Intrigue takes backstage to the Grant/Kelly romance, although this one is not without some fun visuals, like Grant scaling a house in the middle of the night or a beautiful scene set in an outdoor floral shop.
The Good
27.Torn Curtain (1966) – Sees Hitchcock getting surprisingly political with his thrillers again after the politically vague Stewart version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest. Paul Newman is a handsome scientist whose assistant/fiancee (Julie Andrews) follows him to East Berlin without realizing he plans to defect. It’s a ruse, of course, but her presence threatens to derail the whole mission to obtain the nuclear MacGuffin and makes their hasty retreat from the police state of the Soviet Bloc even more complicated. Perhaps a little overlong, and Newman and Andrews have very little chemistry despite being two of the hottest stars of the day, but fun nevertheless.
26. Family Plot (1976) – Hitchcock’s final film is a fun, solid watch, but it’s also not spectacular, and overly reliant on coincidence. Two small-time con artists, a phony psychic and her cabbie boyfriend, are chasing a $10K payday from wealthy Ms. Rainbird, who wants them to find the only remaining family scion, a bastard nephew she forced her sister to give up for adoption decades earlier. Meanwhile, a dastardly jeweler and his lover/accomplice engage in a series of high-profile kidnappings for ransom. The two narratives dovetail together in a perhaps obvious way, but it’s still fun to watch it come together. The only film on which Hitchcock collaborated with John Williams (the composter, not the actor).
25. Stage Fright (1950) – One of Hitch’s Hollywood era thrillers, but shot in and around London. An acting student (Jane Wyman) at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts is informed by her crush that he has just fled the home of an actress (Marlene Deitrich) with whom he has been having an affair, having discovered her in the middle of killing her husband with the intent to frame him; he begs Wyman to help him prove his innocence. Breaks a major narrative convention (and recurring Hitchcock trope) that riled contemporary audiences, but this allows the director to play around with his audience’s expectations, and features a fun musical performance of a Cole Porter song by Deitrich.
24. Spellbound (1945) – Ingrid Bergman is an extremely competent doctor in the male-dominated field of psychiatry. Her apparent frigidness thaws when her institution’s new director (Gregory Peck) arrives, but he may not be the man he seems to be. Features a dream sequence that was conceived by Salvador Dali; the romance is contrived, but Peck and Bergman sell it.
23. Dial M for Murder (1954) – A small scale domestic thriller shot on the cheap (among other corner cutting measures, a character’s trial and sentencing play out in less than a minute in a colorful void, completely removing the need for a courtroom set) as one of the trial runs for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Grace Kelly does some of her finest work against a cold, stony Ray Milland. John Williams (the actor again, not the composer) is very fun as a proto-Columbo trying to figure out how the villainous Milland manipulated the events.
22. The Paradine Case (1947) – Like Jamaica Inn, a frequently derided “lesser effort” that is more praiseworthy than its reputation would imply. In Peck’s second collaboration with Hitchcock, he plays a barrister who is called upon to defend a woman against the accusation that she killed her blind, war hero husband. He falls for the woman while preparing for her defense, threatening the foundations of his heretofore happy marriage. Great performances, especially from Ann Todd as Peck’s emotionally ravaged wife.
21. The Wrong Man (1957) – A docudrama based on the real arrest of a man named Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda), a musician and family man who is falsely identified as an armed robber, tearing his life apart and destroying his wife (Vera Miles)’s mental health. The narrative is somewhat undermined by Hitch’s choice to cast the WASPy Fonda as an Italian-American, which blunts the film’s ability to effectively convey the role that prejudice plays in the arrest, but it nonetheless demonstrates the ease with which any of us might fall into and be destroyed by a broken system through no fault of our own. More timely now than then, and extremely compelling.
20. Young and Innocent (1937) – A successful actress is murdered by her husband, but the crime is pinned on a different man who happens to be her acquaintance and is coincidentally nearby. He escapes from his arraignment and enlists the help of the beautiful young daughter of the head of the local constabulary in trying to prove his innocence. Excellent miniature work, gorgeous tracking shots, and an exciting cave-in all make this one a lot of fun, but it is unfortunately marred by the presence of blackface in the finale.
19. Vertigo (1958) – Undoubtedly my hottest take about “the greatest film of all time” according to Sight & Sound (2012-2022) is that it’s “merely” good, not spectacular. Taken purely on visual terms, it would certainly be in contention, but it’s so lacking in human feeling (excepting a star turn by Barbara Bel Geddes’s as the bespectacled bombshell that Jimmy Stewart should be interested in) other than abundance of neuroses that it’s difficult to connect to on an emotional level. Perhaps it’s intentional that characters throw around the word “love” with abandon when I don’t believe a single one of them, just as Kim Novak’s monotone is purposeful, but it ultimately amounts to less than the sum of its parts.
18. Marnie (1964) – Much maligned due to an unnecessary scene of implied offscreen sexual assault (“implied” in the sense that you know it happened, but could plausibly convince yourself otherwise… maybe), this exploration of the dark side of sexual psychology features a truly winning performance from Tippi Hedren in the title role. The triggers for Marnie’s various episodes of mania are well executed visually, and the scene in which Marnie must mercy kill her beloved horse is genuinely heartbreaking. If you can overlook its flaws (and it’s admittedly a big “if”), there’s something truly beautiful here.
17. Saboteur (1942) – Essentially an American remake of The 39 Steps, although more jingoistic and with a more personal stake on the part of the hero. A wartime aircraft factory worker is accused of sabotage at the plant and must—you guessed it—go on the run to prove his innocence. Along the way, he meets/kidnaps a lady hostage who believes he’s guilty, interacts with various stand-ins for the everyday American, and ultimately finds himself fighting an enemy agent atop the Statue of Liberty. Great stuff.
The Great
16. Notorious (1946) – Roger Ebert’s favorite of Hitchcock’s films. After learning that her father was an Axis spy, patriotic American Ingrid Bergman is recruited by U.S. intelligence officer Cary Grant to infiltrate the home of a Nazi higher-up (Claude Rains) who successfully fled to South America. Her mission is complicated by her growing (mutual) love for her handler as well as the strictures of constant surveillance imposed by her husband’s watchful mother, one of the great Hitchcock villains.
15. Lifeboat (1944) – The survivors of the shelling of a freighter by a German U-boat fight not just for the survival of their bodies but of their souls when they discover a crewman from the enemy vessel is among their number. Tallulah Bankhead is stunning as the reporter whose icy dispassion slowly dissipates in a film that asks what good it is to survive if we become like our enemies, alienated from the things that make us human.
14. Rebecca (1940) – Considered to be one of Hitchcock’s best, and his only film to win Best Picture (star Joan Fontaine did not win Best Actress for her role here but did the following year in Suspicion). Make no mistake—it’s a great movie, but it suffers from an overlong, comedic opening in which our unnamed lead is romanced by widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) in Morocco before he returns with her to his home, the palatial estate Manderly, and the psychological elements of the plot come into play. A twisted fairy tale that’s worth the effort of making it through the messy first act, and features one of Hitch’s best villains in the form of Mrs. Danvers.
