Alfred Hitchcock Films Ranked
10. Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
One of Hitchcock’s paramount themes and topics of discussion in his films is, in essence, the paranoia of people. The thought that others standing next to you might be harbouring the most sinister of secrets. Hitchcock made several close, domestic crime thrillers centred on these ideas, such as Rope and The Lodger, and Shadow of a Doubt stands alongside them as one of the best.
In many ways similar to The Lodger, involving a sinister presence in the household, young Charlie (Teresa Wright) comes to believe that her Uncle, also named Charlie (Joseph Cotton), are connected via telepathy. This intuition begins to lead her down a dark path when investigators turn up in the area, and the thought begins that Uncle Charlie might actually be a murderer trying to escape justice.
The film is played on the tension back and forth between trusting Charlie’s innocence one moment and believing him to be a killer the next. Hitchcock masterfully plays with our emotions, ratcheting up the suspense, stretching the elastic band beyond our ability to bear.
The twin performances of Cotton and Wright are some of the best in all of Hitchcock’s films, in any thriller you’ll see, and even, perhaps, in the entirety of cinema. It is their closeness that drives the paranoia, the innocence of young Charlie that draws us in but simultaneously makes her an unreliable narrator. Framing things deliberately obscurely, with strange camera angles, shadows, and movements, Hitchcock puts absolutely everything under suspicion. There’s no way to tell what is real and what is in our imagination until right at the very end.
Shadow of a Doubt is unrelenting in its goal to give you the shivers, to keep your knuckles white, and to keep you shouting at the screen. Over eighty years later, it is still legendary in its execution.
9. To Catch a Thief (1955)
What do you get when you put Cary Grant and Grace Kelly out on the French Riviera with a thief abroad, and Grant needing to catch him and clear his name? A supremely fun caper of a film that went on to inspire countless others, including The Pink Panther. You also get Cary Grant in a striped sweater – it may be incredibly unflattering, but it is pulled off by the simple fact that it’s Cary Grant wearing it.
To Catch a Thief is hilarity and tension in equal measure, all under the sun and in the sand. The colours are vibrant and so full of life that they look like different flavours of ice cream in a bowl, multicoloured, popping off the text and into reality, sweet and delicious enough to get the mouth watering. There’s innuendo aplenty (Kelly asking Grant, about chicken from a picnic, if he prefers ‘leg or breast’, being one such moment of gold), and a beautifully playful relationship between the two leads.
Hitchcock is in his element, managing romantic relationships with suspicion and danger, creating such entertainment that the latter feels like an effective and unmissable slap in the face.
The final set might look dated, and too obviously a set, but if you lose yourself to the story then you’ll find it to be a beautiful film filled with laughs and fun. It is one of Hitchcock’s most underappreciated films, and fun for all the family.
Recommended for you: Where to Start with Cary Grant
8. The Birds (1963)
‘Now why would he do that?’ That’s the question Alfred Hitchcock asks in the trailer for The Birds when one of his pets pecks at his finger, and it’s a question that remains unanswered throughout the film (and even the years since its release).
In Tippi Hedren’s acting debut (somehow astonishing even for a debutant), Melanie Daniels goes up to the small town of Bodega Bay to try and win over a young man she briefly meets in San Francisco. While she stays there, something happens to the birds, and as the attacks get more and more vicious, there are some that begin to say that it’s the end of the world.
Notoriously, Hedren would go through absolute hell on this shoot, not least through various accusations towards Hitchcock himself. Distancing those issues from the film (whilst never ignoring it), Hedren puts in a stella debut outing, showing the range of sly and sarcastic through to traumatised in the finale, all skills she would eventually also show in Marnie.
The film takes its time to get going, starting out as a screwball comedy, but that’s the intendion; you know the birds will attack, but not when or where.
One of the bloodiest, most violent Hitchcock films ever made, with moments of genuine graphic violence that he usually shied away from, it’s an hour of white-knuckle hell once the terror fully begins. With a chopped-off final ten pages of screenplay to maintain as much ambiguity as possible, some of the effects may look a little dated now, but it’s still vintage Hitchcock, and one of the best horror and disaster films ever made.
7. Rebecca (1940)
The only Alfred Hitchcock film ever to win Best Picture at the Oscars (and the only one, since the categories were put into place properly, to win Best Picture without an acting, writing, or directing win), takes Daphne Du Maurier’s haunting gothic classic and puts it in the supreme hands of Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson. There’s innocence, suspicion, tension, and the haunting spectre of the previous lady of Manderley, Rebecca, hanging over every frame.
What is presented on the screen is a sumptuous film so lavish you could eat it with a spoon. The costumes and art direction are gorgeous, and the film is one of the best adaptations of a novel you could hope for, even with its few differences. Every actor is incredible, and Hitchcock delivers one of his Oscar-nominated directorial efforts, making Anderson’s Mrs Danvers iconic throughout time.
There are some slower moments, but they’re delicately constructed, and when you consider how Hitchcock edited most of the film in-camera to stop producer David Selznik from interfering, it’s all the more impressive.
Rebecca doesn’t quite hit perfection, but there’s also not much anyone can say against it being fairly damn close.
6. Rope (1948)
The late 1940s were a strange time for Alfred Hitchcock. In this time he made some of his most forgettable films during his Hollywood period, and yet he also brought out a few all-time classics. Rope is one of the all-time classics.
Based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play, it stars John Dall and Farley Granger as two young aesthetes who strangle their former classmate to prove they can commit the perfect murder, and therefore show their intellectual superiority over the common man. Dall’s Brandon Shaw then convinces his friend to host a dinner party there, all the while lauding over the commoners that a body is hidden in the chest they use as a table for the food. They don’t count on Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), their old housemaster, who they’ve invited along, beginning to sniff something out.
Rope was filmed in an experimental fashion – in continuous long takes of ten minutes (the length that film cameras could shoot at the time), with cuts being hidden to give the impression of one long take – and reportedly James Stewart hated the process, as the camera was rehearsed more than the actors. Despite this, Rope is an 80-minute technical marvel, and an exercise in sheer suspense and the darkness of the inhuman heart.
With the famous table-clearing-maid sequence one of the best in his entire filmography, Hitchcock masterfully keeps us on the edge of our seats for the entire duration of the film. Brandon is one of the coldest villains on-screen, the dialogue is sharp, the staging perfect. Rope is a stone-cold winner.
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.