3. 52. Topaz (1969)This really is the low point, without even star value to get us through a limply tortuous plot: it's about the uncovering of a Soviet spy in General de Gaulle's
retinue. Save for a single overhead view of Karin Dor being shot, her purple dress spilling out in a lifeless pool beneath her, all imagination was absent, and the ending had to
be recut in total desperation, without a shred of suitable footage to imply Michel Piccoli's suicide. Hitchcock blew this one, and knew it.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
4. 51. Number Seventeen (1932)An oddity,
and the first example of an attempted
comedy–thriller in The Trouble with
Harry mould. The first half's entirely set in a
dimly lit London town house with an
unidentified body at the top of the stairs. In
the second half (it's a mere hour long),
Hitchcock experiments with a cross–cut
chase between a train and a bus, using
some delightfully crude model shots. The
plot's crazily hard to follow, and Leon M
Lion's lead performance as a homeless
dipsomaniac could charitably be described
as broad.Picture: Moviestore Collection /
Rex Feat
5. 50. Champagne
(1928)Hitchcock's career was in
trouble. He dismissed this as 'the
lowest ebb' of his output, and
told Truffaut it had no story. It's
certainly a flimsy affair: a
profligate heiress (Betty Balfour)
is taught a lesson by her father,
who tells her he's bankrupt. She's
forced to get a job and dallies
with some unsuitable men. It was
the easy virtue theme again, but
with no pulse or danger;
Hitchcock's main innovation was
to shoot repeatedly through a
giant, pricey mock–up of a
champagne glass.Picture:
Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
6. 49. Torn Curtain (1966)Problems were legion. Chemistry between Paul Newman and Julie Andrews was lacking, and Hitchcock fell out unrecoverably with Bernard Herrmann
after rejecting his original score in favour of something more poppy. A stolid dourness besets the whole thing, and it never entirely gets going. One famous scene of
excruciatingly protracted tension sticks out, though, as Newman's rocket scientist tries to shove the East German security honcho Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling) into a gas
oven.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
7. 48. To Catch a Thief (1955)Grace Kelly and Cary Grant looked like a match made in heaven, but the star pairing overwhelmed a throwaway plot about jewel heists on the
Riviera, and everyone ended up looking as if they were marking time. It has masked balls, rooftop clamberings, metaphorical fireworks, and some remarkably blatant sexual
innuendo, usually coming from Kelly's direction: she's the ice queen who melts at a single touch, and finally steals Grant's John Robie away. Needless to say, it was a
hit.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
8. 47. Jamaica Inn (1939)With his career already halfway across the Atlantic, Hitchcock squeezed in one last British production, and hugely regretted it, even though it made a
sizeable profit. Producer–star Charles Laughton had developed Daphne du Maurier's book about 19th–century Cornish smugglers, but his own inflated role as a villainous
squire didn't fit, and Hitchcock found Laughton's on–set foibles infuriating. Du Maurier, too, was unimpressed, and supposedly considered withholding the screen rights
to Rebecca when she saw it.Picture: ITV / Rex Features
9. 46. Under Capricorn (1949)A costly fiasco but nonetheless an interesting one. Hitchcock confessed to getting carried away by managing to secure Ingrid
Bergman for a third time, and didn't give enough thought to the story, an unthrilling domestic love triangle set in 19th–century New South Wales. The
longtake gambits of Rope seeped in and the budget soared, but Jack Cardiff's photography is often eerily wondrous, and it's a picture French critics have tried
to rehabilitate as a missing link of sorts between Rebecca and Vertigo.Picture: Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
10. 45. Waltzes from Vienna (1934)Here's one that few critics have ever defended – Hitchcock's misbegotten stab at a musical biopic, often called a nadir. Then again, it's very
possible to indulge as a guilty pleasure, a half–cooked slab of Viennoiserie, enjoyable almost for its very lack of Lubitsch–esque sophistication.Picture: Kobal Collection
11. 44. Stage Fright (1950)Hitchcock confessed to one grave error in this creaky theatreland whodunit, giving a false flashback to Richard Todd's matinee idol and sending his
audience thoroughly down the garden path. It's an undisciplined effort, and Jane Wyman caused him a lot of trouble as a supposedly frumpy heroine who kept making herself
prettier, but there are compensations, particularly in the shape of Marlene Dietrich's singing vamp. Audiences at the time may have missed what a throwback it all was to
the Murder! days.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
12. 43. Mr and Mrs Smith (1941)Hitchcock used to claim that he made this strained, one–off attempt at screwball as a favour to its star, Carole Lombard, though files at RKO
suggest that he pursued the script himself. It's hard to see why, since little about the 'comedy of remarriage' genre especially played to his strengths, and he lacked the ability
of a Hawks or Gregory La Cava to extract that real Lombard sparkle. Robert Montgomery is on looser form, but there were far more spiky depictions of wedlock in the
thrillers.Picture: Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
13. 42. The Farmer's Wife (1928)The BFI's restorers have added 30 minutes to this light pastoral romantic comedy, which struggles to sustain itself even over 90. The problem?
