alfred hitchcock

Dial H for Hitchcock: The Master of Suspense’s 40 Thrillers, Ranked

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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 crème de 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.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Alfred Hitchcock Actually Presents

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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. 

Pairing: With Psycho, naturally. 

“The Perfect Crime” – 2 stars

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. 

Pairing: Visually evocative of Shadow of a Doubt and shares the film’s air of menace and sense of feeling trapped. For further viewing, the story was also adapted in the Wes Anderson anthology film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More.

“Banquo’s Chair” – 3 stars

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.  

Pairing: The Alpine setting calls to mind the original The Man Who Knew Too Much.

“Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat” – 3.5 stars

Season Six, Episode One, aired September 27, 1960

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.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Marnie (1964)

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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 Notorious when 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.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Vertigo (1958)

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Brandon & I recently recorded a podcast episode about our major Alfred Hitchcock oversights; Brandon had never seen North by Northwest, and I had never seen Rebecca, but perhaps the greatest oversight on my part was that I had never seen Vertigo. Vertigo had a lukewarm reception upon release in 1958, but has in more recent decades been re-evaluated and come to be considered not only Hitch’s greatest film, but in the Sight & Sound poll for 2012, it was considered the greatest film of all time (the 2022 re-draft put Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels at number one). I’ve done some reading about the 2012 voting, and it seems there is some suspicion that several of the participants simply wanted to dethrone Citizen Kane from the number one spot and seemed to rally around Vertigo more for contrarian purposes than genuine belief that it’s the greatest film ever made. I didn’t go into this project with the expectation that I would compose a ranked list of Hitchcock’s work that would greatly upset the commonly accepted wisdom, but now having seen all but one of the director’s thriller films (I’m saving his final film, Family Plot, for last), I must put forward my most controversial opinion here; Vertigo is “merely” good, not exceptional.

The film opens with Detective John “Scottie” Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) and a fellow police officer in the middle of a rooftop chase of a suspect. Scottie loses his footing and finds himself clinging to a gutter over a fatal drop into an alley. When his partner attempts to rescue him, the man slips himself and falls to his death. Sometime later, Scottie has retired from the force when he receives a request from college acquaintance Gavin Helster (Tom Helmore) to put his skills to use by following his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak). Gavin does not suspect her of infidelity, but instead fears that she may come to some harm as the result of her connection to a long-dead woman named Carlotta Valdes, Madeleine’s great-grandmother who killed herself at the age of twenty-six, the same age Madeleine now is. As Scottie follows her around, he learns that Madeleine occasionally seems to enter a fugue state where she takes flowers to Carlotta’s grave, spends hours staring at a portrait of the woman in a local museum, and even rents a room in the hotel that was once Carlotta’s house. Over time, Scottie falls in love with Madeleine, and after he rescues her from an apparent suicide attempt when she leaps into San Francisco Bay, she seems to reciprocate these feelings. Madeleine’s apparent haunting/possession by Carlotta seems to be hurtling toward a tragic end, but when something unthinkable does happen, that’s only the beginning of many more twists and turns.

I can see why this is as popular as it is. Like Psycho, Spellbound, and Marnie, Vertigo reflects Hitchcock’s fascination with contemporary psychology, even if the science was very Freudian and of its time. It’s also the only Hitchcock thriller that, at least for a time, presents itself as being a more traditional, supernaturally-influenced horror story, as the presumably skeptical audience is led to wonder whether Madeleine is, in fact, being possessed by her great-grandmother’s ghost. Other than the possibly preternatural link that Young Charlie and Uncle Charlie share in Shadow of a Doubt, this is the only Hitchcock thriller that contains that element, and even though there is a logical explanation for what happens, I understand the appeal that the plot line holds. If Kim Novak is your cup of tea, then you’re in luck, as the film spends long periods of time gazing at her or at a painting of her; I don’t personally find her performance here to be very strong, and learning that Hitch wanted either Vera Miles or Eva Marie Saint for the role makes a lot more sense. Arguably this is the point, as her tabula rasa nature allows Scottie to obsess over her without anything pesky like a personality getting in the way (presumably the only reason that he doesn’t go for the available, lively, spunky, adorable Midge), so I can make an allowance for it, but imagining either Miles or Saint in the role is frustrating, since I can only see either of them improving my personal absorption in the narrative. Stewart’s character here is largely indistinguishable, personality-wise, from Jeff in Rear Window, which is well within his wheelhouse, even if it feels like he’s doing an impression of himself rather than really trying to make Scottie feel real.

If one were to judge the film on its visual merits alone, it’s virtually peerless and its reputation is unassailable. The film is definitively one of the director’s most beautiful; Helster’s office is one of the most sumptuous sets I’ve ever seen, and it’s not a surprise that Hitchcock was so taken with it that he had his own real life office redecorated to imitate it. Ernie’s Restaurant is likewise a gorgeous locale, with crimson damask wallpaper and matching carpeting that make one feel as if they are looking at the interior of a heart, all that red making Madeleine’s green dress stand out all the more. In the scene where Scottie follows Madeleine to a floral shop, the way that the bounty of flowers frames the grey-suited Madeleine is simply gorgeous, and the reverse shot of her reflected in a mirrored door as Scottie peers out from a gap is one of the best compositions of Hitchcock’s career. There are excellent counter-compositions as well, as we move from the rundown McKittrick Hotel, which still retains all of its dark, ornate woodwork and its now-faded wallpaper, to Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes)’s modern apartment with her drawing desk and cluttered supplies and artworks, then to the beautifully appointed Argosy Bookstore. Exterior shots capture some of the best American architectural feats of the early twentieth century as we visit the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (where Carlotta’s painting is kept), spend some time on the Presidio marveling at the Golden Gate Bridge, and gaze at the distant Coit Tower Madeleine uses as a landmark to retrace her steps back to Scottie’s home. We even spend some time in a forest of sequoia trees, and the effect is magical, and there’s not a single window in the film that doesn’t feature a gorgeous view of San Francisco. Every frame is perfect, and I haven’t even mentioned the bizarre, perfect acid-dream nightmare sequence that Scottie has at roughly the 2/3rds mark, which is a perfect piece of cinema unto itself.

