For reasons unknown even to the internet, today is Alfred Hitchcock Day. Because you may not have seen these, here are some publicly available Hitchcock films that you should see, in random order.
REBECCA
Possibly one of Hitchcock’s most famous films, Rebecca is the dead first wife of dark and brooding Laurence Olivier. His second wife, mousy and insecure Joan Fontaine, becomes obsessed with Rebecca’s memory while the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers — Judith Anderson in her greatest and most sinister performance on film — works to undermine her mental health and her marriage. Add in George Sanders as Rebecca’s louche cousin, Gladys Cooper and Nigel Bruce as the in-laws, and delightfully awkward Reginald Denny as the estate manager once infatuated with Rebecca, and all you need to add is a sunken sailboat with a body in it . . .
JAMAICA INN
Significant as the film debut of Maureen O’Hara, she plays a spirited but bereaved Irish girl come to live with her aunt and uncle on the Cornish coast. Alas, she discovers her rough uncle is running a gang that plan shipwrecks and murder the crews to rob the cargo! Robert Newton (probably best remembered as Inspector Fix in Around the World in Eighty Days) tries to help her out, but what sort of game is he playing anyway? Emlyn Williams makes for a cocky shipwrecker with a chip on each shoulder, and I am especially fond of Marie Ney as the long-suffering Aunt Patience. Look also for my beloved Mabel Terry-Lewis (the Comtesse de Tournay in The Scarlet Pimpernel) as an aristocratic dinner guest near the start of the film.
But the honors really go to Charles Laughton as Sir Humphrey Pengallon, the local squire and magistrate, who wants only “to live spaciously, as a gentleman.”
NOTORIOUS
Ingrid Bergman — at her best in my view — starts out as the good-time-girl daughter of a Nazi war criminal. Cary Grant persuades her to start spying for the US government, which means moving to Rio de Janeiro and ingratiating herself with Claude Rains . . . who already has a crush on her. As I’m fond of saying, hilarity ensues, this time involving poison.
If you loved Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers, you’ll really love Madame Konstantin as Claude Rains’s Nazi mother. She smokes a cigarette in bed like a gun firing bullets into your heart. Louis Calhern appears as Cary Grant’s boss (I believe it was in his contract that no fewer than three references to his good looks remain in the finished film). But I was truly delighted to see Lenore Ulric, known only for her performance as Greta Garbo’s rival Olympe in Camille, show up as a party guest. Such enormous eyes, and her line “Young men have such short memories” speaks volumes.
SPELLBOUND
Ingrid Bergman again, this time as a cut-and-dried psychoanalyst at a sanitarium who falls in love with her new boss, Gregory Peck . . . even after he has a freakout. And this being Hitchcock, of course there’s a murder involved. Leo G. Carroll as Himself appears as the outgoing head of the sanitarium, but the best performance is from Michael Chekhov, the son of Anton Chekhov Himself, as Bergman’s peppery psychiatry professor from college. Seeing Bergman deal with a hotel drunk is priceless.
Medically, this film is laughable. Besides all the outdated notions about psychiatry, how on earth is this sanitarium run?! The doctors spend all their time together as a group (including at meals in the same dining room with patients) — and they have to be surgeons as well as psychiatrists! That said, this film is best known for its groundbreaking dream sequence designed by the surrealist Salvador Dalí — and it’s amazing.
THE PARADINE CASE
I just wrote about The Paradine Case recently here, so no need to repeat myself.
There are lots of other amazing Hitchcock movies, but these are the ones on my Yewtybbe list. Certainly you should check out The 39 Steps (though I find it exhausting), To Catch a Thief, Rope, Stage Fright, Rear Window, and Lifeboat. I’m probably leaving out one of your favorites. I’ll conclude by adding that I’ll never see The Birds again, and it’s a horrible movie to see on a date. Don’t ask me how I know.