It's a foregone conclusion that the widowed landowner (Jameson Thomas) and his charming housekeeper (Lillian Hall–Davis) are made for each other, so we're twiddling our
thumbs as he interviews other prospective wives.Picture: Ronald Grant Archive
14. 41. Easy Virtue (1928)Not a hugely comfortable fit for the silent treatment, Noël Coward's play might have transferred better in the stagey confines of the early sound era. As
it was, the focus on a woman with dirty secrets (Isabel Jeans) would come to seem characteristic, but Hitchcock was forced into using too many intertitles. He particularly
came to hate one that appears after the heroine's courtroom disgrace, spoken to the mob of paparazzi gathered outside:'Shoot! There's nothing left to kill…'Picture: The
Kobal Collection
15. 40. Suspicion (1941)Cary Grant debuted for Hitch here, even if it was one of his weaker parts, and Joan Fontaine, who had been considerably better in Rebecca, won the Best
Actress Oscar. Worse yet, Hitch wasn't allowed the ending he'd planned in this Gaslight–clone thriller about a dowdy young bride who thinks her husband might be a
murderous gold–digger. Except maybe he's not. There's good shadowplay on the stairs, as Grant brings up a glass of milk he has or hasn't poisoned. But, in all, the film's a
schizoid and uncertain affair.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
16. 39. The Trouble with Harry (1955)A change of pace to nonchalant black comedy. No one's too bothered with the fact that Harry's dead, or that his corpse keeps showing up
in the unlikeliest places: they've got their own problems, most of them sitcom–ish. The technique is practically antisuspense, and it's an acquired taste – opinions have always
ranged from deadpan masterpiece to clunker. Wherever you fall, Shirley MacLaine made a peachy debut, and Bernard Herrmann's first Hitchcock score is a lugubrious
delight.Picture: Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
17. 38. Family Plot (1976)This curious swansong, made four years before Hitchcock's death, is a lightly creepy thriller about two unscrupulous couples who meet only in the last
act. Barbara Harris steals it as a phoney psychic, and was nominated for a Golden Globe, but it's rambling and a bit peculiar. Audiences didn't really know what they were
being sold, and had no star to get behind. Perhaps Ernest Lehman, who did the screenplay, was right that emphasising the story's drama and darkness would have made
more sense.Picture: Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
18. 37. The Wrong Man (1956)The idea was
an old one – coincidence leading to unjust
incrimination – but the docudrama
approach here was starkly atypical. There
was a personal stamp of sorts, as
Hitchcock had always had a lifelong fear
of the police. Still, he wished he'd taken
more dramatic licence with the true story
of a musician's Kafkaesque arrest, for all
Henry Fonda's commitment in the role.
