Alfred Hitchcock Films Ranked
45. The Skin Game (1931)
Following on from several stage adaptations in the previous years, Alfred Hitchcock turned his attention to The Skin Game, a play by Nobel prize winner John Galsworthy; a story that had already been made into a silent picture in 1921.
Both Edmund Gwynn and Helen Haye would return from that adaptation to appear in Hitchcock’s version as individuals on both sides of a feud between the older aristocratic inheritors of rural land and the wealthy new entrepreneur who sees nothing for sentimentality, claiming land before forcing the inhabitants off it to make way for chimneys and factories.
Parts of the film show off Hitchcock’s attempt to get an incredibly dialogue-heavy script to be something other than photographs of people talking. An inventive POV shot for an auction scene is perhaps the most interesting moment in the film, though some quick cutting near the beginning gives a nice sense of chaos to an early sequence. Despite this, the film is fairly dull for much of its runtime beside the last ten minutes or so, and even with Hitchcock’s typical motifs of a secret-bearing woman trying to generate suspense, it doesn’t manage to generate much in the way of anything. The Skin Game is, therefore, unfortunately fairly forgettable.
44. Number Seventeen (1932)
Returning to the crime thriller genre once more, Alfred Hitchcock took his final screenwriting credit with Number Seventeen, an adaptation of the stage play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon.
A crime caper revolving around a priceless necklace, Hitchcock’s original attempt was to make the whole thing a complete farce, to make every scene a comedy and to play up the tropes. In the end, he settled for something between Farjeon’s original vision and his own, with middling success.
The first two-thirds of the film, all taking place in one house and mostly on one staircase (there’s the staircase again), is fairly dull. There are too many people in too short a space of time, and aside from a famous scene of Rose (played by Ann Casson) handcuffed to a balcony that snaps, leaving her dangling arms-up in the air, it’s all a bit of a muddle.
It would be lower down the order if it wasn’t for the film’s ultimate saving grace: a chase between a train and a bus, 90% of which is done in miniatures. It’s outlandish and stupid, but illustrates Hitchcock finding sheer joy and fun crafting cinematic madness. The montage is great and it’s a precursor to his more famous action scenes to come, but it’s a shame it can’t save the film overall.
43. Mary (1931)
It is a common complaint that Hollywood is simply a machine of remakes in the modern age. Many of these people forget to remember that remaking films was common practice right from the start: George Melies’ first film was a remake of a film by the Lumiere Brothers, and that was back in 1896, under a year after film was presented to the world for the first time. When the talkies came around in 1927, it presented another problem: translation. In the days of silent pictures, where information was often given by intertitles and text cards, you could just make new ones in whichever language you needed. When sound came in, however, dubbing hadn’t yet become an art. Hitchcock would have to have another actress behind the camera for his first talkie, Blackmail, to give his lead, the Czech actress Anny Ondra, a British accent.
The alternative to all this faffing around was simply to reshoot the whole film with actors of another language. Universal did this with 1931’s Dracula, making a Spanish-language version, and this is what Hitchcock did with Mary, a German-language version of Murder!, in tribute to the German masters he learned his trade from.
Most of the film is exactly the same, with the same rough dialogue, same shot choices, almost exactly the same runtime. This makes it not necessarily a bad film – indeed it could almost have the same score as its partner film – but the translation of English to German means some of the naturalness is lost in the film, and it feels a little more stunted. Theoretically everything is the same, yet it doesn’t feel it.
42. The Manxman (1929)
The final film before Alfred Hitchcock shifted to sound is technically a remake, with the original novel having been adapted over a decade earlier. Despite being called The Manxman, Hitchcock decided to shoot most of the film in Cornwall, and not on the Isle of Man, to get away from the interference of the original author, Hall Caine.
In many ways, The Manxman sums up Hitchcock’s silent career. There are the romantic elements, the paranoia and secrets of something like The Ring, and the kind of moral degradation discussion of a film such as Downhill.
Anny Ondra makes her first appearance for Hitchcock, almost single-handedly establishing the Hitchcock Blonde trope that would continue throughout his career. And the film itself is remarkably coherent throughout. There’s not much wandering, almost everything kept in control and in line, and the film is the right length to boot. It is, overall, a very accomplished piece of silent cinema.
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41. Mr and Mrs Smith (1941)
Having been firmly lodged in the thriller genre for several years, Alfred Hitchcock took time out from it for the first time since Waltzes from Vienna in 1934 to look back to the comedy genre. A two-hander romantic screwball starring Oscar nominees Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery, Mr and Mrs David and Annie Smith discover that due to a technicality, they aren’t legally married, and their constant bickering and fighting leads to Annie leaving David, with the gentleman trying to win back the lady.
There are a few humorous moments in the film, always proving that Hitchcock had a flair for comedy when he tried. The problem here is that Hitchcock’s best use of comedy was, perhaps 70% of the time, to help create a rhythm with his terror, as a pacing mechanism for creating and diffusing tension. Usually, when he tried to carry it off for an entire film, it never turned out quite right, and Mr and Mrs Smith is one such example. The scenes go on for too long, the pacing is off, and many of the film’s biggest moments simply aren’t funny enough.
Lombard and Montgomery are decent as the main couple, and Gene Raymond does decently as their friend, especially in a scene when he’s falling-down drunk. It’s not enough to make it any more than passable at best, however, which is a shame because the final shot of Annie crossing her skis as she takes back David is on a par with the train/tunnel gag at the end of North by Northwest for Hitchcock’s sly sense of visual humour.
I think this might be your magnum opus! Personally I’d put The Trouble with Harry Higher, but hard to argue with many in your top 10, particularly the criminally underrated Shadow of a Doubt.
About the top half are films that if they appeared in the top 10 you’d find it hard to argue, annoyingly for someone trying to rank them.