Alfred Hitchcock Movies: A Career Guide from the British Silents to Hollywood

The first time I saw Psycho was on a battered print at a late-night double bill, and the audience, which included plenty of people who already knew exactly what was coming, still gasped in the same places. That is the strange power of Alfred Hitchcock movies. Their twists have been spoiled for more than half a century, and they still work, because Hitchcock was less interested in surprise than in suspense: letting the audience know more than the characters and making them squirm while they wait.

Hitchcock directed more than fifty features across five decades, in two countries, from the silent era to the 1970s. This guide walks through the career period by period, with a place to start in each.

From title cards to director: the London years

Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899, in Leytonstone, on the eastern edge of London. He entered the film business around 1920 designing title cards for the London studio of Famous Players-Lasky, the company that became Paramount, and worked his way up through art direction, writing and assistant directing. In the mid-1920s he spent time at the UFA studios in Germany, where he watched the expressionist filmmakers at work, and the influence of their shadows and angles never left him.

His first completed feature as director was The Pleasure Garden (1925), shot largely in Germany. His second, The Mountain Eagle (1926), is lost, and it is one of the most sought-after missing films in British cinema. The breakthrough was The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), a Jack the Ripper-inspired story about a mysterious tenant suspected of murder. Hitchcock himself later described it as the first true “Hitchcock picture,” and the elements are already there: an innocent man under suspicion, a blonde in danger, and a city seen through fog and shadow. It is also one of the films in which he makes a brief appearance on screen, the start of the famous cameos.

Blackmail (1929) began as a silent and was reworked as one of Britain’s first feature-length talkies. Hitchcock used sound creatively at once, most famously in a breakfast-table scene in which the word “knife” leaps out of a neighbor’s chatter at the guilt-stricken heroine. If you are new to the period, our silent-era section has more context on how British and American studios made the transition.

The British thrillers of the 1930s

After some uneven early sound films, Hitchcock found his true genre at Gaumont-British with a run of thrillers that made him the best-known director in Britain. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) set the template: an ordinary couple pulled into international intrigue. The 39 Steps (1935), with Robert Donat handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll as they flee across the Scottish moors, is the purest early example of his “wrong man on the run” story, and it holds up beautifully. Sabotage (1936) contains a sequence involving a bomb on a London bus that he later said he regretted, because it broke his own rule about rewarding suspense. The Lady Vanishes (1938), a comedy-thriller set on a train crossing Europe, was a major hit in both Britain and the United States and helped secure his move to Hollywood. His last British film before he left was Jamaica Inn (1939), a period adventure with Charles Laughton that is usually ranked among his weaker films.

The Selznick years and the 1940s

In 1939 Hitchcock moved to the United States under contract to the producer David O. Selznick. His first American film, Rebecca (1940), with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, won the Academy Award for Best Picture, an award that went to Selznick as producer. Hitchcock was nominated for Best Director, the first of five nominations; he never won a competitive Oscar.

Selznick loaned him out frequently, and the decade’s films are a mix of studio projects and personal experiments. Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Saboteur (1942) were wartime adventure thrillers. Suspicion (1941) cast Cary Grant as a charming husband who may or may not be a killer, and won Joan Fontaine the Best Actress Oscar, the only acting Academy Award ever given for a performance in a Hitchcock film. Shadow of a Doubt (1943), about a small-town girl who begins to suspect her beloved uncle is a murderer, is often cited as one of his own favorites among his films. Lifeboat (1944) confined its entire story to a single small boat. Spellbound (1945) brought in a dream sequence designed with Salvador Dalí. Notorious (1946), with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, is for many fans the best film of the period, a spy story that is really about love and trust, with a celebrated crane shot that swoops down a staircase to a key in Bergman’s hand.

Once free of Selznick, Hitchcock experimented with technique. Rope (1948), his first color film, was staged to look as if it played out in a handful of continuous takes.

The peak: 1951 to 1960

From Strangers on a Train (1951) to Psycho (1960), Hitchcock made a run of films that few directors in any era have matched. He also became a household name through television: Alfred Hitchcock Presents premiered in 1955, and his droll introductions made his silhouette famous worldwide.

Several collaborators shaped the look and sound of this period. Robert Burks photographed most of the films of the 1950s, Bernard Herrmann composed the scores from The Trouble with Harry (1955) through Marnie (1964), and Saul Bass designed the title sequences for Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho. Our piece on Saul Bass and title design covers that partnership in more detail.

The late films

The Birds (1963), released by Universal, pushed special effects further than anything he had tried, with birds attacking a small coastal town for no reason ever explained. Marnie (1964) was a commercial disappointment on release but has been reassessed by many critics since. Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) are generally considered lesser works.

Frenzy (1972) took him back to London for a grim, darkly funny murder story set around Covent Garden market, and it is the strongest of the late films. His final feature was Family Plot (1976), a light caper. He received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1968, the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1979, and a knighthood in the 1980 New Year Honours. He died in Los Angeles on April 29, 1980.

What makes a film “Hitchcockian”

• Suspense over surprise. Show the audience the bomb under the table, then make them wait.
• The innocent man accused. From The Lodger to North by Northwest, ordinary people are mistaken for criminals and must clear their names.
• The MacGuffin. His term for the object everyone in the story is chasing, which hardly matters to the audience.
• Pure cinema. Long stretches told in images with little or no dialogue, such as the crop-duster sequence.
• The cameo. His brief walk-on appearances, which became a game for audiences.

Much of how we now talk about these films comes from François Truffaut’s book-length interview with Hitchcock, published in 1966, which helped persuade critics that the “Master of Suspense” was a serious artist as well as a showman. For how he compares with his studio-era peers, see our guide to classic Hollywood directors.

Where to start

If you have never seen a Hitchcock film, start with North by Northwest for pure entertainment, then Rear Window for suspense, then Vertigo when you are ready for something stranger. Add The 39 Steps to see where the formula began. Many of the British films are in the public domain in some territories and turn up in public-domain archives, but quality varies widely; the restorations available through licensed services are worth seeking out.