The narrative has a lot of potential, but it falls apart under scrutiny. Spoilers (for a nearly seventy-year-old film) through the end of this paragraph. The twist that the “Madeleine” Scottie has followed for so much of the film is really a woman named Judy Barton whom Helster hired to play the role of Madeleine while his wife is away in the country, so that Scottie can witness her slowly deteriorating mental state and testify to it, is a solid one. Knowing that Scottie’s acrophobia will prevent him from following “Madeleine” to the top of a tower in an old Spanish mission, Helster is already there, and he throws the real Madeleine’s already murdered corpse from the top, seemingly committing the perfect crime. Things start to fall apart when Scottie sees Judy some time later and begins to court her in an attempt to recreate “Madeleine” without realizing that they are the same woman, which stretches the bounds of credulity a bit too far. The mystery is decently maintained until the moment that the audience learns what Helster did, as it carries that same maybe-supernatural element through since it appears that Madeleine has a doppelganger, but once we learn the truth about Judy, the film plods along for far too long before it reaches its conclusion. To relate this to Hitchcock’s famous discussion about the tension that is created by telling the audience that there is a bomb under a table and how that tension is diffused the moment that the bomb goes off, this is like telling us that the bomb under the table has already been defused, with half an hour left to go. The sequence of events also leads to audience confusion as well; Scottie witnesses “Madeleine’s” death, then attends the coroner’s inquest, then has the nightmare sequence that seems to render him catatonic when Midge leaves him in a recovery facility, then immediately cuts to Scottie walking down the street, where he thinks he sees Madeleine. Watching this, I had to ask my viewing companion: “Wait a second, when did he recover?” before I decided to just go with it. Since I was in that state of mind, it didn’t even occur to me that Scottie wasn’t aware that Judy was Madeleine until he has his epiphanic moment when she puts on Madeleine/Carlotta’s necklace.

I’m sorry to say that I was largely disappointed in Vertigo. I understand the appeal, and I even understand the acclaim, but I was left fairly cold by the film overall. It’s a visual feast, but the narrative is convoluted in a way that’s more frustrating than fun and the performances are merely adequate. I did appreciate that the reveal explains some things about Helster’s performance. In his initial meeting with Scottie, he jumps straight to the “It’s not what you think” explanation of his hiring of the man to follow his wife without waiting for Scottie to react to the initial overture, which makes sense in retrospect given that he had likely rehearsed the monologue to death. It also explains some of his dialogue choices from the coroner’s inquest, but it doesn’t gel with his other poor line deliveries in other scenes. The effectiveness of Kim Novak’s performance will vary from person to person depending upon how much one is willing to accept that her monotony is intentional. In doing some light research about the film, I can see that it has been the subject of great academic criticism, and I can understand that as well, since this is a very mood-oriented piece and thus gives itself over to style over substance in a way that invites dissection. I’ve also seen that there are a great number of people who argue that the film is an extended dream sequence, in whole or in part, beginning either in the wake of the animated dream sequence, immediately following the first bell tower scene, or (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge style) all the way back at the five-minute mark when Scottie is dangling from a gutter. I don’t usually think too highly of any flavor of extratextual “it was all a dream” explanation, but I have to admit that I might adopt that belief for myself, as it does improve the text for me as an audience member, at least this time (and it would explain why we spend so much of this film watching Scottie slooooowly drive from place to place). Maybe I was simply too excited for this one, and the movie itself was never going to be able to live up to my expectations. It’s still a good picture, just not (for me) a great one.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Torn Curtain (1966)

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In discussions about my upcoming plans to rank all of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, I’ve mentioned the number “forty” several times, but that’s because I am simply not that interested in his non-thriller films. Even among those that theoretically count as thrillers as a secondary genre, like the comedy The Trouble With Harry and the period piece melodrama Under Capricorn, those have turned out to be the ones that I like least of all. There are about a dozen inarguably non-thrillers that Hitch directed, mostly in his early career, and as such, the 1966 release of Torn Curtain was a landmark, as it was the director’s fiftieth film. Ultimately, it was one that really only pleased the studio due to its financial success, as contemporary audiences and critics as well as the stars and the director himself weren’t terribly pleased with it. 

Torn Curtain opens aboard a passenger ship experiencing heating problems while traversing the European fjords, bearing several dozen scientists to Copenhagen for a physics conference. At lunch, two people are conspicuously absent: Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) and his assistant and fiancée, Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews), as they are canoodling together in his cabin, where they make pillow talk about his recent departure from D.C. following the ending of funding for an anti-missile program in which he was involved. Armstrong receives a radiogram that he conspicuously denies is for him, only to later retrieve it from the ship’s radio room. There, he runs into East German physicist Gerhard (Hansjörg Felmy), who was expecting to have a lunch date with Sarah. Upon arrival in Denmark, Sarah takes it upon herself to retrieve a book that is being held for Armstrong at a nearby shop, and Gerhard tags along. Later, alone, Armstrong decodes a passage in the book that directs him to make contact with someone or something calling themself Pi (as in π). Growing more suspicious as to why Armstrong tried to keep her from joining him on this trip, Sarah watches as he retrieves a ticket from a concierge that he claims is for a quick side trip to Stockholm. When she learns that he is actually going to East Berlin, she follows him and boards the same plane, arriving alongside him behind the Iron Curtain just in time to watch him publicly defect to the Soviet Union.

Hitchcock’s espionage thrillers in the lead up to (Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes), during (Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Lifeboat), and immediately following (Notorious) WWII are all explicitly political. For the most part, his Cold War era spy features, of which there are only four, are not. The Stewart/Day version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which was the first espionage thriller since Notorious a decade earlier, foregoes any real inspection of the foreign “other” that made the Peter Lorre version a much more exciting film. Other than a line from Leo G. Carroll’s professor character in North by Northwest in which he tells Cary Grant, “War is hell, Mr. Thornhill, even when it’s a cold one,” the film is politically vague. Hitch’s output in the back half of his career shows that he wasn’t terribly interested in cloak-and-dagger flicks anymore, and cared even less about politicizing them; if anything, one could argue that the “spying on one’s neighbor” politics of Rear Window are more politically conscious than his two 1950s espionage pictures. That changed in the 60s. By 1965, Eon Productions had released four James Bond films: Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball, and all of them had been inspired in some way by North by Northwest. With a fifth Bond on the horizon, Hitchcock took two attempts at making his own version: 1966’s Torn Curtain and Topaz, the latter of which would premiere in 1967, the same year as You Only Live Twice.

