MY 10 BEST HITCHCOCK MOVIES

1. THE 39 STEPS (1935) -A man in London tries to help a counterespionage agent, and is soon finding himself in one jam after another. Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is a Canadian visitor to London. At the end of "Mr Memory"’s show in a music hall, he meets Annabella Smith who is running away from secret agents. He accepts to hide her in his flat, but in the night she is murdered. Fearing he could be accused on the girl’s murder, Hannay goes on the run to break the spy ring.

2. REBECCA (1940) -When a naive young woman (Joan Fontaine) marries a rich widower (Laurence Olivier), they settle in his gigantic mansion, where she finds the memory of the first wife maintaining a grip on her husband and the servants.



3. SPELLBOUND (1945) -Psychologist Ingrid Bergman tries to solve a murder by unlocking the clues hidden in the mind of amnesiac suspect Gregory Peck. Among the highlights is a bizarre dream sequence seemingly designed by Salvador Dali—complete with huge eyeballs and pointed scissors. Although the film is in black and white, the original release contained one subliminal blood-red frame, appearing when a gun pointed directly at the camera goes off. Spellbound is one of Hitchcock’s strangest and most atmospheric films, providing the director with plenty of opportunities to explore what he called "pure cinema"—i.e., the power of pure visual associations.


4. NOTORIOUS (1946) -A woman is asked to spy on a group of Nazi friends in South America. How far will she have to go to ingratiate herself with them? Following the conviction of her German father for treason against the U.S., Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman)takes to drink and men. She is approached by a government agent, T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) who asks her to spy on a group of her father’s Nazi friends operating out of Rio de Janeiro. A romance develops between Alicia and Devlin, but she starts to get too involved in her work.



5. STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951) -Strange thing about this trip. So much occurs in pairs. Tennis star Guy (Farley Granger) hates his unfaithful wife. Mysterious Bruno (Robert Walker) hates his father. How perfect for a playful proposal: I’ll kill yours, you kill mine. Now look at how Alfred Hitchcock reinforces the duality of human nature. The more you watch, the more you’ll see. "Isn’t it a fascinating design?" the Master of Suspense often asked. Actually, it’s doubly fascinating.



6. DIAL M FOR MURDER (1954) -A suave tennis player (Ray Milland) plots the perfect murder, the dispatching of his wealthy wife (Grace Kelly), who is having an affair with a writer (Robert Cummings). Amazingly, the wife manages to stave off her attacker, a twist of fate that challenges the hubby’s talent for improvisation.



7. REAR WINDOW (1954) -Photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart) is, in fact, a voyeur by trade, a professional photographer sidelined by an accident while on assignment. His immersion in the human drama (and comedy) visible from his window is a by-product of boredom, underlined by the disapproval of his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and a wisecracking visiting nurse (Thelma Ritter). Yet when the invalid wife of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) disappears, Jeff enlists the two women to help him to determine whether she’s really left town, as Thorwald insists, or been murdered.



8. VERTIGO (1958) -James Stewart plays a retired police detective who is hired by an old friend to follow his wife (a superb Kim Novak, in what becomes a double role), whom he suspects of being possessed by the spirit of a dead madwoman. The detective and the disturbed woman fall in love and...well, to give away any more of the story would be criminal.



9. NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) -A hapless New York advertising executive (Cary Grant) is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, and is pursued across the country while he looks for a way to survive.



10. PSYCHO (1960) -Anthony Perkins is unforgettable as Norman Bates, the mama’s boy proprietor of the Bates Motel; and so is Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, who makes an impulsive decision and becomes a fugitive from the law, hiding out at Norman’s roadside inn for one fateful night.