Film · Hollywood
1899–1980 · British (later also American)
Suspense thriller; the Master of Suspense
Alfred Hitchcock directed more than fifty features across a career that began in British silent cinema and ended in Hollywood, and made the thriller into an art of pure technique. He built films out of audience anxiety rather than surprise, using point-of-view cutting, elaborate set-pieces and glamorous, imperilled blondes. He never won an Academy Award for directing, but his vocabulary — the MacGuffin, the wrong man, the murderous mother — is now the common grammar of popular cinema.
A London landlady comes to suspect her mysterious new tenant of being the killer of fair-haired women (1927)
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog — his third feature, and the first he called a true film of his own; he built a glass floor to film the pacing from below.
A music-hall memory man, a manhunt across the Scottish moors, and two strangers handcuffed together (1935)
The 39 Steps — the chase template he reused for the rest of his life.
A photographer with a broken leg spends a heatwave watching his neighbours across the courtyard (1954)
Rear Window — the whole film shot from one apartment, on one enormous Paramount set.
A retired San Francisco detective with a terror of heights falls for the woman he is paid to follow (1958)
Vertigo — the dolly-zoom down the bell tower stairs; voted the greatest film ever made in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll.
A crop-duster attacks a man in an empty Indiana cornfield; the chase ends on four presidential faces (1959)
North by Northwest — Cary Grant mistaken for a spy who does not exist.
A stolen payroll, a roadside motel, a stuffed-bird parlour and a shower curtain (1960)
Psycho — shot cheaply with his television crew; Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings were his idea, not Hitchcock's.
Gulls and crows gather over a northern California fishing town until they attack (1963)
The Birds — no musical score at all, only electronically generated bird sound.
A society girl who steals from her employers, and the man who blackmails her into marriage (1964)
Marnie — his last film with Tippi Hedren, and the end of his run of blonde leads.