The 20 greatest Alfred Hitchcock movies

No film has inspired more deep-dive analyses than Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece about a retired detective (James Stewart) who falls obsessively in love with the mysterious woman (Kim Novak) he’s been hired to follow. It’s a profoundly personal (and perverse) exploration of fetishistic desire, a waking dream that discards its mystery genre conventions to get at the nature of creation and death. Once you’ve seen it, you’ll never shake it.

Hitchcock’s personal favorite of his films is a classic study of the darkness that lurks under the surface of small-town America. Joseph Cotton is chilling as Uncle Charlie, a serial killer who drops in on his sister’s family to spend time with his adoring niece who bears his name, Charlie (Teresa Wright). Co-written by Thornton Wilder, it is a gripping and ultimately unnerving tale that, per Hitchcock, asserts “love and good order is no defense against evil.”

James Stewart stars as a photographer who, laid up with a broken leg, turns his penetrating gaze out to the courtyard of his apartment building and into the private lives of his neighbors, one of whom he believes has committed murder. As Stewart’s worst suspicions are confirmed, Hitchcock manages to both condemn and impishly celebrate the act of voyeurism. As a piece of pure suspense filmmaking, it is peerless.

An American intelligence agent (Cary Grant) recruits the daughter (Ingrid Bergman) of a German spy to help him catch a group of Nazis who’ve relocated to Brazil. The pair rather quickly fall in love, which complicates her assignment: she must to seduce one of the Nazis (Claude Rains) in order to infiltrate their ranks. Ben Hecht’s screenplay is masterfully calibrated for maximum suspense, but it’s the bizarre love triangle and that combustible Grant/Bergman chemistry that make it sizzle.

“Vertigo” looks positively conventional next to the formalistic madness of this psychological thriller about a woman (Tippi Hedren) whose criminality — along with her phobia of thunderstorms and the color red — is deeply rooted in childhood trauma. It might sound irredeemably silly, but it’s actually one of Hitchcock’s most emotionally charged films, as well as one of his most gorgeously shot and scored (it would mark his final collaboration with composer Bernard Herrmann).

Cary Grant is a fun-loving Manhattan ad executive who’s forced to go on the run when he gets mistaken for a government agent named George Kaplan. This non-stop thrill ride is easily Hitchcock’s most purely entertaining film. Grant is at his charming best, the luminous Eva Marie Saint is every bit his equal and the set pieces — particularly the crop duster assault and the climactic chase across the face of Mount Rushmore — still elicit gasps even though they’ve been ripped off dozens of times over the last 59 years.

The master of suspense’s first masterpiece. A spy thriller in which Robert Donat gets caught up in a twisty piece of espionage involving a spy ring hell-bent on stealing British military secrets, “The 39 Steps” is an expertly crafted chase movie that never takes its foot off the gas. It’s a set-up/payoff machine — replete with a classic MacGuffin — that established a template Hitchcock would return to again and again throughout his career.

Few films have so profoundly altered the medium like “Psycho” did in 1960. Hitchcock’s shocker about a murderous mother’s boy broke new ground with its then graphic violence, creating the kind of scandal that results in moviegoers lining up around the block to see what all the fuss is about. What they saw was a perfect movie with one of the most audacious second act twists of all time. “Psycho” invented the slasher genre and revolutionized film editing with its iconic shower sequence. The film has been copied, parodied and remade shot-for-shot, but the original has lost none of its power.

Three years after “The 39 Steps,” Hitchcock hopped a train for this briskly paced spy thriller starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave as a pair of innocent travelers dodging Nazi officers while they search for a missing old lady. All is not what it appears to be, and it’s tremendous fun to watch the pieces snap together. Hitchcock’s command of visual storytelling is on full display here; as in “The 39 Steps”, he’s drawing up a road map that every popular filmmaker would mimic in the years to come – one that is till very much in use today.

Patricia Highsmith’s nasty bit of business concerns two travellers (Farley Granger and Robert Walker) who fall into a joking conversation about swapping murders to help each other out; it all turns frighteningly real when one of them turns out to be a psychopath. The film that inspired Danny DeVito’s “Throw Momma from the Train” is a darkly funny film itself, though the laughs in this one tend to get stuck in your throat. 

