Alfred Hitchcock Films Ranked
30. Torn Curtain (1966)
Contractually obliged to make a certain number of films for Universal, Alfred Hitchcock returned once again to the spy thriller that he had made himself an international success with.
With a script written by Brian Moore, Torn Curtain takes Paul Newman’s American scientist Professor Michael Armstrong and his secretary (Julie Andrews) behind the Iron Curtain to East Germany, where he has defected in order to pursue anti-nuclear projects that the American government has shut down. But it’s all a ruse, as he really intends to get a formula from a communist scientist, and then get back out of the country before being discovered.
On paper, it’s the perfect thriller setup. There’s suspense, subterfuge, deception, plenty of opportunities for sneaking around, developing bad guys, and the like, with a power couple of Newman and Andrews at the height of their powers. Unfortunately, the film is so routinely Hitchcock that it seems as if he vomited back up the previous four decades of his career in his sleep.
The film is a good half an hour longer than it should be, and Julie Andrews’s Sarah is almost useless as a character, save for the typical blockbuster romantic other half. Some moments are decently fun, but there’s a sense that it’s a film that might have been much better had it been released a decade prior, when there was still some invention to be done.
A parody of pastiche and collection of clichés, Torn Curtain is Alfred Hitchcock on autopilot; better than most, but average at best for this great director.
29. Saboteur (1942)
A classic Alfred Hitchcock film in every sense of the word; if you want an Adventure Thriller, Saboteur has it all.
A man wrongfully accused of arson at a manufacturing plant during the war goes on the run. There’s a Hitchcock blonde that teams up with the main character after initially squabbling with him. There are secret spies, chases across the country, and a finish in a big national landmark, this time hanging from the torch of the Statue of Liberty. It’s everything you could ever want.
It being everything you could want is one of its issues.
On its own, it’s a fairly fun film, if skin deep at best. Hitchcock gets as much as he can out of the film, and it’s impossible to criticise the performances too much. The main problem is that the great filmmaker had already made very similar films (look at The 39 Steps, for example), and will do similar films (North by Northwest) in the future, and in a much more accomplished fashion.
This isn’t to suggest that Saboteur isn’t a good film, because it is, and it’s filled with plenty of twists and turns and suspenseful moments. One just can’t help but to think that, even at the time of release, Hitchcock had already made this film before, and that there was (and certainly is now) nothing inherently new or fresh to uncover.
28. Foreign Correspondent (1940)
Alfred Hitchcock had one of the best years of his career in 1940. Between Foreign Correspondent and Rebecca, his films were nominated for seventeen Oscars, with some of the categories counting work directed by him twice.
Of the two films, Rebecca is the one everyone remembers, whereas Foreign Correspondent, a two-hour espionage thriller about an American newspaperman trying to get a scoop in Europe who stumbles into a plot of spies at the beginning of the war, tends to be forgotten. That’s a shame, because it is a very finely made film.
Two scenes are of particular note: the first being a hostage scene in a hotel room, which channels all of Hitchcock’s expressionist learnings, drawing on both startling imagery and exactly what the camera doesn’t see making maximum impact; the second being the final action sequence involving a plane being attacked and shot down, which makes maximum use of the drone of the plane engines to substitute for a low string section in the score, keeping everything at the highest point of tension for as long as possible.
It’s simply a shame that the spy plot isn’t quite intriguing enough to justify its runtime. Trim 20 minutes off the start and Foreign Correspondent is much better. As it is, it’s a fine film, but in Hitchcock’s vast and impressive oeuvre, it’s always going to play second, third, or even fourth fiddle.
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27. The Trouble with Harry (1955)
Alfred Hitchcock loved a laugh, but made very few straight comedies. Most of his films had comedic aspects to them, but they worked to vastly varying degrees of success. In the mid 1950s, when he’d just made one of the seminal films of his career in Rear Window (1954), he made a black comedy that only Hitchcock could make.
It’s an idyllic little town in Vermont, and an elderly old war captain stumbles across a body, having gone out shooting rabbits. He thinks he shot him, but as the film goes on, so do four or five of the other townsfolk. Who killed Harry isn’t the issue, but how to keep the body hidden whilst they try to work it out (which involves burying him, digging him up again, and maybe putting him underground again) is.
There’s an anecdote that Hitchcock said he would never, after a certain point in his career, do a straight romance film, because after ten minutes the audience would be wondering where the body was. Here, such a problem is solved; make the body the Hitchcockian MacGuffin and build the humour around it. It’s a valiant attempt, but not a complete success. There are a few funny lines, the score by Bernard Hermann (the first of his compositions for Hitchcock) is great, and the colours look wonderful and vibrant. But then the film also drags on, and the comedy-of-manners does not translate well to the American Hollywood system.
Some will get a massive kick out of The Trouble with Harry, but some are going to hate it. That, unfortunately, is the major trouble with Harry.
26. The Lady Vanishes (1938)
After a string of relative failures, Alfred Hitchcock managed to return to winning ways with The Lady Vanishes in 1938, a film based on the Ethel Lina White novel “The Wheel Spins”.
The first starring role for future Knight of the Realm Michael Redgrave, he and future star Margaret Lockwood find themselves first trapped in a hotel in the European mountains, and then on a train where an elderly lady mysteriously vanishes, with everyone else claiming she never existed.
If the film has an issue, it is the first 30 minutes or so. Unfortunately, this section is used mainly to get us used to the characters in tried and true Agatha Christie fashion, but almost derails the whole film by dragging on for a good ten minutes longer than it has to. When everything gets going, however, and we’re onboard the train with the mystery getting into full swing, the film picks up speed, and what a film it turns out to be. Every five minutes that go by makes the whole thing more baffling, more sinister, and more intense, leading to a great final showdown.
The Lady Vanishes is the film that convinced Robert Selznik to take Hitchcock to Hollywood, and it’s easy to see why. It has the comedic character beginning, the deep mystery middle, and the action-packed finale – all the tools he would need going forward.
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.