Shadow of a Doubt, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, 1943.
The Man Who Knew Too Much, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by John Michael Hayes, 1956.
IF ONE bypasses his handful of silent pictures and a few early talkies made while he was still finding his path, Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography divides neatly into three sections. There were the speedy, ironic, cheeky thrillers he made in Britain in the 1930s, the best of which are The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, and his adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, called Sabotage and released in 1936. Invited to Hollywood to work for David O. Selznick in 1940, he turned out a range of suspense films over the next decade and a half, some of them memorable, including Rebecca (his premier American movie), Notorious, and Strangers on a Train. In 1954 he abandoned the black-and-white palette and turned to Technicolor and widescreen; his leading man, fortunately, was almost always Jimmy Stewart (Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo) or Cary Grant (To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest). He returned to his smaller-scale, monochromatic projects only twice: with The Wrong Man, starring Henry Fonda, in 1956, and, famously, with Psycho, starring Anthony Perkins, in 1960. These pictures share an uncharacteristic grim intensity that stands in stark contrast to his big-screen crowd-pleasers—even Rear Window, where the emotional point of view is that of Stewart’s wheelchair-bound photojournalist combating cabin fever in his apartment. In my view, the less said about the half-dozen pictures he made after Psycho the better, though both The Birds and have scores of defenders.