Based on the bestselling novel by Daphne du Maurier, this haunting tale of love and obsession is Hitchcock’s sole Best Picture winner (he never won Best Director); ironically, it is also the studio film over which he asserted the least creative control (producer David O. Selznick re-shot several scenes without Hitch’s involvement). The gothic romance stars Laurence Olivier as a dour aristocrat whose new wife (Joan Fontaine) develops an unsettling fascination with his deceased first wife. 

Hitch returned to the work of Daphne du Maurier for this horror classic about a small coastal town in Northern California that comes under attack by our fine-feathered friends. It’s a ludicrous premise, but Hitchcock plays it as a sensational, straight-faced slow burn, and pays it off with the help of some unique visual effects from Walt Disney animator Ub Iwerks. Tippi Hedren made her big-screen debut as the film’s pecked-upon heroine.

This terrific “wrong man” yarn stars Robert Cummings as an aircraft factory employee who is wrongly suspected of wartime sabotage. This cross-country chase film, which culminates in a dizzying set piece on the torch of the Statue of Liberty, feels like a warm-up for “North by Northwest,” but its plenty entertaining in its own right. It’s a first-rate entertainment with a script credited in part to Dorothy Parker. It’s probably Hitchcock’s most underrated film.

Hitchcock’s second Hollywood studio film was released and nominated for Best Picture the same year as “Rebecca.” It’s much more Hitchcockian than that film (if only because every shot in the movie belongs to him), but the story does have a stitched-together quality at times, no doubt the consequence of having ten writers take a pass at the script. The highlights are an assassination on the steps of the Amsterdam Town Hall and a terrifying-to-this-day plane crash.

Hitchcock had just closed out the 1960s with two of his weakest films, “Torn Curtain” and “Topaz,” when he returned to the U.K. for this uncharacteristically sleazy thriller about a serial killer (Barry Foster) who pins his murderous misdeeds on his friend (Jon Finch). It’s the only Hitchcock film to receive a contemporaneous R-rating from the MPAA. As the penultimate film of his career, it’s surprisingly lively; there are some truly sinister laughs, and a great final scene.

Based on a standard-issue murder mystery by Frederick Knott, “Dial M for Murder” is essentially a technical exercise for Hitchcock. It may not pop at home in 2D, but if you see it on a big screen in 3D, the master’s staging and shot composition makes fiendishly clever use of the gimmicky format. Ray Milland is perfectly hissable as the plotting husband, and Grace Kelly is hugely sympathetic as the would-be victim. Watch out for those scissors!

Of Hitchcock’s minimalist experiments, “Lifeboat” isn’t quite as enjoyable as “Dial M for Murder,” but it masks its limitations and seams better than the long-take thriller “Rope.” Passengers on a torpedoed luxury liner are lost at sea on a small vessel, and their plight gets much more interesting when they decide to rescue a survivor from the U-Boat that sunk them. If you’re wondering how Hitchcock makes his obligatory cameo on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, not to worry. He pulls it off brilliantly.

This trifle of a thriller plays like an excuse for the cast and crew to luxuriate on the French Riviera for a few months, but the glamour pairing of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly would be eye candy enough regardless of the setting. The cat burglar plot is utter fluff, but Grant is having a ball and Kelly, as costumed by the legendary Edith Head, was never more beautiful. It’s been a go-to date movie for over seventy years.

Neither the 1934 original nor the 1956 remake belong in the top tier of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, but they both have their strong points. Doris Day singing “Que Sera Sera” to help locate her kidnapped son in the ’56 version is hard to resist, but the ’34 variation is a leaner, more exciting take on the material, featuring a sharpshooting hero mom (Edna Best) and a delicious bit of villainy from Peter Lorre. 

If you roll your eyes during the final psychiatrist-explains-it-all scene at the end of “Psycho,” you might break out in hives at the Freudian jibber-jabber espoused throughout this psychological thriller. Fortunately, Hitchcock is fully on his visual game, and he gets a little help from surrealist Salvador Dalí in the conceiving of the trippy dream sequence. Gregory Peck was always an odd fit as a Hitchcock male lead, but Ingrid Bergman coaxes a warmish performance out of him (and more offscreen, as the two married actors had a brief affair during the shoot).