The nervous breakdown of his wife (Vera
Miles) gives it a grim, fatalistic tone, and
audiences didn't come running.Picture:
Everett Collection / Rex Features
20. 35. I Confess (1953)A killer confesses to a priest, who keeps the secret even as it dooms him. Montgomery Clift was an unusual choice of lead, and an apt one for a film so
enshrouded in guilt and doubt, but Hitch's frustrations with method acting (later rearing up again with Paul Newman in Torn Curtain) marred production, and the lack of
humour made it a tough sell to audiences. He wondered if his own Jesuit upbringing might have led to it feeling so oppressively sombre.Picture: Moviestore Collection / Rex
Feat
21. 34. The Ring (1927)Skilful photography boosts a standard–issue love triangle into one of Hitch's own favourite films from the period. The ring of the title refers both to the
world of boxing and the snakelike bracelet that Mabel (Lillian Hall–Davis) wears and conceals, as her loyalty is weighed up between 'One–Round' Jack (Carl Brisson) and the
rival he'll inevitably face in the finale.Picture: Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
22. 33. The Paradine Case (1947)Marvellously shot though it was by the great Lee Garmes (Shanghai Express), this lavish courtroom drama ended the collaboration between
Hitchcock and Selznick for good. The problems were chiefly down to casting: Hitch wanted Laurence Olivier or Ronald Colman for the English barrister, but was stuck with
Gregory Peck again, and had hoped to lure Greta Garbo to the role eventually played by Alida Valli. It was a major commercial failure, too, having cost nearly as much as Gone
with the Wind.Picture: Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
24. 31. Spellbound (1945)Daft, doolally and still oddly essential, this penultimate Hitchcock/Selznick offering sprung from the fashionable obsession with psychoanalysis, and
housed its mystery largely inside the head of Gregory Peck's amnesiac asylum chief Dr Edwardes. Plenty of elements are unforgettable – Miklòs Ròzsa's grandly swoonsome,
theremin–deploying score, the astounding, Dalí–designed dream sequence, Ingrid Bergman's fierce containment – and the cumbersome plotting did nothing to dent its
enormous popularity.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
26. 29. The Pleasure Garden (1925)'A nightmare,' said Hitchcock about the process of making his frisky debut with established star and renowned diva Virginia Valli. The opening
is pure Hitchcock naughtiness: a troupe of dancing girls pour down a spiral staircase to the curtains of a revue show. After backstage melodrama, we sashay to the tropics for
romance and betrayal, where proceedings are stolen by Miles Mander's crazed, rapier–wielding cad.Picture: ITV / Rex Features
27. 28. Frenzy (1972)The director's return to London took him right back to the sex–attack terrors of Blackmail and The Lodger as if nothing in his home city had changed, though
he tackled this story with the more ghoulish flair expected in the post– Psycho era. Having grown up as the son of a Covent Garden market trader, he was keen to use this
setting in its dying days, but you could hardly call this a nostalgic tribute: one of the key sequences has the so–called Necktie Killer, Rusk (Barry Foster), scrabbling around
amid sacks of potatoes, trying to find Anna Massey's corpse, whose fingers he then has to break to retrieve his tie pin. Earlier, the on–camera throttling of Barbara Leigh–
Hunt counts as the most explicitly gruesome demise in this whole oeuvre. It was certainly a return to Hitchcock's comfort zone, if not perhaps wholly to form. Reviews at the
time ranged from the famously hard–to–please Leslie Halliwell's verdict ('an old man's sex suspenser') to Vincent Canby's New York Times rave ('dazzling, lucid'). A winking
British vulgarity helps ironise the tawdriness: as one pub patron puts it, 'We haven't had a good sex murderer since Christie'.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
28. 27. Marnie (1964)Biographers have loved to latch on to this as evidence of Hitchcock's perversity towards women, painting him as a spiritual twin to the Sean Connery
character, who forces Tippi Hedren's frigid thief into marriage and rapes her on their honeymoon. Hitch had hoped to lure back Grace Kelly yet again, but instead sculpted
Hedren into her substitute. It remains one of his most contentious and fascinating projects, inviting endless debate over its flagrant artifice and morbid, arrested
psychology.Picture: Everett Collection / Rex Feature
29. 26. Lifeboat (1944)Hitchcock's most overt bit of anti– Nazi flag–waving was also his first single–location exercise, a tautly developed survival story. On a boatful of high–seas
refugees, Walter Slezak's U–boat captain gradually emerges as the real threat. Everyone else, including Tallulah Bankhead's jaded columnist, is busy squabbling while he
quietly assumes control. By rendering him a formidable and wily opponent, Hitchcock attracted more controversy than he'd intended. His cameo, meanwhile, came in the
form of a newspaper ad for weight loss.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
30. 25. The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1934)Though Hitchcock never looked
back at the musical genre after Waltzes,
he kept returning to the concert hall, not
least in the famous finale of this, his
biggest hit to date. He was thinking
through musical ideas and working them
into the plot: an assassination is to occur
at the cymbal–clashing climax of a cantata
at the Royal Albert Hall. Peter Lorre,
making his English–language debut, steals
the movie as the kidnapper, with shades
of his celebrated performance in Fritz
