The three scenes that made Alfred Hitchcock a movie genius

April 29 marks the 40th anniversary of the death of the famous British director.

Cary Grant walking up the stairs with the glass of milk in Suspicion (1941)

In his first film with Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant was given the role of Johnnie Aysgarth, a gambler who seems to live off what his friends lend him. On a train, traveling side by side in first class, he meets Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine): they fall in love and quickly marry. But after the honeymoon, she discovers her true character, and she begins to suspect that she married a murderer when her husband's partner dies mysteriously.

The entire film plays on the woman's fear of being next on the list of this supposed murderer who sleeps with her. The climax comes with a scene that turns an everyday object into the greatest threat: it is a glass of milk that Grant brings to Fontaine. She thinks that he may be poisoned. To build suspense and make us see the glass as a potentially deadly weapon, Hitchcock had a spotlight placed inside the glass, while Grant's face remains in shadow. That way, all attention is on the liquid.

Was he poisoned or not? Just a clue: Hitchcock was dissatisfied with the ending, which the producers made him change to preserve the image of Cary Grant, one of his biggest stars. The scene is the one that opens this note.

The dream sequences of Tell me about your life (1945)

It is not one of Hitchcock's most appreciated titles -he had not been so satisfied with the result-, but it has two key ingredients: the introduction of psychoanalysis as a fundamental part of the plot and the collaboration of Salvador Dalí. The Spanish artist was commissioned to design the famous dream sequences for the film, which tells the story of an amnesiac man who asks a psychoanalyst for help to remember his true identity, as well as the fate of the person for whom is being passed off.

“I intended to break with the tradition of dreams in the cinema, which are almost always foggy and confused, with the screen shaking, etc.,” Hitchcock told Truffaut.

"I asked (producer) Selznick to secure the collaboration of Salvador Dalí. Selznick accepted, but I'm sure he thought that I wanted Dalí to work for the publicity it would give us. The only reason, however, was my willingness to achieve very visual dreams with sharp and clear features, precisely in an image clearer than that of the film".

"I wanted Dalí's collaboration because of the sharp aspect of his architecture –De Chirico is very similar-, the long shadows, the infinite distances, the lines that converge in perspective, the shapeless faces”.

Much of the scene ended up out of the movie, but what was left - bizarre landscapes, eyes, card games - was as fascinating as it was cutting-edge. Another innovation of Talk about yourself was the incorporation of the electronic hum of the theremin into the music, something that would later be imitated by many genre films. Hungarian Miklós Rózsa won an Oscar for the soundtrack.

Cary Grant was chased by a plane in International Intrigue (1959)

One of Hitchcock's classic narrative premises was that of the ordinary man involved in extraordinary circumstances. That man here is Cary Grant, who plays a publicist, Roger Thornhill, who finds himself embroiled in a complex espionage plot when he is mistaken for a man named George Kaplan.

He is not only hunted by two foreign spies but in the middle, he is accused of murder and must also run from the police. The scene that remained in the history of cinema takes place in the middle of the field: Grant's character arrives there without realizing that it is an ambush. His enemies attack him with a plane and he has nowhere to take refuge. It is a scene with a long introduction in which nothing seems to happen until the plane appears and we are aware of the danger the protagonist is in.

“I wanted to react against an old cliché: the man who shows up in a place where he is probably going to be killed. What is usually done? A night in a small town square. The victim waits to stand in the circle of light from a streetlight. The pavement is wet from recent rain. A close-up of a black cat sneaking along a wall. A shot of a window with someone drawing the curtains to look outside. The slow approach of a black car, etc..."

"I asked myself the following question: what would be the opposite of this scene? A deserted plain, in full sun, without music, nor a black cat, nor a mysterious face behind the windows!"