Topaz is fine, if a little overlong, and it’s more clearly evocative of the Bond format; the main character is a career spy, has a lot of gadgets, and has sexual encounters with morally dubious women on both sides. Torn Curtain is a better film because it adheres more closely to Hitchcock’s strengths: strong character work, an “everyman” protagonist, an appropriate level of comic relief, the occasional breathtakingly gorgeous shot composition, and multiple scenes of excellent tension. Unfortunately, it also features some of the director’s late-career shortcomings, notably some lazy shortcuts with some visuals. The most unconvincing is a scene in Copenhagen where Armstrong and Sarah are at an outdoor cafe where he behaves like a total ass in an attempt to get her to stop following him (and thus avoid potentially being trapped in East Germany for the rest of her life). Inexplicably, the sequence is shot not on location or even on a soundstage, but with Andrews and Newman sitting across from each other at a table while the street, the restaurant, and the other patrons are rear-projected behind them. 

To its credit, however, it also uses some of Hitch’s ideas from his other end-of-career films in the best possible way. I’ve fretted quite a lot about what the gratuitous, provocative, mean-spirited sexpolitick and violence of Frenzy (and to a lesser extent, Marnie) might imply about the man’s entire filmography, but this film perfectly combines the cheekiness of the underplayed sexuality in North by Northwest with the more liberal attitude toward sex (and violence) that Frenzy had. While the censor boards prevented him from showing Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint climbing into bed together at the end of Northwest despite them explicitly being married by that point, this film opens with Newman and Andrews under the sheets (and a pile of coats) together. In the features on this film’s Blu-ray, they include and highlight an on-set production photo showing a bra lying in the open in a shot that doesn’t appear in the film, which is more suggestive than the director would have been able to get away with at an earlier point, and when Newman gets out of bed, he’s topless. In a reversal of the mainstream tendency for a film to ogle its female characters, Hitchcock also clearly understood Newman’s wide sex appeal, as he is slutting this man out. In addition to climbing out of bed with Andrews shirtless in the first scene, he’s shot head to toe in a shower in a Danish hotel with only a frosted shower curtain to leave something to the imagination, and Newman’s top comes off again in the back half in a doctor’s office to wake up anyone in the audience who might have started to zone out at that point. In contrast, although Andrews is gorgeous, the Edith Head costumes that she wears throughout are sharply tailored and fabulous, but also conservative in their coverage. (It’s also worth noting that the hairstyle she has here is not flattering; one assumes it’s her actual hair, still growing out from the short style she wore in the previous year’s The Sound of Music, but the two-toned highlights make her appear greying in a manner that ages her in such a way that you would believe it if someone told you that film and this one were a decade apart.) 

The production was a mess behind the scenes. One of Hitchcock’s most famous quotes is that “Actors should be treated like cattle,” and Newman was a younger performer who had studied method performance at the Actor’s Studio. The director didn’t care for this, and is quoted as having responded to Newman’s question about what his motivation was in one scene by telling the actor “Your salary.” Hitchcock may have burned a bridge with longtime collaborator Bernard Herrmann, who composed several of his films, including Psycho and The Birds. All sources note that they “never worked together again,” but Hitch only made three more movies after this, one of them after Herrmann’s death, so it’s unclear how long-term that enmity might have been if either of them hadn’t been quite old at this point. Andrews’s sudden ascendancy to superstar meant that she was cast at the studio’s insistence, even though her brief window of availability also meant that the film had to be rushed into production despite Hitchcock not feeling that the script was ready. Of the experience, she has said that she took the opportunity because she wanted to work with the famous director, “and that’s what [she] got out of it,” since she “did not have to act in Torn Curtain. [She] merely went along for the ride.” 

To be honest, all of these seams are apparent in the final product, but this is nonetheless a decently captivating motion picture, especially if you are someone familiar with Hitchcock’s work. Contemporary reviews criticized the film’s pacing, cited a disappointing second half once the twist becomes clear (especially so since, although Sarah believes Armstrong’s defection is in earnest, no one in the audience will), and criticized what they felt was an old-fashioned film. To that last point, they may not be wrong. As noted before, this was the man’s fiftieth feature, and he had been doing this for four decades; he was now in direct box office competition with two generations of directors who had been inspired by his work, while he was a 67-year-old man with only a few films left in him. Nevertheless, this might not be hitting it out of the park, but he’s still making it to second base. The most well-remembered scene finds Armstrong grappling to death with his Stasi tail, Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling), in a farmhouse kitchen when Gromek tracks the supposed defector to a farm where he finds the π symbol scratched in the dirt. This is where the looser restrictions around violence in the 1960s work better than in Frenzy. Hitchcock wanted it to be clear that killing a man is difficult work, rather than the quick and easy slayings that James Bond dished out, and so the scene lasts a long time. The academic Armstrong is no match for the man, and it takes help from a farmer’s wife to take Gromek down, in a fight that involves a knife, a shovel, and a pot of cabbage soup. 

It’s excellent stuff, but the sequence that stood out the most to me was one in which Armstrong and Sarah are escorted onto a bus full of other members of the secret π organization. The bus is a decoy that runs ten minutes ahead of schedule of the real bus that goes from Leipzig to East Berlin, and everyone aboard is a member of the resistance. It’s fantastically tense, as the audience first experiences relief when it seems like Sarah and Armstrong are finally en route to the next step in their homeward journey, then anxiety when they meet the first police barricade, then relief when they pass, then suspense when they encounter a second barricade, only to find that they now have to deal with army deserters who act as highwaymen. It’s a great ride. Once they get to East Berlin, they also find themselves assisted by a Polish expat, Countess Kuczynska (Lila Kedrova), who hopes to escape to America with their help, and she adds a lot of heart to the film. Despite her late arrival, she’s third billed, and it’s well deserved.

Time has not been kind to Torn Curtain, but its categorization as a lesser Hitchcock is largely undeserved. It doesn’t reach the director’s heights, but it’s also much more engaging and exciting than its reputation would indicate.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Hitchcock Quickies

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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 (give or take) of the thriller films directed by Alfred Hitchcock had some kind of coverage, in the lead up to an overall Hitchcock ranking. Because the uptown Prytania in New Orleans programs a great deal of classic Hitchcock, Brandon had already seen and reviewed many of them, but I still needed to watch (or re-watch) all of them in order to complete my “best Hitchcocks” list, which sometimes left me without an outlet to talk much about them, and we didn’t always agree. So, I’ve collected my thoughts on the Hitchcock films already covered by Swampflix below.