13. Rope (1948) – Hitchcock’s first attempt at shooting an entire film in long shots, much more successfully than in Under Capricorn. Two young men, groomed by their former schoolmaster (Jimmy Stewart) into thinking that they are better than everyone else and thus “above” good and evil, murder their former classmate for the thrill of it then host a dinner party in the same room as the corpse. Stewart struggles with his character’s moral complexities, but the film is nonetheless a triumph.
12. The Birds (1963) – The first hour breezes by with only minimal references to something odd happening with our feathered friends as Tippi Hedren traipses through romcom stations of the cross: the meet cute, the minor injury that her love interest can bandage, friction with an overbearing mother and then bam! A man with his eyes pecked out. The last hour is carnage and chaos. A master lesson in classing up a schlocky idea.
11. Foreign Correspondent (1940) – An American goes undercover in Europe posing as a journalist, where he gets caught up in an assassination plot. Features some truly blockbuster moments of spectacular action, including a plane crash caused by a shot from a German ship, alongside breathlessly beautiful tableaux featuring hundreds of umbrellas moving like ballet dancers on a crowded street or ominous windmills turning slowly on a desolate plain. A marvel.
The Excellent
10. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) – While the later remake of this one focused on the parents of the kidnapped child and their attempts to find their offspring, this earlier version focuses more on Peter Lorre’s kidnapper, who is cultured, refined, and extremely dangerous; he’s a top tier Hitchcock villain comparable to Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca and Madame Konstantin in Notorious. Like Jamaica Inn, this is also an earlier Hitchcock where the lady lead gets to be an utter badass; she’s introduced in the film’s opening as a competitive sharpshooter, which comes in handy later. Leagues more interesting than the fifties revisitation of the same narrative.
9. The 39 Steps (1935) – The first “prelude to WWII” international intrigue thriller. A Canadian man (Robert Donat) helps a woman escape from a theater in which a gun goes off, only for her to reveal that she is a spy with information that must be secreted to her superiors. When she is murdered (with him as the prime suspect), he must flee across the Scottish Highlands in order to find her contact, only to meet obstructive bureaucrats and secret villains at every turn, all while handcuffed to a woman who doesn’t believe in his innocence. In many ways the prototype for all the “wrong man pursued” pictures that followed, and a solid win from the very foundation.
8. Strangers on a Train (1951) – A tennis star trapped in a loveless marriage to an unfaithful wife has fallen in love with a senator’s daughter. A fellow passenger on a train recognizes him, and knows a bit too much about the athlete’s situation from the society papers. The other man relates his own life troubles and how his father is standing in the way of his happiness, then jokes about how each could “take care” of the other’s problem, and no one would be able to figure out the motive. The tennis player laughs this off, but when his estranged wife is killed, he realizes that the other man was dead serious, and expects him to fulfill his half of their “bargain.” One of the master’s best domestic thrillers.
7. The Lodger (1927) – A working class family takes on a new tenant in their upstairs room at roughly the same time that a Jack the Ripper-style slasher called “The Avenger” is terrorizing London. The family’s chorus girl daughter matches the profile of the Avenger’s victims, and the young police officer who is fixated upon her latches onto the new lodger as the likeliest suspect. Is he correct, or is his singular fixation on an innocent man whose presence is a romantic inconvenience allowing the real killer to continue his dastardly work? A silent masterpiece that cribs from German expressionist film, Hitch’s first thriller is also one of his best.
6. The Lady Vanishes (1938) – The best of Alfie’s “prelude to WWII” international espionage thrillers. A young playgirl befriends an older woman when their return to England is delayed by an avalanche. They board a train together and the younger woman takes a nap, only to learn upon waking that her companion has disappeared, and various others aboard the train claim that no such woman ever existed. A variation on the locked room mystery, this one is full of unexpected twists, turns, and romance.
The crèmede la crème
5. North by Northwest (1959) – Alongside Vertigo and Psycho, the most common contender for the appellation of Hitchcock’s best film as well as the most frequently homaged/parodied. Cary Grant is Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive whose ill-timed attempt to flag down a page at a hotel bar results in him being mistaken for George Kaplan, a spy who doesn’t actually exist. His flight from his pursuers and to clear his name is assisted and complicated by his romantic and erotic entanglement with Eva Marie Saint, ultimately leading to a showdown with the villains on Six Grandfathers Mountain (aka Mount Rushmore).
4. Sabotage (1936) – Perhaps the most undersung film in the director’s entire repertoire. An American woman (Sylvia Sydney) entrusted with the care of her younger brother lives in London, where her Eastern European husband operates a struggling movie theater. An employee at a neighboring business is an undercover detective trying to find evidence that the theater operator is one of a cabal of saboteurs seeking to undermine the social order. Contains one of the most shocking spectacles in the entire Hitchcock canon, and the most sobering depictions of the grief that follows. Often overlooked, but not to be missed.
3. Rear Window (1954) – The first Hitchcock I ever saw, and in many ways the perfection of his form. Jimmy Stewart doesn’t work as the protagonist of the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much and struggles with the complexity of his character in Rope, but was born to play the believably cranky, thrill-chasing photographer L.B. Jeffries while Grace Kelly lounges around like an earthbound angel trying to convince him that she’s more than suited for a life of adventure. Raymond Burr is terrifying, and Thelma Ritter is adorable. The limitations of setting and character require an economy of storytelling that is sheer perfection.
2. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) – Hitchcock’s personal favorite of his own films, and an excellent choice for that distinction. Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Teresa Wright) is a normal teenage girl living in quiet Santa Rosa, California, longing for something exciting to happen to her. She gets what she wished for in the most unpleasant manner possible, when the long absent uncle for whom she was named (Joseph Cotten) suddenly appears for a visit to the Newton clan. Initially delighted, young Charlie’s dream turns into a nightmare as the macabre reasons for Uncle Charlie’s spontaneous visit come to light, and young Charlie must protect her family, both from Uncle Charlie and the horrible truth. The romance plot in this one doesn’t really work, but the film is otherwise unimpeachable.
1. Psycho (1960) – What is there left to say about Psycho? It’s one of the greatest films of all time? That it was the first slasher? That it’s full of unexpected twists and turns that were so famous that they’re no longer unexpected? It was so iconoclastic that it became iconic? That knowing the twists makes the film no less effective, no matter how many times you see it? When putting together my Hitchcock quickies list, I tried to come up with something new to say about it and found myself stumped. This is a film that anyone with even the smallest passing interest in film generally or Hitchcock specifically has seen. It had been discussed to death (and back) before I was even born. It’s Psycho.
