Alfred Hitchcock Films Ranked
35. Murder! (1930)
Once again showing that the thriller genre was where he belonged, and where he had the best command over story and presentation, Alfred Hitchcock turned to the novel “Enter Sir John” for his 1930 film Murder!, simultaneously shot in German as Mary.
A woman is found dead, with Diana Baring (Norah Baring) covered in blood nearby, almost mute, and seemingly going along with the court’s suggestion that she was guilty and shall be executed for it. However, Sir John (played by Herbert Marshall) doesn’t believe it, and sets out to silence his doubts one way or the other.
A whodunnit is strange by Hitchcock’s standards, and this film is most famous for its shaving scene, which made it one of the first films (possibly the first) to have dialogue played to suggest an internal monologue. Recording Marshall’s dialogue beforehand, then getting an orchestra just off-screen to play Wagner over the top, Sir John shaves and contemplates his thoughts through the most minute of facial expression changes. It was an incredibly expensive thing to shoot in 1930, but it still works today. There are a few small moments in the rest of the film that give it some life, but unfortunately much of it is rather stagey and, although interesting, not massively memorable.
Murder! is a quaint picture with some quality moments, but also one that was simply a stepping stone to greater heights.
34. Young and Innocent (1937)
By 1937 there was seemingly no stopping the Alfred Hitchcock thriller train.
Once again returning to the wronged, innocent man motif, Hitchcock takes the wild rurality of The 39 Steps (1935) and puts young Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) out there on the run, escaped from being sentenced for a murder he didn’t commit. He manages to convince Erica (Nova Pilbeam) of his innocence, and the two must work together to find the vital evidence that proves it was someone else, and catch the real murderer before the police manage to put a stop to their attempts.
Young and Innocent is, unfortunately, a poor-man’s The 39 Steps, with many of the same ideas and motifs. It manages to have a few fun moments, including hanging off the edge of a collapsing mine shaft, and a wonderful lengthy camera crane to reveal the killer at the end of the film, but those moments aside, much is as we’ve already seen it. Pilbeam and De Marney have palpable chemistry for a fairly plain plotline between them, and Hitchcock tries to wring every last drop of suspense out of the script he can, but it doesn’t change how Young and Innocent is simple escapism, the middle of the range for Hitchcock.
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33. Topaz (1969)
By 1969, Alfred Hitchcock had been directing films for over forty years. His health was beginning to decline, hence there were larger gaps between films. In addition, the films he did make seemed to get more mediocre than those made during his prime. With Topaz, there’s much to be found in common with earlier Hitchcock spy thrillers such as Notorious, Secret Agent, and even Torn Curtain, but for some reason it has an even longer runtime than all of them.
Loosely based on real events that take place during the Cuban Missile Crisis, with a plot derived from a novel by Leon Uris, the film follows secret agent André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), working for the US government to try and get proof of Cuban weapons pointed at the West, and evidence of leaks coming from inside a French-based soviet spy organisation named “Topaz.”
There are a few beautiful moments – a standout being the death of Karin Dor’s Juanita, shot from a gods-eye perspective, her long dress billowing out like purple blood as she slowly sinks to her knees. Several moments of suspense work well too, with perfect Hitchcockian poise and skill, so the film isn’t completely without merit.
The film has too many characters and plot threads, however, and scenes go on for minutes longer than they should. Perhaps if there were a two hours maximum cut there would be a better end result? Topaz isn’t a priceless jewel, but still a very pretty gemstone.
32. Stage Fright (1950)
Stage Fright takes an interesting and fun concept, plays with it a little, then eventually decides it doesn’t know what to do with it.
The plot centres on Jane Wyman’s Eve, who shelters her boyfriend Jonathan (Richard Todd) when he’s accused of killing his lover’s husband. Being a student at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Art, Eve goes undercover, acting as a replacement for the famous actress in question (Charlotte Inwood, played by Marlene Dietrich), to try and uncover what she believes to be the truth; that Charlotte killed her husband and made Jonathan take the blame.
Based upon Selwyn Jepson’s novel “Man Running”, the film tries to make itself all about deception and disguises and acting, and it does indeed load almost every scene with people having to lie and bluff and perform their way out of the situations they’ve got themselves into. Dietrich is the star of the show, cold and abrupt yet hiding a terrified innocence inside. Despite this, many of the scenes are played for laughs, but in such a way that one never knows if the whole scene is intended to be a farce and a sendup of the genre, or just humorous in its own right. As a result, the tense moments aren’t as tense as they should be, the funny points not as funny, and everything feels like it’s missing the mark ever so slightly. Nothing is wildly awful, but none of it is getting a standing ovation either.
31. Sabotage (1936)
Alfred Hitchcock’s second picture of 1936 deals with subterfuge under the surface of the law, but whereas Secret Agent sent itself off to the far flung world of mainland Europe, Sabotage stays very much in Hitchcock’s London.
Centred around a cinema, it follows a detective on the trail of a saboteur in the city, but everything begins to unravel as plots converge and intertwine.
Sabotage, to its credit, has one of the most famous sequences in any Hitchcock film: a young boy unknowingly carrying a bomb in a film canister, set to go off when he eventually leaves it at Piccadilly.
Hitchcock would later go on record saying it was a mistake to let the bomb go off, thus creating a story Hitchcock would discuss throughout his career, somewhat extending the shelf-life of the film. In its defence, it is an incredibly tense sequence, and far outweighs the rest of Sabotage, which has its moments but is monumentally outshone by this one sequence.
You’ll refer to as ‘the one with the kid with the bomb’ for the rest of time. If you need to, go study that scene on it’s own, because it’s a masterpiece. The rest is not.
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.