Suspicion (1941)

When compiling the document for us to keep track of what had and hadn’t already been covered, Suspicion was a film that I noted I hadn’t seen, because once you get into that period of Hitchcock’s work where he had a high density of films beginning with S— (Sabotage, Suspicion, Saboteur, Spellbound, Stage Fright), they tend to blur together somewhat. To my surprise, when I went to my notes in the margins of Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat, I discovered that I had given this one a rating that was quite high, with no date associated. As I watched the film, I slowly began to recall the general outline of the plot, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how a younger, even less patient version of myself was able to get through this film in a single sitting, let alone enjoy it so much. In general, I find Hitchcock’s domestic dramas less interesting than his espionage plots. For every exhilarating Shadow of a Doubt, there’s a plodding I Confess. Suspicion is a film that I felt had a lot in common with Hitchcock’s very early work Number Seventeen, in that it’s repetitive and tiresome for most of its runtime, until it suddenly whips into gear in its final fifteen minutes. No wonder I forgot that I had already seen it; I can now vaguely recall a TCM screening that was so unmemorable that I had long ago assumed that images from it were things that I had dismissed as incorrect recollections of Notorious, most notably the scenes of Cary Grant in a poorly driven car.

Most viewers’ issues with Suspicion stem from what many considered to be a rushed, cop-out ending. Supposedly, the film was intended to end more like the book on which it was based, with Lina (Joan Fontaine)’s suspicions about her husband Johnnie (Grant)’s plans to murder being revealed to be well-founded. Apocryphally, Hitchcock lost a fight with the studio about this ending, as there were concerns that Grant’s performance as a murderous cad would tarnish his marketability as a leading man. I can say with certainty that this is not my issue with the film because the last-minute revelation that Johnnie is innocent in the deaths of his friend Beaky and was only picking the brain of a local Agatha Christie-esque mystery author to find a way to commit suicide is, in my interpretation, an utter fabrication. He was very clearly going to murder Lina, and his sudden apology for his behavior after all of his sinister machinations is yet another in a long line of Johnnie’s fibs that Lina naively falls for. After several rinse-and-repeat scenes of Johnnie being caught in a lie and then having to backtrack out of it, the audience has the understanding that no matter how many times Lina finds one of her family heirlooms at the antique store or someone stops her on the street to “Oh, honey,” her about the fact that her loser husband is not at work as he claims but is instead a frequent fixture at the race track, she’s just going to fall for it again. I don’t understand how the film’s final scene could be read any other way. She’s just getting back on the carousel again, and the next time Johnnie takes her on a dangerously fast coastal drive, he’s going to successfully push her out of the vehicle because she’ll be lulled into a false sense of security. This is not a happy ending by any stretch of the imagination, and that’s almost enough to save it, but not quite. The image of an enshadowed Grant summiting the stairs while carrying a possibly poisoned glass of milk is striking, but it comes far too late in a meandering plot to make much of a difference.

Saboteur (1942)

When we talked about The 39 Steps, one of the things that I mentioned was that ingesting so many Hitchcock films in rapid succession highlighted the fact that North by Northwest was assembled from various ideas, images, frameworks, iconography, and archetypes that he had been sharpening and honing for decades at that point in his career. Specifically, I cited that North by Northwest was all but a remake of 39 Steps in structure and character, with the Hitch staple of an innocent man on the run featuring a similar romantic entanglement and similar climactic finale taking place in a landmark location (although the director was using the last of these tropes as early as 1929’s Blackmail). As it turns out, there was (at least) one link in the chain of Hitchcock’s evolution of this concept that I hadn’t seen at that time, 1942’s Saboteur. In the midst of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, a domestic terrorist sabotages a California aircraft manufacturing facility, and blame falls on factory worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), who goes looking for the real culprit based on a piece of mail that he saw the saboteur carrying. Just as in The 39 Steps, this results in our reluctant hero falling into the hands of a fascist-supporting man who takes advantage of his status as a well-respected member of the community, being forced to take a hostile woman hostage, escaping from police custody on a bridge, and even being forced into turning himself over to the antagonists when his love interest is threatened just when he has the opportunity to expose their nefarious deeds to a large audience. Presaging his eventual use of Six Grandfathers Mountain in North by Northwest, the film’s nail-biting climax takes place at the top of the Statue of Liberty.

What sets this one apart is both how jingoistic it is about America while remaining frank about and critical of its institutions. As always, Hitchcock’s police officer characters are inept, corrupt, and easily-duped, but the series of characters that Kane meets along the way who aren’t surreptitiously fascists are a broad spectrum of kindly strangers who help him evade detection and stay one step ahead of the police. Blind pianists, bearded ladies, long-haul truckers: they are all united in their belief in Kane’s innocence, and each independently contributes more to the successful capture of the titular saboteur than the combined efforts of the systems in place. The system itself is the enemy of the people, whether embodied in the wealthy—composed of coastal urban socialites and wealthy rural land men alike—or in the passive collaboration of a law enforcement which does the bidding of the wealthy and ignores the innocence of the common man. It’s interesting subtext, and although a lot of critics found the performance of Cummings as Kane underwhelming, I found myself rather taken with him in this film. Not as well remembered as either of the films that it serves as the link between, but an exceptional picture nonetheless.

Stage Fright (1950)

One of the many unintended tragic consequences of the “improvement” of search engines over time is that the recommendations for related searches can sometimes pop up and spoil something for you before you get the chance to get to what you were trying to find. This film is not often in discussion as a major work in Hitchcock’s canon, despite the fact that it’s quite good, and is instead only remembered as one of the films that featured an element that Hitchcock regretted. I won’t get into what or why (I’m kinder to you that the Google landing page in that way), but I will say that, just as the director was strongarmed into feigning apologizing for the shocking act of violence that is (for many) the most memorable thing about Sabotage, the public “I’m sorry” that Hitchcock made in later years for breaking the audience’s trust by subverting a narrative convention here should never have come to be. It’s an artist’s job to challenge the observer, and although the outcry from the masses in response to one of this film’s twists must have weighed heavily on his mind for many years, Hitchcock didn’t owe us an apology. Even as early as 1950, the audience presumed that they came to a Hitchcock picture with the expectation that they would be shocked, surprised, and entertained, and they got what they paid for. When I hear about the people who whined about Hitchcock “breaking their trust,” they all look like Annie Wilkes in my mind’s eye.