Modern life is increasingly difficult for Harry Lehman (John Turturro), whose lifelong pickpocketing career doesn’t yield the same profits it used to in the present year of 2026, where everyone’s money is digital and their consumer electronics are easily trackable and difficult to fleece. Estranged from his daughter Kelly (Tatiana Maslany), he spends his days on the streets and in the subways trying to get together enough money to cover medical expenses for his comatose second wife, Rose. When he manages to lift a set of keys off of a young punk named Dylan (Will Price, who plays Tim Robinson’s son on The Chair Company) driving a classic car, he empties out a duffel with some cash and a USB drive, which he recognizes as a computer gadget but doesn’t know anything else about. When his regular fence Ben (Steve Buscemi) plugs it into the pawn shop’s computer, neither of the old men understand that they’ve managed to tip off the drive’s owner to their location or that they’ve got their hands on a crypto wallet worth close to a million dollars. By the time Dylan shows up to Ben’s shop and ransacks it looking for the crypto drive, it’s already been hawked to Ben’s counterpart in Chinatown, forcing Harry to go on a trek to get it back before Dylan, who turns out to be the scion of a mafia family, kills Rose.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is an elegy for a lost era and a lost city, which it telegraphs from its opening moments, set to LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down.” It also feels as if it’s drawing inspiration from the 1974 film Harry and Tonto (down to the main character’s name), which was also about a New Yorker experiencing late in life alienation from the city that had been his home for his entire life, and whose situation leads him to a single, meaningful encounter with his estranged daughter. While Art Carney’s Harry goes on an emotionally uplifting journey where we join him in finding a place in a changing world, Pickpocket is a much more bittersweet narrative, as we know from the moment that Ben reveals that Dylan’s family is connected to organized crime that Turturro’s Harry’s days are numbered. Everywhere he goes, Harry Lehman encounters others of his generation who are unable to keep up with the times. His friendly-but-antagonistic relationship with soon-to-retire detective Allen Warren (Giancarlo Esposito) is marked by a mutual respect, but Warren has also been relegated to a basement desk because he “can’t be retrained” for cybercrime; Ben is useless with computers and requires assistance from his granddaughter Eve (Victoria Moroles) for anything more advanced than checking his emails; the crime boss who is Dylan’s grandmother (Jamie Lee Curtis) expresses the same hesitancy about crypto currency as Harry does for cell phones, and is ultimately right to be concerned. The world of crime that they all know and can contemplate, theft on a scale from petty to grand, no longer exists.
The key difference between Dylan and Harry is that for the former, crime is a business. At one point, Dylan complains that his family doesn’t respect that he’s trying to bring them into the twenty-first century by lamenting that they can’t send him off to an Ivy League school and then get annoyed that he’s committed to “first concepts.” For the latter, crime is a way of life. Harry doesn’t moralize his way of “earning” a living, he just does the only thing that he knows how to do, acting as part of a larger economic ecosystem. Dylan is established early on as a fad chaser, as he orders a drink because he was inspired by an influencer and ends up hating it. As the bartender says, nine thousand likes on the video he saw does not translate to nine thousand people trying the drink. This scene also establishes something important about how the two men approach their business; Dylan is loud, flashy, and trendy, and only gets away with what he does because of his family connections, while Harry’s entire mode of being revolves around being unnoticed, quiet, and unassuming, and his line of work ultimately cost him his family. Neither is a particularly good way to live, but it ends up proving easier for an old dog to learn a couple of new tricks than it is for a young buck to learn not to run his mouth; if Dylan hadn’t been so concerned with showing off his smart watch and all of its features to Harry, then Harry would never have had the small victory that he does in the end. Although this could lead to the film feeling too reactionary in a “it’s the children who are wrong” way, the narrative smartly balances Dylan’s arrogance by including both Ben’s aforementioned granddaughter and a young pickpocket that Harry catches in the middle of a lift and briefly mentors.
Turturro is quite good here, although this is such an undemanding role that an actor of his talent could sleepwalk through it (which Curtis does in her single scene). The film goes out of its way to show you that Harry is very talented at what he does. Lock-picking, palm-greasing, and wallet-lifting come to him as easily as breathing; it’s just that those skills aren’t relevant in a more modern world. As such, the film also feels like a comment on the decline of the power of labor in the modern age. Turturro is fun even if he’s not being challenged as an artist, and he and Buscemi have an easy natural chemistry that ensure the film is worth checking out just to see the two of them spend some time together, if nothing else. If one had to choose between Buscemi’s performances in Wild Horse Nine and Pickpocket, his nomination for best supporting actor should be for this one. I’ll admit to some bias because I adore her, but Maslany is the real standout for me here. She fulfills the same role that Ellen Burstyn did in Harry and Tonto as the daughter that our main character has let down too many times. The dialogue is rote and a little trite—”I go to a real job [for my family],” “My family doesn’t get bologna sandwiches from a food bank while I’m waiting for a bond ticket,” etc.—but Maslany is magnificent and wrings pathos from the tired tropes anyway because she’s just that good.
Carefully riding the line between conservative movies that your dad would like because old salts get the upper hand over young upstarts and a lo-fi heist picture, this is one to check out, although it’s not going to be one that you need to rush out to theaters to see on the big screen.
There’s a woman with whom I attended school who had the misfortune of enduring multiple childhood brain tumors. She was still quite smart, and although she was severely awkward, this was a magnet school, so she wasn’t that much weirder than the institutional average. I did figure she’d grow out of that like most people do, but when we reconnected years later, she was still stuck in a state of emotional immaturity. Although the reasons for her inability to connect with others on the same level were recognizably clinical, it wasn’t difficult to see how those without knowledge of her past would sometimes find her company off-putting, and as fellow Louisiana expats in Texas, I unsuccessfully tried to integrate her into my friend group. She departed for parts unknown during the first year of COVID, and when I think about her now what I remember most was how uncanny she looked when she smiled. Her brain simply didn’t produce neurochemicals in a typical way, and as such she didn’t naturally smile or frown; these facial movements were clearly practiced in a mirror to better fit in, and witnessing a smile that never reaches the eyes can be unnerving. Elizabeth Holmes is the same, but my high school classmate didn’t commit mass fraud and negligence (that I know of).
