39 steps (1935)
It is Hitchcock's major British stage film. A perfect thriller: an intelligent and multifaceted protagonist, an early murder that ignites the plot, a frantic pace, and continuous coincidences.
39 Steps shows the director's British humor in the most obvious way. Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) stumbles upon an accusation of murder without knowing how or why. Between escapes and cigarettes, Hannay ends up handcuffed to a beautiful blonde (a common trait among the protagonists of Hitchcock's films), played by Madeleine Carroll, whom he must convince that she is innocent.
Unlike the films of his American era, 39 Steps uses silence instead of music to generate tension in the viewer.
Cardigan (1940)
"Last night I dreamed I was going back to Manderley." This is how Rebecca begins, Hitchcock's first film to arrive in the United States. During the first half hour, the British direct presents a beautiful love story between an innocent young woman (Jean Fontaine) and the tormented Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) that disconcerts the viewer and distances them from the suspense that Hitchcock had been working on in his filmed tapes. in the United Kingdom.
De Winter's second wife lives a continuous psychological attack when she arrives at the English estate of Manderley, where she sees herself in the shadow of Rebecca, Maxim's perfect first wife who apparently died in a tragic accident at sea. It is in the great Cornish mansion where the story takes a 180-degree turn and takes a dark turn. De Winter's now wife meets a servant, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who tries to make life miserable by constantly summoning the ghost of Rebecca.
Mrs. Danvers' admiration for Rebecca has led to her being attributed to a lesbian relationship with De Winter's former wife. It is this impossible passion for the invisible protagonist that leads the housekeeper to end her love story with the burning of Manderley and her own suicide.
Rebecca was one of the three Hitchcock films adapted from books by Daphne du Maurier, in addition to Jamaica Inn (1939) and The Birds (1963), which sowed the writer's disgust for the liberties that the British director had taken at the time to rewrite the script.
The Rope (1948)
The rope was undoubtedly one of the director's greatest cinematographic experiments. Alfred Hitchcock recorded this film in a sequence shot that moved through the room in which the plot takes place, despite the technological impossibility of recording more than 10 minutes at a time.
However, the importance of this film does not lie solely in visual experimentation, but also in its philosophical importance. Hitchcock transfers Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical theory of Superman to the film. And after exposing her and influencing her, he destroys her.
Two young would-be supermen, Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Grange) strangle their friend David (Dick Hogan) with the sole aim of proving they are capable of committing the perfect crime. They hide his body in a chest that will serve as a table during a dinner attended by David's girlfriend, an old boyfriend of hers, and Rupert (James Stewart), a former teacher, who has exercised a notable influence on the murderers for his theories about the human condition.
Rupert, who had taken his ideas to the limit, then found that his disciples had turned theory into practice by murdering David. Do you remember when we said that the lives of inferior beings were unimportant? That the moral concepts of good and evil, of fair and unfair, are not valid for intellectually superior beings? We turned what you and I theorized into reality”, Brandon tries to explain.
Brandon, until this very moment, this world and the people in it have always been dark and incomprehensible to me. I have tried to make my way by exercising my logic and superior intellect. You just threw my own arguments in my face, Brandon, and you had a right to do so. A man must maintain what he expresses, answers Rupert, the fallen Superman.
The professor becomes at that moment the incarnation of the failure of totalitarian ideologies: «From the beginning, there has been a criminal feeling within you that has made you commit such an act. However, within me, there is something superior that would never have allowed me. Tonight, you have made me ashamed of all the concepts I have held in my life about superior and inferior beings. Now I know that we are all individual persons, simple human beings, with the right to live, think and work freely.