Dial M for Murder (1954)

This is an oddity in the Hitchcock film canon for a few reasons. Firstly, a lot of the man’s films are either sprawling odysseys that take a character from London to the Highlands or from Madison Avenue to Six Grandfathers Mountain, while he drew attention to his “limited setting” pictures (namely Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window) by confining their location. Dial M for Murder is often left out of discussions of the latter, largely because it isn’t confined to precisely one location, but it is noteworthy in that it’s limited to no more than three sets and some rear-projected street scenes. Despite this, it doesn’t do any of the fancy camera work that Rear Window did (that same year, no less). Even when a character is facing trial for a murder, instead of the standard courtroom scene, we get a more expressionistic image of said character standing before a colorful void that reflects their inner turmoil while the charges are read and the sentence is pronounced, all in barely a minute of screentime. It further differentiates itself from the larger repertoire in that, when Hitchcock followed a traditional mystery structure, he usually stuck to the age-old whodunit scaffolding. Dial M for Murder is a howcatchem (like Columbo or Poker Face) feature and it was released theatrically (in 3D!), it more neatly intersects with the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The anthology series began airing the year after this film was released and continued for a total of ten seasons (with the last three featuring episodes of an hour in length rather than the thirty minutes they had spanned in previous years, much to the detriment of the renamed Alfred Hitchcock Hour). Hitch didn’t direct every episode himself, of course (in total, he directed 18 of 361), but the series did have a symbiotic relationship with his film career. The most obvious impact came with Psycho, which Hitchcock shot quickly between seasons of the show and using the show’s crew, which is why it was his first film since Strangers on a Train to be shot in black and white instead of color (other than The Wrong Man, where the monochrome nature is deliberate due to the movie’s docudrama nature). When he did direct episodes of the show, Hitchcock would use the show’s resources to work on proofs of concept for his features, essentially treating the series as an incubator for test runs of certain techniques. The season-two episode “One More Mile to Go” is perhaps the most apparent in this respect, as one can draw a direct visual line from that episode’s use of a dashboard point of view of a traffic stop and the sequence in Psycho where Marion Crane is pulled over by a motorcycle cop. This film also features an appearance from John Williams, who appeared in eight separate Hitchcock Presents narratives (one of which was a three-parter, so he technically was in ten episodes), many of them Hitchcock-directed installments, which goes to show how much the two got along.

This is a lot of information about the technical elements of the movie and where it fits into the oeuvre, which overlooks that, on the whole, this is a delightful little reverse mystery. Ray Milland, the man with the x-ray eyes himself, discovers that his wife (Grace Kelly) has been having an affair with a handsome young tennis star (Robert Cummings) and sets out to have her murdered, but when she manages to kill her would-be-killer in self-defense, he allows her to go to trial for murder, hoping that the justice system will solve all his problems. Small scale and domestic, but still quite good.

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Retired catburglar and jewel thief John Robie (Cary Grant), alias “The Cat,” lives a life of quiet leisure in a French villa, having been paroled for his work in the French Resistance during WWII. When a string of high profile jewelry burglaries is reported along the French Riviera, Robie knows that he’ll be questioned, and fears the loss of his reputation as a reformed man. When investigators do come for him, Robie escapes and makes his way to the restaurant of his friend Bertani, whose staff consists almost entirely of the old gang of thieves, all making an attempt at an honest life. Bertani directs the daughter of the restaurant’s wine steward to take Robie by boat and drop him off at a nearby beach club. Unbeknownst to him, it’s here that he’s first noticed by Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly), an American traveling with her nouveau riche mother, Jessie (Jessie Royce Landis). Robie also encounters a man named Hughson (John Williams again), an insurance specialist with Lloyd’s of London, who is in the area due to many of the recent thefts having been insured by his employer. Reluctantly, he agrees to help Robie try to find the copycat “Cat” by providing information about another set of insured clients in the area, which just so happens to include Mrs. Stevens and her daughter.

I watched this one shortly after seeing both the striking The Lady Vanishes and the non-Hitchcock noir classic Dark Passage, and it couldn’t help but feel a little lackluster in comparison. Reportedly, Hitchcock decided to direct this picture because he wanted to take a vacation in France, and if that’s true, I’d have to admit that it shows. There are glorious, lovely sweeping vistas throughout, but there’s nothing in the film with the inspiration of, say, the zoom in from across a great chessboard-tiled entry hall to a tiny key in someone’s hand in Notorious. When Hitchcock pulls out one of his trademarks, like a climactic rooftop scene at the end, it feels less like he’s playing the hits and more like he’s spinning his wheels. Kelly is magnetic as always, but Grant fails to inspire.

Psycho (1960)

What is there left to say about Psycho? It’s one of the greatest films of all time? 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? My most recent rewatch (of many) was at a repertory screening at my local megaplex, accompanied by a younger friend who had no concept of what the movie was beyond obliquely recognizing the title, but he had some sense of what was going to happen because of his familiarity with the AMC prequel series Bates Motel; there’s something about horseshoe theory and pop cultural penetration to be mined from that, I’m sure. Sixty-six years later, the score is still so iconic that it was used in Primetime. It’s Psycho. You already know everything there is to know about it.

The Birds (1963)

The Birds is my mom’s favorite Hitchcock, but I still never managed to see it until I was an adult. It’s hard to describe the film without sounding like you’re talking about a B-grade schlocky horror, because in many ways, it is one, but like Psycho before it, it was also a genre definer. Tippi Hedren is a socialite who has risen to notoriety after a practical joke got out of hand and resulted in a widely publicized court appearance. She has a meet-cute with a handsome lawyer who is trying to buy a couple of lovebirds for his sister’s eleventh birthday. Hedren, believing that she’s in a romcom, buys the birds and tracks him down to Bodega Bay, where she learns that her new love interest has an overbearing mother (Jessica Tandy) who ruins all of her son’s potential relationships. Were it not for the ominous lack of sound (other than cawing corvids) that played over the film’s opening credits, one could mistake this for any other period romantic comedy, right down to Hedren’s character being a comically bad “woman driver” and her getting a mild injury (via divebombing seagull) that her love interest can tenderly tend. Other than a typically an offhand mention of the lawyer’s mother’s chickens refusing to eat, nothing seems truly amiss until the birds turn on mankind in full force, and we’re suddenly in a very different kind of movie.

(Tippi Hedren is iconic in this part. I remember commercial parodies of her taking refuge in a phone booth airing well into early aughts, and we probably only stopped seeing them because those are a thing that don’t exist anymore; and that didn’t stop a bird figurine based on her from selling out just two years ago.)

The Birds is not as shocking a swerve as the mid-film shake-up of Psycho, but the shot of one of the residents of the small town being discovered with his eyes completely pecked out is a major departure from an otherwise charming story so far, and things only get more exciting from there. There’s a scene in the diner in town that feels like it became a direct inspiration for so many similar tableaux in a great many of Stephen King’s works, where the residents of a coastal village argue and turn on one another when faced with some external evil force. All hell breaks loose moments later when a man gassing up his car is attacked by the birds, causing him to spill a trail of gasoline that ignites and sets off chaos. The final twenty minutes feature an all-out attack on the farmhouse by screeching fowl, and it’s terrifying. A master lesson in classing up a schlocky idea.