You Can See Everything is directed by Lance Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, Primetime) and Nathan Fielder, a graduate of one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades. Following on the success of his Comedy Central TV series Nathan for You, which was at once both a Bar Rescue/Kitchen Nightmares style “save the floundering business” reality show and a satirization of the same featuring Nathan concocting outlandish schemes, Fielder went to Showtime and HBO, where he conceived The Curse and The Rehearsal, respectively. Both are two of the most fascinating and bizarre pieces of art of this century, blending surreality, human interest stories, and psychological manipulation. As time goes on, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell where the lines lie between Fielder the person, Fielder the documentarian, and Fielder the subject. If Fielder ever became as notorious as Holmes and a Dropout-style TV series were made about him, and (even less likely) he ever dropped his public persona (if that’s even what it is), I can conceive of how he might respond to the question of how he felt about it the way that Holmes allegedly did when asked about Amanda Seyfried: “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”
That quotation bears significant relevance on You Can See Everything, as it seems to be the one issue that Holmes is hung up on, and it is admittedly a potential key to her entire puzzling deal. Holmes makes a great number of claims about herself, many of them spurious at best: that she was never in tech for the money and was always altruistic in her desire to make medical testing more widely available, that she doesn’t feel that she did anything wrong, that she has never lied in her adult life. They cannot possibly be objectively true, but could this possibly be her truth? Is she simply delusional? At a pivotal juncture in the film’s first half, Holmes’s partner Billy Evans tries to make the case that Holmes’s contemporaneous claims of what the Theranos machine “can” do during her girlboss heyday wasn’t an attempt at deception but part of a larger fundamental gap between how Holmes thinks/speaks and how everyone else interprets her. To that end, Fielder shows the couple the classic Abbot & Costello “Who’s On First?” routine, and observes Holmes, who seems to laugh not because she finds something funny, but because she’s conditioned herself to laugh when others are laughing. When questioned, she can’t identify what is funny about the routine, and Nathan has to spell out for her that the joke is that a player has the unlikely surname of “Who.” When is she pretending—when she says that to her there was no difference between verbalizing “Theranos can do X, Y, and Z” and “At some point in the future Theranos could theoretically do X, Y, and Z,” or when she misses the point of the most famous comic banter of all time? Is it all just playing a character she created? I can’t conceive of why Elizabeth Holmes and her husband would think that Fielder would be the ideal person to document her final weeks before going to federal prison; it makes no sense. But I can see why Fielder would take the job.
I was fortunate enough to go into this film without being spoiled by some of the more unusual metatextual jumps that it eventually makes. There are elemental, recurring ideas in Fielder’s work that, in retrospect, I should have expected, but even if you guess he’s going to do some Rehearsal-esque stuff, I would not have guessed who he was going to involve in his scheme. It leads to some of the film’s best material, especially as the surprise star of the second half manages to embody what you would expect from a more standard documentary treatment, balancing empathy for Holmes against recrimination for her, and when Nathan starts to become a little too charmed by Holmes, it’s this person who sees through it. One could criticize the film (or Fielder through it, as the man and the text are inextricably intertwined) for being too empathetic for Holmes at certain points, as You Can See Everything isn’t really about her; it’s about Evans, which we should have known from the beginning since it’s his image that we open on. Holmes departs the movie at the halfway point to begin her term in federal prison in Bryan, Texas, at which point we jump ahead two years to where we find Evans firmly ensconced in tech bro culture in Austin: operating out of a WeWork, shooting automatic rifles at the weapons range, and creating deepfakes of his incarcerated partner while various reptiles slither and slip about the room.
Holmes and Evans are a match made in hell. She trusts him fully and completely, and he is a control freak who can’t even let her scramble eggs without intervening. He makes deals on her behalf (maybe), has taken over Holmes’s online presence by providing proof of his power of attorney over her to Twitter, and accepts the nonconsensual generation of AI porn of Holmes as an inevitability that he chooses to profit off of. Despite all of this, he and Holmes seem to remain completely simpatico, up to and including describing their love for one another with the same faux-poetic narrative. It’s bizarre. Is everyone just playing characters that they’ve created? Is anyone real, ever?
I’m not sure what You Can See Everything is—documentary of a criminal, confession of a voyeur, character study of a master manipulator (or two?), or docufiction of a woman with no sense of reality. It’s both earnest and detached; it’s damning, and sometimes surprisingly sweet. For now, I’ll settle for “utterly engrossing.”
For ten seasons, across both NBC and CBS, Alfred Hitchcock hosted 361 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, with the final three seasons billed as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, as the show’s time slot was extended. This was an anthology series that, in the director’s own words in the introduction to the sixth season premiere, told “homey little stories of an unusual nature,” often about “crime as practiced by ordinary people, like the people next door.” For the most part, I would describe each episode as a two-act play with a twist (two twists if you’re lucky), with about three cast members and two sets, not counting the opening and closing segments with Hitchcock himself. Over the course of my many years on this earth, I’ve probably seen most of the half hour episodes; Hour was not as widely syndicated, although I have seen it pop up from time to time on MeTV late at night, since that channel usually programs an hour long block of Presents anyway. As you can imagine, there are only so many stories that can be told in this format, and many of them start to run together—I can’t tell you how many of them revolve around a nephew with debts learning he’s set to inherit some money and coming up with a murderous scheme—but there are still a lot of original ideas and concepts. Hitchcock’s onscreen involvement in every episode, as he introduces and closes out each one, led many to believe that he was very involved behind the scenes, but this wasn’t really the case. Over the decade it was on air, Hitchcock directed a total of eighteen episodes, and like the show as a whole, they run the gamut from awful to excellent. I rewatched them all to see which ones would be worth recommending to fans of his work in the lead-up to my ranking of his features, and for each, I’ve also recommended a film from his catalog that best pairs with the episode, for thematic, casting, or narrative reasons.
“Revenge” – 3.5 stars
Season One, Episode One, aired October 2, 1955
Synopsis: The premiere episode. Ralph Meeker (who would later appear in The Night Stalker alongside Psycho alum Simon Oakland) plays a man who comes home one day to discover that his provocative new wife, played by Vera Miles, has been sexually assaulted. The police offer little help or reassurance, so the couple leaves the area. Husband slays the man his wife points out as her attacker, only for her to point to another man and make the same claim, clearly traumatized to the point that she sees her assailant in every man.
Pairing: The Vera Miles connection might lend itself to pairing this with Psycho, but there’s a later episode that’s better suited; as such, the “Vera Miles has a breakdown” element is best reflected in The Wrong Man.
“Breakdown” – 4 stars
Season One, Episode Seven, aired November 13, 1955
Synopsis: Joseph Cotten (who had previously collaborated with Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt and Under Capricorn) portrays a callous business executive who finds himself paralyzed but completely conscious following a car accident. Originally unmoved and even disgusted by an employee’s tearful reaction to being laid off, the man is only able to alert the morgue attendant that he is alive by shedding a tear, after several unfortunate things happen to his presumed-dead body.
Pairing: I’d joke that this one would pair well with Under Capricorn, as Cotten is only slightly less wooden here as an apparent corpse than he is in that stinker, but I cannot recommend that film in good conscience, or even in jest. Instead, I’ll provide a “Further Reading” instead and direct you to the audio version of Stephen King’s short story “Autopsy Room Four,” which references this episode and is very well narrated by Oliver Platt.
“The Case of Mr. Pelham” – 1 star
Season One, Episode Ten, aired December 4, 1955
Synopsis: Feels more like a (boring) Twilight Zone than an episode of AHP, as this is more of an existential story of terror with a seemingly supernatural twist. Tom Ewell (the titular Mr. Pelham) finds that everywhere he goes, people tell him that he just left, and that he was a good hang. Pelham eventually starts wearing an outlandish tie to differentiate him from his doppelganger, only for no one to believe him because he would never wear such a thing. Can you hear the sad trombone noise?
Pairing:Vertigo, given the overall theme of double identity.
