1. Rear Window (1953)
The allure and danger of voyeurism run through Hitchcock's work, but in Rear Window it's front and center. Jimmy Stewart stars as the charming and curmudgeonly 'Jeff' Jeffries, a frustrated news photographer who is out cold thanks to a broken leg and hip cast. To keep himself busy, he watches the scenes that come out of the apartment windows on his block.
There's the newlyweds, a struggling songwriter, a lonely woman desperate for love...and a wife who suddenly disappears. Does the husband have blood on his hands? Jeff and his girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) investigate, and soon things get out of hand. It's a witty, snappy, romantic, morbid, and paranoid mix of all Hitchcock's strengths and a sly reminder that you, the movie audience, are just as voyeuristic as Jeff.
2. 39 Steps (1935)
Hitchcock's first absolute masterpiece hits almost all the tics that would define his last great thrillers. In Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), he has a hero who is framed for a murder he didn't commit and has to uncover dark forces to clear his name while he's on the run from the police. What are the 39 steps? And why does he want him dead? It has a bubbly and fun script and tension between Donat and Madeleine Carroll. And, in his most famous part of the montage - a woman turns to scream when she finds a dead body, but the shriek coming out of her mouth is the whistle of the train Hannay has boarded to Scotland - there's more verve, flair, and mystery than in most other full-length movies.
3. Psycho (1960)
"Psycho was meant to make people scream and scream and so on," Hitchcock said in 1964. "But no more than screaming and screaming on a return train... so you don't have to go very far because you want that get off the train laughing with delight".
This is not how Psycho landed. Following the path blazed by the slippery, colorful, and vagabond With Death on its Heels, Psycho is a black-and-white pulp film set in rural Nowheresville. Some critics hated it; the Observer critic CA Lejeune withdrew and promptly resigned in protest of her. Another called it "a stain on an honorable career."
The public, on the other hand, loved it. Partly because it was subversive, not only because of its violence. it was the first American film to show a flushed toilet.
Despite the legendary terror of Psycho and the frenzy of the shower scene, its opening is mundane. A woman runs off with embezzled money, hiding out in a motel to decide what to do next. Suddenly, however, the whole mechanism begins to go into gear: a domineering mother, a creepy young man who keeps eating candy corn, a murderer and a past she can't escape.
4. Alarm on the Express (1938)
Iris (Margaret Lockwood) returns to England from Central Europe to be unhappily married when a falling flower pot hits her on the head. She wakes up on the train and befriends an old lady. She takes a nap (not recommended for concussion, but it happens anyway), and the old lady is gone. Not only that, but everyone on the train swears that she was never there. What's going on? Michael Redgrave's Gilbert is a wry leader, and the cricket-obsessed Charters and Caldicott add further comic relief, but behind the light-hearted tone are strangely prescient murmurs of war in Europe.
5. With Death on the Heels (1959)
If Cary Grant had been chased into that cornfield by Hitchcock's first-choice threat, the cinema might look very different. He originally wanted a tornado, before writer Ernest Lehman changed everything.
"I can't tell you who said what to whom," Hitchcock later said, "but sometime that afternoon, the cyclone in the sky turned into the crop duster."
Cary Grant is Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive who, in yet another case of mistaken identity, is rounded up by spies and nearly killed. While he was trying to figure out who exactly he was mistaken for, he too was framed for murder. He's on his own, and he has to figure out what this spy ring is trying to steal from the US while he avoids being assassinated. This brilliant, globe-trotting thriller is the pinnacle of Hitchcock's hits. As if that were not enough, he also invented James Bond.