Frenzy (1972)

Not just a bad movie because it’s ugly, cruel, and nasty (although it certainly is all of those things), Frenzy is a film that I can’t help but detest for the shadow that it casts over the rest of Hitchcock’s career. Gone are the subtleties and nuances with regards to sex and violence. Instead of the provocative image of stockings being dried near a fireplace in The 39 Steps or fireworks going off over the water outside of a hotel window when Cary Grant and Grace Kelly kiss in To Catch a Thief, we get a graphic rape sequence. In place of the implication of violence in Psycho, where we never actually see a knife penetrating flesh, but the sequence tricks you into thinking you have, we witness stomach-churning violence. When the ending of North by Northwest was considered too risqué for its implication that Grant and Eva Marie Saint are about to consummate their marriage, Hitchcock cheekily thumbed his nose at the censor board by ending the film on the metaphorically graphic image of a train entering a tunnel. Frenzy shows the director in a different moral era, one in which he can get away with more salacious and explicit images and content, and he goes full bore into it at the end of his career.

Frenzy raises the question of whether or not all of the sly playfulness and clever directorial handiwork in Hitchcock’s oeuvre would have existed if he hadn’t had to outwit and circumnavigate contemporary censorship, ratings boards, and public sentiment. We remember Hitchcock as a master of the discipline because of the subtleties of his work, his deft hand at misleading you via cinematic trickery into thinking you’ve seen something that you didn’t, his impudent impishness at pushing the envelope. Even at the height of his career and amidst nigh-universal acclaim for his work during his golden era, Hitchcock had to be cleverer than the people who could (and would) try to stop his vision, and that made him sharper as a filmmaker. Frenzy’s very existence implies that, with those strictures loosened, an unbridled Hitchcock is craven, schlocky, and base. This is the film that fans the flames of those who argue Hitch was a misogynistic asshole. If there was nothing else left of his body of work but Frenzy, there could be no counterclaim.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rear Window (1954)

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When we discussed the two Men Who Knew Too Much, Brandon and I commiserated that the updated 1950s version starring James Stewart could not hold a candle to the original Peter Lorre-centered film, but he posited that one could list off Alfred Hitchcock’s three other collaborations with Stewart—Rope, Rear Window, and Vertigo—and confidently call them the director’s masterworks without that being much of a hot take. Rear Window was the first Hitchcock film I ever saw, and I immediately fell in love with it. Through viewings of several others, it remained at the top of that list, until sometime in my late teens I fell head over heels for Notorious. I hadn’t revisited it in a very long time, possibly because I became too familiar with it, but after returning to the well after such a long absence, the water is even sweeter than I remembered.

L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Stewart) is a WWII vet and photographer who is in the sixth of seven weeks of recuperation after a daring shot at a racetrack that resulted in a broken leg. He is attended every day by wisecracking insurance nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), who encourages him to settle down with his fashionista girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) before she finds someone better than him. Accustomed to a faster pace of living, Jeff fears that Lisa would be ill-equipped for a life of adventure with him in the often dangerous places that he finds himself on assignment, while Lisa hopes that, as he’s getting older, he’ll be willing to take a more stationary position with his magazine in New York, where they can be together. His only entertainment during his medical imprisonment is voyeuristically observing the neighbors whose windows face the same courtyard as his: Miss Hearing Aid, a sculptor; Miss Lonelyhearts, a woman who can’t seem to find a good man; Miss Torso, a dancer; the songwriter, who can’t seem to get his latest composition just right; and two married couples, one with a little dog that they let down into the courtyard with a basket and the other composed of a supposedly invalid wife and the salesman husband (Raymond Burr) who supports her. When he believes that he has witnessed a murder in one of the apartments, Lisa and Stella become his sidekicks in determining if one of his neighbors is a murderer, or if his mind has gotten so bored in his semi-isolation that it’s begun to play tricks on him.

This is an all-time classic for a reason. Although he struggled with the contradictions of his character in Rope, Stewart shines in this performance, as Jeff is a character who’s rough around the edges and a bit of a jerk, but with whom we remain nonetheless empathetic and sympathetic. At this point in his relationship with Lisa, they are explicitly chaste, as Jeff’s cast has immobilized him in more ways than one, and one gets the feeling that without being able to be intimate with one another and mistake passion for love, he’s come to realize that he doesn’t feel like he and Lisa are actually all that compatible. Unconsciously, he’s pushing her away and making up excuses for why, drawing barriers between them in the form of their class differences (she “belongs to the rarefied atmosphere of Park Avenue” while he lives in Greenwich Village with the other poor, starving artists) and trying to warn her away from joining him in his life of wandering by making it seem unsuitable to her. It isn’t until he sees that she gets the same thrills that he does when they leave a note for the possible murderer to see their reaction that he actually sees her and realizes that they could have a potential future together. Since he only comes to this realization when he sees how she could fit into his life, combined with the fact that he doesn’t cry out for help or try to distract the killer when Lisa falls into their clutches, one could find him difficult to like, and it only really works with Stewart in the role. What I see in that scene is that his realization of his helplessness paralyzes him far more than being injured did, and for the first time he has some concept that a life of adventure could actually be dangerous to her, in reality and not just as a fiction to keep them apart, and understands that he’d rather be with her than not.

More academic critics than I have spilled a great deal of ink over the film’s use of Jeff as the audience surrogate, as his viewpoints into his neighbors’ lives are metaphorically like us watching the movie. There’s also been a great deal of writing about the film’s sexual connotations, especially with regards to the prurience of voyeurism and the phallic nature of Jeff’s telescopic lens. One thing that I haven’t seen discussed is the way that each of the vignettes that Jeff observes has only a partial, fragmented view of the participants, to which he ascribes narratives that he has essentially made up, without realizing that they are all reflective of him. Miss Hearing Aid is nosey, just as he is, as demonstrated when she gets into Mr. Thorwald’s business about how much he’s watering his plants, and when she is frustrated by Miss Torso’s loud music and footfalls, she turns her hearing aid down, just as Jeff tunes out what he doesn’t want to hear. The songwriter is a frustrated artist who is blocked creatively while Jeff is a photographer temporarily caged, and Miss Lonelyhearts is a reflection of what Lisa could become if Jeff continues to waste her youth without commitment; Lonelyhearts changes her mind about overdosing when the songwriter finishes his piece and the two of them listen to it together, in perfect time for Jeff and Lisa to (maybe) commit to one another fully. Miss Torso’s similarities to Lisa are textual, as there is a conversation between Lisa and Jeff one night when she has a few men in her apartment and Jeff compares the two directly, only for Lisa to declare that the woman across the way is “juggling wolves” and that she doesn’t love any of her suitors. When Jeff asks her how she knows, she says “You said it’s just like my apartment, didn’t you?” This proves true in the end, when the dancer’s beloved, a short nerd named Stanley, returns from the war and she takes him passionately into her arms, just as Lisa, who could do a lot better than grumpy old Jeff, really does love her flawed man. It also leaves the open question of which of the couples the two will end up like: the happy newlyweds (whose cracks start to appear in the end), the unhappy Thornwalds (with their one bedbound party), or the dog-owning couple, who only seem to need one another. That’s left for the viewer to ponder.