“Back for Christmas” – 3 stars
Season One, Episode Twenty-Three, aired March 4, 1956
Synopsis: British Herbert Carpenter (John Williams) and his overly fussy wife Hermione (Isobel Elsom) promise their friends they’ll be back from America for the holidays, but then Herbert kills her and buries her in the basement he has been excavating under the guise of digging himself a wine cellar. Stateside, he establishes a cover story about the two separating and prepares to settle into a new life, until he receives a letter indicating that his wife has hired someone to finish the wine cellar as a Christmas gift while he’s away; the discovery of her body now inevitable.
Pairing: With Dial M for Murder, where Williams plays the magnetic detective rather than the killer.
“Wet Saturday” – 3.5 stars
Season Two, Episode One, aired September 30, 1956
Synopsis: Mr. Princey (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) is a well-to-do patriarch whose daughter has just slain the local schoolmaster in a fit of rage because he’s marrying someone else. Luckily, John Williams stumbles into the house at just the right time to be framed for it, comically.
Pairing: With Rope, where Hardwicke gets a strong turn as the father of the victim rather than the perpetrator.
“Mr. Blanchard’s Secret” – 1.5 stars
Season Two, Episode Thirteen, aired December 23, 1956
Synopsis: Amateur mystery writer Babs Fenton (Mary Scott) annoys the hell out of her long-suffering husband when she concludes that their neighbor has murdered his wife. Her insistence on creating bizarre fictions about the neighbors continues even after she meets the (living) Mrs. Blanchard. One of the more frustrating episodes: the comedy isn’t funny, and the mystery, such as it is, has no real resolution.
Pairing: The episode is clearly a parodic homage to Rear Window, which this would pair well with, but I would recommend avoiding this entry altogether. Mary Scott appeared in three other episodes of the series, all of which are top tier: “Crackpot,” directed by TV stalwart John Meredyth Lucas and featuring a genuinely frightening performance from Robert Emhardt; “Safety for the Witness,” directed by Norman Lloyd and starring Art Carney; and “The Diplomatic Corpse,” directed by Paul Henreid (Dead Ringer) and starring Peter Lorre. Any one of them is a better time than “Mr. Blanchard’s Secret.”
“One More Mile to Go” – 5 stars
Season Two, Episode Twenty-Eight, aired April 7, 1957
Synopsis: David Wayne (who starred in the 1951 Americanization of Fritz Lang’s M and portrayed the Mad Hatter on the Adam West Batman series) who impulsively kills his wife; his attempts to get rid of the body are hampered by a broken tail light and an overly helpful motorcycle cop. Possibly the best episode of the series, the first half is entirely without dialogue and relies solely on the image for suspense. The clearest demonstration of Hitchcock using the series as a proving ground for things he would include in later films, as the movie presages Psycho in many ways.
Season Three, Episode Three, aired October 20, 1957
Synopsis: Stars Vincent Price as an expert homicide detective who keeps a memento from each of his great cases on display, reserving the center spot for “the perfect crime.” He receives a visit from a defense attorney (James Gregory) who claims he can prove that Price sent an innocent man to the electric chair. It’s fine if you want to see a fun Price performance in an otherwise boring package, but you don’t need this episode for that; we have it in abundance elsewhere.
Pairing:Rebecca, although not for any thematic reasons. Price kills the attorney and uses his remains to create a ceramic vase, with Hitch’s closing narration performing its standard censor-addressing concerns by saying that the crime was discovered when a charwoman knocked the piece over, and cites this as the reason why cleaning women are always breaking vases. That a piece of the late Mrs. de Winter’s ceramic decor was broken (and a housekeeper blamed) is a plot element in Rebecca. I admit this is a stretch, but my other nomination was Marnie based solely on the fact that James Gregory appeared in the original series Star Trek episode “Dagger of the Mind” and that Marnie actress Mariette Hartley was in “All Our Yesterdays,” which is even more belabored.
“Lamb to the Slaughter” – 5 stars
Season Three, Episode Twenty-Eight, aired April 13, 1958
Synopsis: Pregnant Mary Maloney (Barbara Bel Geddes) is in a state of shock when her policeman husband comes home and tells her he intends to leave her. She knocks him out with a frozen leg of lamb, then cooks it; when the police come to investigate, they eat the murder weapon. This is perhaps the most well known episode of the show; when the series came to TV Land when I was a young teenager, there was a weekend long marathon that began not with the premiere, but with “Lamb to the Slaughter.” The narrative is also well known because the short story, written by Raold Dahl, is frequently anthologized. An absolute master work from start to finish.
Pairing: Bel Geddes’s only Hitchcock film was Vertigo and that’s already taken, as is Rope, the other big “evidence in plain sight” narrative from the director. Given the dearth of Hitchcock/Bel Geddes feature content, I’d instead recommend that you just do a marathon of all four AHP episodes she appeared in, although I would place them in a different order than release date (and only this one was directed by Hitchcock). Start with the Arthur Hiller-directed “The Morning of the Bride” from season four, a kind of Bluebeard story in which Bel Geddes learns an awful truth about her new husband, then watch “Slaughter.” Follow that up with “The Foghorn” from season three, based on the Gertrude Atherton short story, and close out with “Sybilla” from season six, directed by Ida Lupino.
“Dip in the Pool” – 4 stars
Season Three, Episode Thirty-Five, aired June 1, 1958
Synopsis: Hitch’s second Roald Dahl adaptation. Keenan Wynn (Dr. Strangelove) plays boorish American William Botibol who is on a cruise with his wife to a tightly budgeted European tour. He learns from stock broker Renshaw (Philip Bourneuf) about a shipboard lottery that revolves around the daily distance the ship travels and wagers too much when he believes he has insider information. When he’s poised to lose it all, he resolves to juke the odds by “accidentally” falling off of the ship so that it has to stop and retrieve him. Unfortunately, he makes the wrong choice of eyewitness. Fay Wray has a minor role as Renshaw’s wife. Doreen Lang plays the woman whose nurse disbelieves her about Botibol going overboard; one wishes she had been similarly disbelieved when she falsely identified Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man. (She’s also the hysterical woman in the diner in The Birds.)
Pairing: Pair with Lifeboat for a fully on-the-seas adventure.
“Poison” – 4.5 stars
Season Four, Episode One, aired October 5, 1958
Synopsis: Another Roald Dahl adaptation, this time of a story that served as an allegory about the venomous effect the Raj had on India. The episode opens on James Donald as Harry Pope, a man paralyzed with fear when Timber Woods (Wendell Corey, who played Jimmy Stewart’s cop buddy in Rear Window) arrives to find him in bed, claiming that there is a venomous krait snake asleep on his chest, beneath the sheets. Effectively tense as Woods menaces the helpless, sweaty Pope, who is shot in glorious chiaroscuro, even though the conflict itself is less than satisfactory.
Season Four, Episode Twenty-Nine, aired May 3, 1959
Synopsis: John Williams is a retired detective who has arranged to gaslight a suspect in a murder he could never solve, who happens to be the old AHP archetype of the nephew who killed his rich aunt. On the anniversary of her death, the detective gathers a few friends and makes the nephew believe he is witnessing his aunt’s ghost, but after he confesses, the actress hired to play her arrives, implying the ghost was real. Conceptually fun, but the spectral element drags on in order to reach the minimum run time.