Lang's M (1931).Picture: ITV / Rex
Features
31. 24. Rope (1948)A daring experiment in form at the service of a clammy chamber piece, Hitchcock's first colour film (and first use of James Stewart) is often misremembered
as a single-take wonder. He did his best to feign this, obfuscating magazine changes by bringing the camera behind players' backs, but the reel–changes every 20 minutes
weren't disguised. A gay subtext is whispered but present, in Farley Granger's wooden discomfort as much as in the sturdier performance of accomplice John Dall.Picture:
SNAP / Rex Features
32. 23. The Skin Game (1931)Another play Hitchcock was resistant to adapting, this time by John Galsworthy, made for a static but honourable picture. Edmund Gwenn has a
small man's stubbornness as the entrepreneur who wants to bulldoze some cottages, reneging on his verbal agreement with the lord and lady of the manor. The tactics of
Helen Haye's Mrs Hillcrist involve dragging Gwenn's daughter–in–law (Phyllis Konstam) into the dirt.Picture: Kobal Collection
33. 22. Young and Innocent (1937)The wrong–man–accused theme was fast becoming a favourite. Hitchcock took Josephine Tey's novel A Shilling for Candles and largely
stripped it of whodunit elements to fashion this swift chase movie about lovers on the run. It's famous for one of the most elaborate shots of Hitchcock's whole career, as the
camera dollies from high up in a hotel lounge, through the lobby and ballroom, right into the eyes of a drummer in blackface, which twitch and thereby give him away as the
killer.Picture: Everett Collection / Rex Feature
34. 21. Dial M for Murder (1954)Or Dial G for Grace, in the first of three consecutive Kelly vehicles. Hitch did right by Frederick Knott's play in not opening it out (as Andrew Davis
did in his dissipated 1998 remake, A Perfect Murder). Confinement was crucial. The film gets dismissed too readily as easy hackwork, when uncluttered simplicity was very
much the way to go. It's a model of tension–inducing camera placement, and Ray Milland excels as the scheming husband.Picture: Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
35. 20. Murder! (1930)Hitchcock had figured out that suspense rung the box–office tills. Here he delved into an uncustomary subgenre – the whodunit. Herbert Marshall plays a
juror unconvinced by the verdict in the case of a murdered actress. There are plenty of risqué elements such as, well, the key suspect, who's a mixed–race homosexual
trapeze artist.Picture: Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
36. 19. Foreign Correspondent (1940)War hadn't much exercised Hitchcock as a subject before, but here was the opportunity for a patriotic potboiler on a high budget. It could
have been higher still: he wanted Gary Cooper, but had to settle for the good, rakish Joel McCrea as a crime reporter sent to Europe to sniff out Nazi intrigue. Technical
novelty in the staging of the action was more sophisticated than ever, and its success as a piece of propaganda is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that even Goebbels
admired it.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
38. 17. The Birds (1963)Mystery is the keynote of this third Daphne du Maurier adaptation, and an invitation to hypothesise on what the bird attacks mean: Hitchcock rejected
any banal explanation such as rabies. He wanted Cary Grant and Grace Kelly again, but got Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren, who endured live birds being flung at her for days,
and apparently had nightmares filled with flapping wings. The impact is heightened by a strikingly avant-garde experimental score, and the ambiguous ending is a
stunner.Picture: Everett Collection / Rex Feature
39. 16. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)Extravagantly remaking his own 1934 hit, Hitchcock signed big stars (James Stewart and Doris Day) and stuck to the conceit of the
Albert Hall sequence, even using the same piece of music, the specially commissioned Storm Clouds cantata. He considered this one the work of a true professional, where
the original was that of a talented amateur. Day's rendition of Que Sera Sera, which won the Best Original Song Oscar, is ingeniously worked into the finale to draw the
attention of her kidnapped son.Picture: ITV / Rex Features
40. 15. Rebecca (1940)He didn't consider it a 'Hitchcock picture', undoubtedly because David O Selznick wanted it made his way. But it's remarkable how many personal touches
Hitchcock managed to sneak into this first Hollywood mega–production. Judith Anderson's Mrs Danvers, significantly modified from du Maurier's novel, was an especially
plum coup of direction and performance, and our dreamy introduction to Manderley is just about unimprovable. Selznick had the hit he wanted, and a Best Picture Oscar to
boot.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
41. 14. Saboteur (1942)More or less a remake of The 39 Steps, re–imagined as a wartime propaganda piece à la Foreign Correspondent, and hurtling ahead through a giddily
complex plot with nary a chance to draw breath, this was Hitchcock really hitting his stride as a studio–funded auteur. It's an A picture with B stars: Robert Cummings is the
airport factory worker wrongly accused of fifth–column treachery, and Priscilla Lane his billboard–model sidekick. The tussle atop the Statue of Liberty provides a hair–raising
signature climaxPicture: Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
43. 12. Blackmail (1929)As we all know from Singin' in the Rain and The Artist, the advent of sound changed the film industry more or less overnight. It certainly affected the