Every performance here is delightful. Thelma Ritter really shines as the take-no-guff nurse with sharp instincts. One of my favorite jokes in the picture is when she’s trying to advise Jeff, who still sees himself as the young flyboy in a photo taken while he was in the service, that he needs to marry the glamorous, youthful Lisa before it’s too late. She does so in the middle of massaging the gray-haired forty-six year old and calling him “young” also, presumably facetiously. Grace Kelly (25 at the time) looks just about as beautiful as a human being possibly can as she lounges around in gorgeous fashions and gets excited about breaking and entering, and she’s a delight. The limited setting for this one also means a limited main cast, as only five characters ever pass through Jeff’s apartment, where all of the film takes place, although the extended cast does a lot with the little pieces of their lives that we get to see, and the fact that this whole thing was done on a soundstage is also unbelievable. The complexity of it all looks so simple, and it’s pure movie magic. Rear Window is a top-tier Hitchcock and a classic picture in its own right.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Strangers on a Train (1951)

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Strangers on a Train is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s truly great works. The larger body of his thriller work can be largely divided into two subgenres: domestic dramas and stories of international intrigue. The director’s recurring explorations of main characters who are wrongfully accused of something fall into both categories, with domestic “wrong man” thrillers dating all the way back to The Lodger and including other notable examples like Young and Innocent, Spellbound, and, naturally, The Wrong Man. It’s also one of his most frequently homaged and parodied works, with Throw Momma from the Train as the most triumphant example. It’s well worth noting that this might be because the narrative passed through two notable authors before it hit the screen, with the story coming from a novel by Patricia Highsmith (of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Carol fame) and the screenplay featuring work from hard-boiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler, seven years after the man’s first script, for Double Indemnity, which he co-wrote with director Billy Wilder.

Guy Haines (Farley Granger, previously of Rope) is an amateur tennis star traveling by train to visit his estranged wife Miriam, who has become pregnant by one of her extramarital affairs, in order to give her the money that she demands in order to retain a lawyer for their divorce. En route, he encounters an eccentric, lazy manchild of privilege named Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), who recognizes him from both the sports and society pages of the newspapers, as Guy has been romantically linked to Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a senator (Leo G. Carroll), in addition to the notoriety of his sports career. Bruno reveals that he wants nothing more than to draw income from his trust fund but that his attempts at a life of leisure are continuously foiled by his father’s insistence that he work, if not for a living then at least to contribute something and learn the value of a dollar. Bruno guesses at the source of Guy’s agitation and suggests that the two of them “swap murders,” so that Bruno kills Miriam and Guy slays Mr. Antony, in the belief that no one will be able to make the connection. Disturbed, Guy laughs off the suggestion and its supposed cleverness, and gets off at his stop. When he arrives home to Metcalf, Miriam reveals that she’s also become aware of Anne Morton and now refuses to divorce Guy, and will instead force him to support her child by another man. Their row over this is very public, which causes trouble for Guy later after Bruno tracks down and strangles Miriam at a fairground. Despite constant police surveillance, Guy finds himself harassed by Bruno to uphold his end of their “bargain.”

Although many of Hitchcock’s films contain noir elements (Shadow of a Doubt and Foreign Correspondent immediately come to mind), never do they come through as clearly as they do in Strangers on a Train. That really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given Chandler’s involvement in the picture, as Double Indemnity is the codifying work for many of the elements of that genre. Even in his most beautiful and sumptuous B&W pictures, none of them are as gorgeously monochromatically chiaroscuro as Strangers is. That’s not the only genre convention at play here, either. While we talk about Psycho as the ur-slasher, some of the less lurid elements of the genre are taken from Strangers. One could almost draw a direct line from Bruno’s dark figure cast against the white marble steps of a D.C. government building as a frightened Guy makes his getaway in a cab to the ominous sight of Michael Myers stalking Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. There’s even a kind of killer’s P.O.V. shot on the carnival’s “smoochers’ island” when Bruno finds Miriam alone and his hands come into shot with Guy’s lighter. The film also contains one of the best spectacle setpieces in the Hitchcock canon while also remaining one of the most grounded, as it takes something as commonplace and ordinary as a carnival carousel and turns it into a giant, deadly machine. In typical Hitchcock fashion, this is not the fault of the film’s villain, but of incompetent police who fire a gun into a crowd and miraculously only manage to kill the carousel operator.

Rope and Rebecca are usually thought of as Hitchcock’s major works in the queer canon, with Rope having been based on a play in which the characters were explicitly gay (toned down but still noticeable in the film) and Rebecca’s Mrs. Danvers having an erotic fixation on the late Mrs. de Winter that drives her to burn down Manderley. It would be remiss to leave Strangers on a Train out of that discussion, however. In her later years, Highsmith was insistent that Tom Ripley was not written as a gay man (having reread the novel again earlier this year, I call B.S.) and that the queerness of her work was all subtextual. From what I can gather without getting my hands on her novel (I’m fourth in line with a hold on two copies that my library has), the Guy and Bruno equivalents therein have a relationship that is not unlike that of Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf, with one fixated upon the other in a way that transcends their “bargain.” It’s strong enough that, in the book, Guy does go through with killing Bruno’s father, which dramatically changes the ending. I can’t be certain until I give it a read, but I think that I prefer this ending. Why, without it, we wouldn’t get that wonderfully tense scene of Bruno almost losing the evidence he intends to plant in a storm drain!