Pairing:Family Plot, which also involves some phoney paranormal phenomena that may be more real than believed.
“Arthur” – 3.5 stars
Season Five, Episode One, aired September 27, 1959
Synopsis: New Zealand poultry farmer Arthur (The Manchurian Candidate himself Laurence Harvey) addresses the audience directly and tells us about how he murdered his ex-fiance (frequent “Poe Cycle” Roger Corman collaborator Hazel Court) when she tried to come back to him after a failed marriage. Slyly funny, especially with Harvey camping it up and breaking the fourth wall. Improves in the second half once the cat-and-mouse games with the police begin.
Pairing: With The Birds, given Hazel Court’s unfortunate fate.
“The Crystal Trench” – 1.5 stars
Season Five, Episode Two, aired October 4, 1959
Synopsis: A story of wasted obsession: Mark Cavendish (James Donald) spends decades waiting for a woman (Patricia Owens, The Fly) whose husband dies on a mountain climbing expedition and who resolves to wait forty years until his body emerges from the ice. When it finally does, Mark discovers a locket around the corpse’s neck, which contains a photo of a different woman. Conceptually interesting and traffics in Hitchcock’s frequent theme of fixations, but the overwrought dialogue about “preserving the roses of summer” paired with a preposterous plot make for a late-in-the-game miss.
Synopsis: Mrs. Bixby (Audrey Meadows, aka “Straight to the moon” Alice from The Honeymooners) gets dumped by the retired colonel with whom she’s been having an affair while claiming to visit her elderly aunt. As a parting gift, he gives her a mink coat that she’ll never be able to explain to her husband; she schemes to pawn the coat temporarily and pretend to find the ticket for it in a cab. Her husband goes to claim it and comes back with a cheap stole, and Mrs. Bixby spots her coat on Dr. Bixby’s secretary.
Pairing: With Marnie, as the scheme Mrs. Bixby concocts reminds one of Marnie’s complex plans to hide the money that she’s stolen.
“The Horseplayer” – 4 stars
Season Six, Episode 22, aired March 14, 1961
Synopsis: Father Amion (Claude Rains)’s church’s roof needs extensive repair. Parishioner Sheridan is on a winning streak at the horse races and attributes his success to his newfound interest in prayer, and shows his appreciation when the collection basket comes around. Amion resists the temptation to follow Sheridan’s lead for a time but finally makes a bet himself, leading to a crisis of faith. Admonished by the bishop, he is told to pray that his horse will not win; the prayer is answered, but in an unlikely way. Cinematically on par with the director’s film work, elevated by Rains’s performance.
Pairing: With I Confess!, which also follows a priest struggling to navigate his spiritual and personal needs.
“Bang! You’re Dead” – 5 stars
Season Seven, Episode Two, aired October 17, 1961
Synopsis: Most like The Wrong Man in that this episode takes the form of an “issue” picture. Billy Mumy’s uncle comes to visit and leaves his revolver laying about carelessly, where the cowboy-obsessed little boy finds it and carries it with him all over town, pointing the gun at passersby who play along with him, completely unaware that they’re staring down the barrel of a real deadly weapon. It’s fantastically tense, with a standout sequence where the boy follows the family’s domestic help Cleo (Juanita Moore of Imitation of Life fame) with the gun in first person perspective. Haunting!
Pairing: With Sabotage, for the real and present danger to a child.
“I Saw the Whole Thing” – 2.5 stars
Season Eight (now The Alfred Hitchcock Hour), Episode Four, aired October 11, 1962
Synopsis: On the day following a hit and run accident, Michael Barnes (John Forsythe, thankfully much less obnoxious here than in The Trouble With Harry) goes to a police station and tells the officer on duty that it was his car that was involved. Five eyewitnesses claim the car never stopped before colliding with a motorcycle, and Barnes fears that if his wife learns about the trial she will miscarry, for the third time. Like most episodes of Hour that I have seen, the plot is a bit belabored; by the end of the scene in which Barnes has broken down the testimony of the first witness called to the stand, you already know that you’re going to have to watch this same thing happen four more times. The twist (that it was Barnes’s wife driving) is fine, and a concise version of this story in half an hour on Presents would likely have been quite good. I may have simply been out of patience by the time we got here, but this is a forgettable hour of television.
Pairing: With Murder!, Hitch’s first film to include elements of the courtroom drama.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate how wonderfully bizarre it is that Yorgos Lanthimos is now an award-winning, crowd-pleasing auteur célèbre, when just a few years ago he was considered one of cinema’s cruelest basement-dwelling freaks. No one was watching Lanthimos’s sociopathic incest thriller Dogtooth and thinking, yes, this man will soon be nominated for major-category Oscars on an annual basis. Recent titles like The Favourite, Poor Things, and Bugonia have earned the Greek filmmaker enough of a cultural foothold that his influence is starting to show in other directors’ work, though, whereas earlier efforts like Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer were so singular in their distanced, self-delighted cruelty that they were peerless to the point of feeling otherworldly. Signaling this new paradigm, the fairy-tale romcom Wicker is loudly & proudly Lanthimosian in its tone: playing flat, affectless human cruelty for farcical humor in a way that’s unmistakably indebted to the director’s signature style. It’s also a much cozier, gentler picture than anything Lanthimos has ever directed himself, repurposing his alien viewpoint on everyday social rituals for something that can be sincerely, sweetly romantic.
In genre terms, Wicker is a monsterfucker romcom. Olivia Colman stars as a medieval fisherwoman who’s shunned from everyday social rituals by the younger, prettier women in her village who don’t reek of fish. Annoyed by her designated role as the town spinster & punchline, she commissions a magically gifted basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to weave her a husband of her own whom she can parade about town to spite her many nemeses. The basket salesman over-delivers on the deal, crafting her the most handsome, devoted, virile husband the village has ever seen, as voiced & embodied by Alexander Skarsgård under a layer of interwoven prosthetics. The unlikely interspecies newlyweds canoodle, fuck, and promenade in such a cartoonishly loving fashion that it drives their fellow villagers mad with jealousy, none more so than the queen-bitch tailor’s wife (Elizabeth Debicki). The ads for Wicker sell it as a ribald sex comedy, but it’s ultimately much sweeter and more restrained than all that, functioning more as a tongue-in-cheek fairy tale than as sincere erotica. Plenty of fan fiction is already being written on the subject, though, I’m sure, as Skarsgård’s basket man makes for the perfect himbo arm candy no matter what material he’s made of.
To Wicker‘s credit, it doesn’t borrow Lanthimos’s dry humor just for the sake of it; it serves a clear thematic purpose. Lanthimos’s movies always have a way of examining everyday social rituals from a distanced perspective that makes them look absurdly arbitrary, whether they be the rituals of familial life in Dogtooth or the rituals of romantic courtship in The Lobster or the rituals of office-work hierarchy in Kinds of Kindness or so on. For its part, Wicker takes a distanced, outsider look at the rituals of a traditional marriage and finds them as inhumanly arbitrary & absurd as any uncanny behavior in a proper Lanthimos film. It portrays marriage as a never-ending series of self-imposed social rituals, with the small European village where it’s set having developed its own variations on marital traditions that stray only a few steps away from the ongoing absurdity of modern social behavior. Instead of a bride being marked as her husband’s property with a shiny wedding ring, she is ceremonially collared with a giant ornate shackle that clamps around her throat. Instead of tossing a bouquet to expectant maidens, she distributes wicker eggs that explode into puffs of colored powder, à la gender-reveal announcement parties. Instead of the husband enjoying one final night of sexual freedom before marriage at the local strip bar, he is costumed with a strap-on carrot that’s ceremonially eaten by a goat, signifying his loss of manhood. It’s all very silly, and none of it is entirely foreign to the way we actually celebrate modern weddings.
Things get a little more serious inside the wicker man & stinky fisherwoman household, where the more private, routine rituals of married life are portrayed as natural & worthwhile. Colman & Skarsgård’s physically mismatched lovers are sincerely, demonstrably affectionate towards each other, which is a difficult sentiment to come by in a proper Lanthimos film. Most of the dramatic crises that arise are a result of outsiders’ petty jealousy for their mutual affection, while everyone else’s marriages appear to be primarily practical unions in commerce & sexual reproduction. This is a town where everyone’s personhood is defined by their occupation, after all, known only by names like Fisherwoman, Butcher, Butcher’s Wife, Tailor, Tailor’s Wife, and so on. Even Skarsgård’s wicker husband is eventually known by the name Fisherfucker, since sexually pleasing his wife appears to be his most productive daily endeavor. If the movie has any recognizable value of its own outside its extension of Lanthimosian anthropology to a new social ritual, it’s all in the convincingly magical quality of that wicker Fisherfucker’s screen presence, which is just as mesmerizing to the viewer as it is to his fellow villagers. He’s an incredible creature-feature specimen, mixing practical prosthetic applications with post-production touchups that allow specks of sunlight to shine through his sexy wicker body. He is also, quite literally, perfect husband material, and the core of the movie’s heart & humor rests in the way pointless societal pressures fuck that perfect scenario up for his loving wife.
Although my journey through the Alfred Hitchcock oeuvre has not been strictly linear or chronological, I decided to save his final film for my final review. It’s a pretty good one to go out on, even if I have to disagree with Roger Ebert, who wrote in his review of Family Plot that “it’s a delight for two contradictory reasons: because it’s pure Hitchcock, with its meticulous construction and attention to detail, and because it’s something new for Hitchcock—a macabre comedy.” He’s wrong on the latter account because this wasn’t the director’s first foray into overt comedy, as the disastrous The Trouble With Harry had premiered two decades earlier, and with regards to the former, there’s nothing about it that’s quintessentially Hitchcock. It’s a good movie, but it’s also one that feels like it could have been helmed by virtually anyone.
Phony psychic Blanche (Barbara Harris) makes her living using information that her cab driver boyfriend George (Bruce Dern) digs up about her clients. As the film opens, she’s just landed a potential whale; elderly spinster and sole heir to a great fortune Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbitt) has asked Blanche to find her long-lost nephew, an illegitimate child that she forced her sister to give up for adoption to avoid scandal some forty years prior. Rainbird hopes the younger woman’s psychic prowess will avert the kind of attention that private eyes and newspaper announcements would stir up. As the pair of con-artist lovebirds depart her mansion, they almost run over a woman in a long overcoat and sunglasses (Karen Black); we later learn her name is Fran, and the story follows her for a time as she strides into a police station and accepts delivery of a ransom in the form of a gigantic diamond. Without speaking a word, she directs a waiting helicopter pilot to the location where a kidnapped businessman is awaiting rescue, and she absconds with the brains of the operation, a seemingly respectable jeweler named Arthur Adamson (William Devane). George does some great amateur gumshoe work and eventually tracks down the missing Rainbird heir, who was adopted under the name Edward Shoebridge, only to learn that the man supposedly died in a fire in 1950 alongside his adoptive parents, but there’s more going on here than meets the eye.
The production of this film was troubled. Initially, Hitchcock hired Anthony Shaffer to pen the screenplay. Shaffer was on a run of hits at the time, having drafted Hitch’s Frenzyand the stellar Laurence Olivier/Michael Caine two-hander Sleuth, both released in 1972, and had followed those up with 1973’s The Wicker Man and Murder on the Orient Express, which was the first of four Hercule Poirot adaptations he would write over the course of fifteen years (including Death on the Nile). Allegedly, while Shaffer was out of the country on holiday, his agent made excessive demands of the production, which led Hitch to instead enlist Ernest Lehman, who had collaborated with the director seventeen years earlier on North by Northwest. Hitchcock’s health was in decline at the time, and he suffered a heart attack that required the surgical implantation of a pacemaker in late 1974, but in later interviews, Lehman remarked that the man was already diminished even before this, such that he stated that during early story meetings he no longer wanted “to do creative battle with this legendary and physically weakened man.” Behind-the-scenes material found on the movie’s DVD also indicate that Hitchcock was growing so exhausted with the production that he began to cut certain corners, and it does, unfortunately, show. Some driving scenes are so poorly composited that you can actually see the light of streetlamps through an actor’s face. The film’s big set piece, in which Blanche and George barely escape from a sabotaged car before the saboteur abandons all subtlety and starts to chase them down, is a combination of the opening drunk driving scene and the later cropduster attack sequence from North by Northwest but fails to be as exciting as either part of the earlier film. Of further detriment is the supposed comedy of the scenes where Blanche is doing her schtick; it isn’t funny, and lands with a thud.
There are still high marks here, though. After decades of working with John Williams, whom I have to identify every time I write about him as “the actor, not the composer,” Hitchcock does finally collaborate with John Williams the composer, fresh off of the previous year’s Jaws. In an interview on the DVD, Williams recalls meeting with Hitchcock and working on a particular scene in which Arthur is visited by one of his accomplices, a murder-happy mechanic named Maloney (Ed Lauter), who slips out of the window when Arthur is called away by detectives seeking information about the ransom diamond. Hitchcock directed Williams to have the music stop as the camera moves to the open window, so that the silence conveys his absence, and Williams recounts the anecdote in a way that denotes fondness and awe. It’s sweet, and the soundtrack that Williams composed is a good one, especially in the comedy sequences that work. The best of these is probably Blanche’s attempts to find “A. Adamson,” who might be the supposedly dead Edward Shoebridge (e.g. the Rainbird nephew). Comedy ensues as she goes through the phone book and first meets a woman, then a Black man, then a man who is too young (and a twin to boot) before finally arriving at the jewelry store. It’s a fun bit, and effective at getting the audience to relax a bit before the thriller elements kick into high gear, as Arthur and Fran drug her and lock her in their basement cell when she comes knocking, assuming that she’s there to blackmail them for a portion of the profit from their kidnapping schemes.
Narratively, this is something of a cozy mystery, which appealed to me greatly as a longtime Murder, She Wrote fan. When Blanche isn’t being one of the more annoying Hitchcock protagonists, she and George have a very fun dynamic as an investigative team. She takes information that he gathers and works it into her fortune telling sessions to prompt Julia Rainbird to remember certain details that George can then trace down. George himself is a likeable everyman detective and demonstrates a shrewd wit, like when he notices that despite sharing a death date, Edward Shoebridge’s headstone at the titular family plot is of a different material than his adoptive parents’. The film is perhaps overreliant on narrative coincidence. It’s a neat trick for George to nearly hit Fran with his car early on and then have the camera follow her, and it’s also convenient that Adamson happens to be Edward Shoebridge/Baby Boy Rainbird. That George tracks down the clergyman who baptized Edward and that said parson is now an archbishop who happens to be Fran and Arthur’s next kidnapping victim is perhaps a bridge too far, especially given that George arrives to meet him at the same time that the kidnapping is actually taking place, in front of an entire congregation, no less!
It’s forgivable though, given that this still works as a cohesive narrative despite the failing health of its director. It’s a relatively high note to go out on, and one gets the feeling that Hitch knew this was going to be his last hurrah by the time the film wrapped. At least he sent us off with a wink and a smile.
In my copy of Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat, in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller appendix, there is an undated rating of 2/10 in the margins for Marnie. I have only the faintest recollection of catching Marnie on TCM when I was a teenager, and the way that Brode writes about the film in his negative blurb is provocative, so I must admit that at some point in the past, I saw this (in whole or in part), was bored and/or offended by it, and graded it poorly. On rewatch as an adult, although there are moments where Marnie fails, it’s also much more interesting and well-considered than I (half-)remembered.
Marnie opens on a dark-haired woman whom we only see from behind as she makes her way down a train station’s departure line. Elsewhere, business owner Mr. Strutt (Martin Gabel) opens his safe and realizes that “Marion Holland,” the pretty brunette with nice legs whom he hired despite her lack of references, has made off with nearly $10K in cash (about $108K in 2026). He complains about this to publishing magnate Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), for whom he handles accounting, and reminds Mark that he met “Marion” at an office party. The dark-haired woman from the opening washes the dye out of her hair and inspects her newly blonde look in the mirror; this is Marnie (Tippi Hedren), a compulsive kleptomaniac and pathological liar. She returns to Baltimore to visit her mother, Bernice (Louise Latham), in the latter’s skid row home, where Marnie expresses great envy over her mother’s attention to a neighborhood girl named Jessie, whom the older woman treats with affection that she never showed to Marnie. On to her next con job, Marnie applies to the Rutland publishing house under the name “Mary Taylor,” where Mark instantly recognizes her, but he directs the manager to hire her anyway. Once she’s under his employ, Mark courts “Mary” despite the antagonistic relationship between her and Lil Mainwaring (Diane Baker), the widow of Mark’s deceased brother who is also in love with Mark, while he patiently waits for the day when Marnie will steal from him so that he can blackmail her into marrying him.
There’s one big misstep in Marnie, and it’s the fact that Mark sexually assaults the title character on their honeymoon cruise. This is apparently something that happened in the novel on which the film was based, and screenwriter Evan Hunter (best known to most by his pen name Ed McBain), who had previously written The Birds, objected so strongly to transliterating that into his script that he was ultimately let go from the project. Stating that all sympathy for Mark would be lost afterward, he insisted upon omitting the sequence and was replaced for his trouble by Jay Presson Allen, who received full screenwriting credit despite Hunter’s work, making this the only Hitchcock film to be credited to a woman screenwriter. Allen would later go on to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay twice, with one of those nominations coming for her penning of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, and she also penned Deathtrap and did an uncredited rewrite on Copycat. She had no problem adhering to Hitchcock’s vision, up to and including the rape scene, although it is possible that we owe her a debt of gratitude for handling it with subtlety and grace, as it occurs entirely offscreen and only in implication. Still, when people talk about Alfred Hitchcock as a man who “hated” and “terrorized” women, this is probably the movie that codified that idea best.
Brandon outlined it best when writing up the “Bonus Features” guide to Notoriouswhen it was our Movie of the Month; starting out strong with Norma Bates in Psycho in 1960 and following that up with Jessica Tandy’s frigid mother of the love interest in The Birds, the 1960s were the decade where Hitchcock let his mother-hating flag fly. Although Bernice Edgar isn’t the main antagonist in Marnie (that would be either Lil or Mark, depending on how you look at it), she is the film’s primary villain, as it becomes clear that Marnie’s frigidity and intermittent outbursts stem from something that happened in her childhood. Although the film seems to be headed toward a conclusion where we learn that former sex worker Bernice also, um, “offered” Marnie to her clients, this is, thankfully, not the case. Ultimately, the root of Marnie’s psychological issues is more mundane, if no less violent. Instead of doing a single thing to address her daughter’s mental health when the girl blocks out the memory of the inciting event, Bernice justified said temporary amnesia as a gift from God, even though her own memory of the event makes her shrink at her own daughter’s touch, all while doting on neighborhood children. She even seems pleased to stoke her daughter’s resentment and jealousy, instead brushing neighbor girl Jessie’s hair while explicitly stating that she never did the same for Marnie. No wonder Marnie ended up the way that she did.
The opening half-hour promises a different kind of movie, centering on a master lady thief, that I would have liked to see Hitchcock try at some point in his career. What we end up with is an exploration of the dark side of sexuality through the lens of contemporary psychology. A year before this film was released, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act, and mere months after the film’s premier, an article was published in the September/October issue of Fact magazine that inspired the American Medical Association to establish the Goldwater Rule as part of the group’s medical ethics guidelines. Psychology was a pop phenomenon, and it’s no surprise that Hitchcock would want to capitalize on that, given that he was fascinated with the subject long before it was in vogue. Mark’s layman’s attempts to get to the root of Marnie’s issues are as effective as they are blunt, leading her to quip “You Freud, me Jane” at one point, and it’s not a flattering portrait of him. Hitchcock was probably wagering that Connery’s sex appeal would make it easier to stomach Mark’s most evil action, which it may have at the time, but given that Connery would later remorselessly admit to slapping women around, it’s a bit more difficult to stomach in a different way. It’s also implied that Marnie recognizes that Mark is truly trying to help her and is willing to let him, as she attempts to commit suicide the following morning by drowning herself in the ship’s pool rather than throwing herself overboard. Although she quips that “the idea was to kill [her]self, not feed the fishes,” it also reads as a statement that she wants to be saved. Ultimately, that makes Marnie a movie about something truly dark and twisted, and although it isn’t the con artist girlboss movie that it tricks you into thinking it will be, it’s still much more worthwhile than the film’s grimy sexpolitick would lead you to expect.