production of Blackmail, a film often cited as the first British talkie, even though the decision to switch to sound took place halfway through production.Anny Ondra's heavy
Czech accent had to be dubbed, with Joan Barry standing just off–screen and reading out the lines as Ondra lip–synched. When the film came to be released, it was the silent
version that made more profit, probably because most British cinemas weren't yet fully equipped for sound. Indeed, the silent Blackmail's better: Ondra's performance,
understandably awkward in the synched version, is luminously alive, and the pacing's more dynamic. The scenes leading up to her assault by a garret artist, whom she stabs
in self–defence, are magnificent in their tightening tension. In the final–reel chase up the roof of the British Museum, Hitchcock set a template for plenty of giddy climaxes to
come.Picture: Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
44. 11. Rich and Strange (1931)TELEGRAPH PICK Hitchcock's least typical great movie hasn't a knife or deadly threat in sight. It might look like an exotic light travelogue, but
underneath is a surprisingly adult investigation of marriage. A restless couple, played by Henry Kendall and Joan Barry, inherit some money and go cruising to the Orient,
where they both nearly run off with other people. There's a pathos and bitterness to the scenario (adapted from a novel by Dale Collins) which Hitchcock clearly believed in,
even though he wasn't happy with the leads, and blamed their obscurity for the film's resounding box–office failure.Picture: Ronald Grant Archive
45. 10. The Lodger (1927)Hitchcock's first iteration of the 'wrong man' idea is his most sophisticated silent feature: it's not hard to see why the director thought of this as the first
true 'Hitchcock' film. The film, a huge hit, begins, shockingly, with the image of a murder. Suspicion falls on Ivor Novello's reticent young boarding-house tenant, whose heavy
pacing about in his upstairs room Hitchcock found an ingenious way to represent without sound: he shot his feet from below through a plate–glass floor, and attached a
wobbly chandelier. The director makes the first of his legendary cameos here, though he claims his appearance was strictly utilitarian: 'We had to fill the screen.'Picture:
Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat
46. 9. The Lady Vanishes (1938)The summation of Hitchcock's British period and perhaps his most perfect light thriller, so successful (it was the most lucrative British production
of its day) that it enabled him to negotiate the Hollywood contract of his dreams. Music is again pivotal: Michael Redgrave's character, a researcher of folk song, is entrusted
with a vital bit of code for British Intelligence in the form of a whistled tune. Hitchcock was helped by the smoothly polished Sidney Gilliat/ Frank Launder script and an
impeccable supporting cast.Picture: ITV / Rex Features
47. 8. The 39 Steps (1935)Hitchcock stepped it up here in every way, with a significantly larger budget than he'd yet enjoyed, even if much of it went to his two stars, Robert
Donat and Madeleine Carroll. The influence of Capra's Oscar–winning It Happened One Night (1934) is hard to miss in the leads' bickering relationship as they're thrust
together in a journey across the Highlands. The female characters, though, were entirely Hitchcock's innovation in adapting John Buchan's novel, and the ingenuity of
bringing about Donat and Carroll's unwanted intimacy with handcuffs was a sly masterstroke. There was a dashing wit to the whole exercise, and Hitchcock achieved his goal
of breathless forward motion for the first time, engineering a plot which only needed to make passable, not perfect, sense.Picture: REX
48. 7. North-by-Northwest (1959)Sheer, purring professionalism from a top-notch Ernest Lehman script, shooing Cary Grant into his funniest portrait of flummoxed decency. The
censors objected to a line of Eva Marie Saint's about making love on an empty stomach, but somehow failed to spot the blatant symbolism of a train plunging into a tunnel at
the end. James Mason is the absolute model of urbane villainy, and the set pieces from crop–duster to Mount Rushmore are as playful and brilliant as anything in
Bond.Picture: Everett Collection / Rex Feature
50. 5. Strangers on a Train (1951)Two men agree to swap murders, except only one of them means it. This criss–cross plot was ideal for Hitchcock's purposes, because the
innocent guy, Guy (Farley Granger) becomes the incriminated party, and the burden is wholly on him to prove that the mastermind, Bruno (Robert Walker) is responsible. In
Patricia Highsmith's source novel, Guy actually carried out his part of the bargain, but Hitchcock preferred to have him refuse, and also rewrote the character of Bruno to
make him a debonair mummy's boy rather than a repugnant alcoholic. Raymond Chandler got the script credit, even though almost none of his lines were used, after an
apparent falling out with the director. Hitchcock's chosen cinematographer Robert Burks, who would shoot almost all his remaining films, supplied an inky menace: the killing
that's famously shot in the reflection of the victim's glasses, and the tennis game everyone is intently watching but Walker, are bravura sequence climaxes you can well
imagine in silent cinema. Meanwhile, Bruno and Guy's sexual ambiguity charged the movie with subtext. Fittingly, in a film about envious doppelgängers, Hitchcock himself
appeared carrying a double bass.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
51. 4. Rear Window (1954)All Hitchcock's films invite the shivery pleasures of voyeurism to some degree, but here he turned our gaze back on an incorrigible Peeping Tom.