Ruth Roman is a bit of a cypher here as Guy’s love interest — serviceable, but not that interesting or exciting. However, her inclusion ensures that we get to spend some time with her precocious kid sister, Barbara (Alfred’s daughter, Patricia Hitchcock), who is a total delight. Whenever Bruno meets Barbara, her similar glasses to Miriam’s gives him a flashback to the murder, which almost results in him throttling a socialite at a government function, which is a great scene that calls back to the gorgeous double composition of Miriam’s murder, reflected in both lenses of her fallen glasses. This is one of the larger roles that Alfie gave Pat, and it makes a case that she could have been included more, but perhaps she was too gracious to take the easy nepo baby route to stardom, unlike others who shall remain nameless.

If you’re planning to make November Noirvember, make sure to put this one on your list.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

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I first saw The Trouble with Harry on a VHS that I bought from a video store on Essen Lane in Baton Rouge that was driven out of business by Blockbuster, around 2008. My roommate at the time hated the film when we watched it together, and I, at the height of my first Alfred Hitchcock phase, defended the film against his criticism. Upon rewatch, however, I must admit that he was right; this is not a good movie. 

That’s a shame, because it opens very promisingly. A young boy named Arnie (Jerry Mathers, aka Beaver Cleaver) is playing with a plastic toy ray gun on an autumnal Vermont hillside when he hears gunshots and drops to the ground. As he continues to explore, he comes upon the dead body of a man dressed in a gray suit. When he runs off to tell his mother, retired (alleged) naval captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn, of Miracle on 34th Street fame) emerges from the woods, where he has spent the day hunting for rabbits despite the land being posted. Upon discovery of the same body, he believes that he must have killed the man with a stray shot and resolves to bury the corpse to avoid arrest. His attempts to dispose of the evidence are continuously interrupted, however, first by the appearance of local spinster Miss Gravely (Mildren Natwick) who accepts his explanation and condones his course of action before inviting him to tea that afternoon, then by a wandering hobo who steals the dead man’s shoes, followed by the eccentric local doctor, Greenbow, who is so absorbed in his reading that he fails to notice the body even when he trips over it, and finally by Arnie and his mother, Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine), who identifies the body as that of Harry Worp, her estranged husband, before dragging her son off for lemonades.

All are residents of the small town of Highwater, which appears to have only about four other residents in total. Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) is a gadabout artist with empty pockets, and although he has failed to sell even one of his paintings, local general store owner Mrs. Wiggs (Mildred Dunnock), a widow, finds his work beautiful, if incomprehensible. Her son, Clay (Royal Dano), is the sheriff’s deputy in the town, who supplements that position’s low income by repairing and reselling antique cars. After Sam and Clay have a brief interaction that demonstrates Sam’s lack of respect for law enforcement and Clay’s simple-minded nature, Sam goes to a scenic spot for some charcoal sketches, drawing the dead man’s feet sticking out from behind a bush without realizing what he’s espied. When he goes to inspect the man, he meets Captain Wiles, who tells him the whole story. From there, Harry’s body is buried, un-buried, interred, dug up, buried again, and then retrieved one final time over the course of a single day, as various parties realize that they may be the party actually responsible for his death.

Like Under Capricorn before it, this one barely qualifies as one of Hitch’s “thrillers,” if one categorizes it that way at all. There’s definitely a mystery, but this is a comedy first and foremost, and a screwball one at that, featuring character studies of the eccentric villagers of Highwater, Vermont. It’s odd that it feels so out of place, as the crew was full of longtime Hitchcock collaborators: composer Bernard Herrmann (nine films together), cinematographer Robert Burks (twelve collaborations, including several of the greats), costuming by Edith Head (eleven films together), and screenplay by John Michael Hayes (only four collaborations, but includes Rear Window). This should be running like a well-oiled machine, and several of the pieces do even if the total is less than the sum of its parts, with the standout positive being the visuals. In the special features for North by Northwest, one can find an advertisement for that film that features the director introducing it as if he were a travel agent selling the viewer on a cross-country trip from New York to Chicago to South Dakota; for all that it’s lacking, The Trouble With Harry could almost function perfectly well as an actual advertisement for Vermont during changing of the leaves. The scenery is so gorgeous and so well photographed that, before the film’s actual plot started to chug along, I was already earmarking this as a potential perennial favorite to watch every fall. What Douglas Sirk and Russell Metty did for New England winters in All That Heaven Allows, Hitchcock and Burks are doing for New England autumns in The Trouble with Harry.

Unfortunately, sumptuous scenery does not a great, or even good, film make. Things begin to tank the moment that Sam appears on screen; the wisecracks he rattles off are neither wise nor cracking, and I genuinely am unable to tell if Forsythe is making the acting choice to render Sam Marlow the most annoying character in the entire Hitchcock canon or if he’s simply trying to do the best he can with a bad script and failing. Unlike the audience, the other characters within the film are charmed by him, which is a baffling choice, although it may be chalked up to the fact that he’s the only man in Highwater who isn’t a child, elderly, or dead. He volunteers to guess Miss Gravely’s age and pegs her at fifty despite her only being forty-two, and not a single woman in this town bashes a cider jug over his head for his impertinence. MacLaine plays Jennifer Rogers like a woman blissed out on pills, which one could hardly blame her for if this were the case (her first husband died six weeks before she learned she was pregnant, and her single brother-in-law married her out of a sense of obligation before leaving her alone on their wedding night because of his horoscope), but she seems to just be like that, and it doesn’t make for exciting viewing. The dialogue for everyone is overwritten, which causes the so-called jokes to mostly land with a dull thud, although I did get a chuckle or two every once in a great while. As a result, although this one is only 100 minutes long, it drags along to its conclusion. The only character I really enjoyed was Mrs. Wiggins, whose half-mean jokes about her dead husband and her fascination with Sam’s (hideous, hideous) paintings give her a depth of character that the others struggle to achieve, as they fall back on cliches and eccentricities instead. 

The DVD I got from the library identifies this as part of the Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection Blu-Ray set, with the cover identifying it as an “Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece.” I regret to inform you that this is a lie, and my college roommate was correct. A film that is only for Hitchcock completists or someone who is looking for a movie to put on, muted, in the background at a harvest festival after-party; don’t trouble yourself with it otherwise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #274: Jamaica Inn (1939) & Hitchcock Blind Spots

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Welcome to Episode #274 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & Boomer catch up on some personal Alfred Hitchcock blind spots, starting with his final British production, Jamaica Inn (1939).

00:00 Halloween Streaming Report
02:00 Dead Calm (1989) at Barrett’s Too
05:37 Hitchcock rankings
08:06 Jamaica Inn (1939)
30:20 Rebecca (1940)
51:11 The Wrong Man (1956)
1:15:34 North by Northwest (1959)
1:43:18 Hitch quiz

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew