Alfred Hitchcock Films Ranked
25. Frenzy (1972)
At the beginning of the 1970s, Alfred Hitchcock returned to his native London to try and get back some of the spark that had been lost over the past few years. Back with the cockney accents, slang, greengrocers, and good old English pubs, Hitchcock wove a tale somewhere between Psycho and The Lodger, with a script by future The Wicker Man scribe Anthony Shaffer.
Frenzy is set in London, and someone’s going around murdering women with a necktie. The Necktie Murderer, as original as it sounds, seems to be Jon Finch’s Richard Blainey, who protests his innocence at every opportunity.
Frenzy was a hit when it came out, nominated for four golden globes, and given rave reviews by Roger Ebert and his most well-regarded contemporaries.
The film walks that fine line between funny and terrifying, with an incredibly graphic murder sequence (featuring the first nudity Hitchcock allowed in his films), some wonderful suspense sequences involving the killer retrieving incriminating evidence off a body, and one of the best examples of camerawork ever put to screen, following the killer and his next victim to the door of his flat before tracking all the way back out of the building and across the road, leaving them to their fate. The cast all do their jobs, including a supporting role by future ‘Doctor Who’ favourite, Bernard Cribbins (The Railway Children). Unfortunately, there’s a hell of a lot of meandering around, and the film is nowhere near as tight as it could be.
Hitchcock had found his bottle again, going all out at the censors with foul language and sexually explicit violence along with his gallows humour and inventive camerawork, but it’s also missing the final polish it really needs to make it completely pop.
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24. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
The first of several collaborations between Hitchcock and Peter Lorre (known at the time for being the star of the Fritz Lang film M (1931), a director of whom Hitchcock was a great admirer), the first of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much films was the one that would truly make Hitchcock an international star.
When a spy is assassinated, he gives mysterious instructions to the woman in whose arms he dies. Hours later her daughter is kidnapped, and an ultimatum is given: say anything to the secret service, and you won’t see her again.
Hitchcock himself would describe the film as being made by a ‘talented amateur’, and although it has its rougher moments, there certainly is talent on full display.
There’s a wonderfully comic scene in a church with two of our protagonists singing a conversation to each other undercover to the hymn being sung, but of course the film’s Albert Hall sequence is what cemented Hitchcock’s legacy. One of many finales (or near finales) to take place at a big landmark, the combination of Hitchcock’s direction and Hugh Stewart’s editing gives a white-knuckle, heart-pounding showstopper of a scene to overshadow almost everything done previously, with a neat use of the Schüfftan process (a favourite technique of Hitchcock’s) to create the crowd in the hall.
The criminals aren’t too intimidating (aside from Peter Lorre), and it could do with another 20 minutes or so to flesh it all out, but it’s still a wonderful film with several immortal moments, which is several more than most other directors have been able to manage.
23. Lifeboat (1944)
The first of Alfred Hitchcock’s films to be set in a limited location (Rope, Dial M For Murder, and Rear Window would all come along in the next ten years), the iconic filmmaker drags all the darkness and paranoia he can out of a script by John Steinbeck (author of “Of Mice and Men”, “The Grapes of Wrath”, and so on).
Attacked by the Axis forces, a group of American survivors of a shipwreck end up stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with no hope of rescue. To make matters worse, the most able seaman of them all is a German soldier who speaks no English.
Lifeboat might have been one of the most puzzling technical challenges Hitchcock ever faced. How do you make an entire film where almost every shot consists of at least half a dozen characters in only a few square feet of location? Not only that, but how do you get in your now trademark cameo?
Thankfully, Hitchcock manages to dredge the darkness of the situation, giving tension and paranoia to every moment. Harrowing scenes of women weeping for their lost children merge with fights over winning games of rigged cards. Water becomes a matter of paramount importance, and humanity’s true nature become revealed over time. It’s not perfectly smooth sailing, and Hitchcock would learn to better handle this type of situation in the years to come, but it is still an incredibly tense film with featuring one of the most creative ways to get a cameo by the director into the film, and has rightly come to be regarded as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s hidden gems.
To have Lifeboat be a film only in the middle of your cinematic quality shows how ridiculously high the calibre of Hitchcock’s oeuvre is.
22. Suspicion (1941)
In the first thriller to bring together the pairing of Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant, who would go on to work together a further three times, Grant plays Johnny, a playboy who marries the rich but romantically inexperienced Lina (played by Joan Fontaine in an Oscar-winning role, the only acting winner of all of Hitchcock’s films). He’s a gambler, a swindler, a cheat, a borrower, a man who lives fast and loose as long as he doesn’t have to work for the money. He might also have murder on his mind, and Lina has enough of it for the thought to start to taking root in her head too.
Despite an ending Hitchcock complained about for his entire career put in at the request of RKO Pictures, the film is a great little potboiler that starts off in almost romantic comedy fashion, before slowly building up towards its true nature as a thriller in disguise. There are moments of driving and rear-view projection where the technology doesn’t quite give Hitchcock the realism he would want, and it looks cheesy now, but the ending doesn’t take away from the terror in the previous scene, the dread that a glass of milk might just be poisoned, a light put inside it to give it a sinister, almost glowing appearance.
The acting is supreme, the direction nice and crisp, and an endearing Nigel Bruce rounds off a wonderful cast. There may be issues, but it’s still Hitchcock giving a wonderful thriller almost without thinking.
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21. Blackmail (1929)
Of all the early Alfred Hitchcock films that set the stage for who he was to become later on, perhaps none were as important as Blackmail.
Made two years after The Jazz Singer introduced the world to talkies and changed history overnight, Blackmail was made as both an entirely silent picture and as Great Britain’s first talkie. The sound version changed scenes, added things and modified other things to make the transition smoother. It’s the sound version we’re using for this list.
Based on the stage play by Charles Bennett, Blackmail contains all of the trademarks that would become associated with Alfred Hitchcock. The thriller genre, the paranoia, the murder, the detective, the chase and finale at a large national landmark (in this case, the British Museum). Also on display is Hitchcock’s transition from silence, with many scenes reminiscent of both his earlier silent work and the German Expressionist movement that characterised his early directorial learnings, into experimentation with sound. The famous ‘knife’ scene, with the word becoming clearer and clearer to Anny Ondra’s Alice, shows Hitchcock’s willingness to play around with the new medium for cinematic purposes.
Perhaps the first half is a little drawn out, and the live dubbing (Anny Ondra miming her dialogue due to her accent, and Joan Barry standing by the camera vocalising the dialogue) makes her performance clunky at times. Despite these little imperfections, it’s a wonderful picture, and a great answer to asking where Hitchcock truly began.
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.