What's particularly clever is how the silent vignettes of neighbourly intrigue work, too, as a commentary on the stalled relationship between Jeff (James Stewart) and Lisa
(Grace Kelly). Only when Kelly herself becomes a fraught part of the diorama does Stewart finally pay attention to her, but he's as powerless as the (symbolically disabled)
viewer to intervene.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
52. 3. Notorious (1946)Claude Rains somehow never won the Supporting Actor Oscar, despite being the best supporting actor, nominated here as one of the most supremely
sympathetic of all Hitchcock's villains. Meanwhile, Cary Grant is a coldly monstrous leading man, willing to imprison Ingrid Bergman in a loveless marriage to extract secrets
about smuggled uranium ore. Ben Hecht's script, perhaps the most satisfying anyone wrote for Hitchcock, pings Bergman back and forth between these possessive men and
still manages to retain our sympathies for all three characters, while constructing a thriller-situation so neat and durable it's been copied endlessly (and usually none too
well).
53. 2. Vertigo (1958)No Hitchcock film has undergone a greater reversal of fortune in critical and public appreciation than Vertigo, which was indifferently received on its first
release – reviews were mixed, box office moderate. Hitchcock blamed its semi–failure on the age gap between James Stewart (50 at the time) and the 25–year-old Kim
Novak, which in artistic terms only heightens his need to objectify and possess her. The reappraisal, helped by a benchmark restoration job in the Nineties, has this regularly
positioned high up on all–time top–10 lists: there's something about the film's hypnotic swirl of obsession, and doomed recapitulation of its central romance, that induces the
very rapture it seeks to explore. The patterning is everything. There are few title sequences in movies that conjure a greater sense of impending delirium, with Bernard
Herrmann's miraculous score seducing us into danger like a silky vortex. Stewart is tremendous in all his work for Hitchcock, but this is obviously the performance of his life.
There may be lesser Hitchcocks with fewer surface glitches – some of the plot curlicues here go for nought – so there's no need to call it a masterpiece. But it's deep,
dreamlike, audacious and mesmerising, and we'll live with that.Picture: SNAP / Rex Features
54. 1. Psycho (1960)It was planned as a television episode, until Hitchcock realised there was simply too much fun to be had with Robert Bloch's gotcha premise, and seized the
chance to terrorise moviegoers as never before. If Vertigo was a bold act of delving into his pathological id as a director of women, Psycho was a way of indulging his wicked,
pranksterish ego. Hitchcock evidently relished the wool–pulling reversals here, especially the shock tactic of killing off his apparent star (a never–better Janet Leigh) a mere
third of the way in. Viewers were famously forbidden entry to cinemas once screenings had started, a publicity gimmick which was also a way of ensuring that he had them in
the palm of his hand. Misdirection doesn't come much more skilful than the faultless first act, which lures us into guilty complicity with a heroine whose transgressions are a
surprise even to herself, and then swallows her up. Herrmann's slicing violins and the Saul Bass–assisted editing made the shower sequence a devastating assault by cinema,
reverberating through every subsequent shot. All the remaining keys are being jiggled in Anthony Perkins's pockets.Picture: Everett Collection / Rex Feature
