Wednesday: Alfred Hitchcock

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1935) • In this gem from his pre-Hollywood days, Hitchcock adapts John Buchan’s novel and crafts a scintillating thriller about an innocent man on the run. After a chaotic night at the theatre, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) escorts a beautiful and frightened woman (Lucie Mannheim) home. She reveals that she is a spy, hunted down for uncovering a plot against Britain. Later that night, she appears at his apartment, stabbed in the back. Framed as the killer, Hannay is forced to flee. As he follows the clues, he struggles to answer a central mystery: What are the 39 Steps? 16mm

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1938) • Nothing like a good train movie if you like intrigue and propulsive drama—in short, if you like Hitchcock. A young socialite (Margaret Lockwood) on board a train drifts off to sleep; when she awakens, her kindly old seatmate (Dame May Whitty) is nowhere to be found. But how does someone disappear from a moving train? A psychiatrist says she never existed; another passenger suspects foul play, and, with an eccentric musician (Michael Redgrave) as Lockwood's unlikely companion, the train and the picture pull into the station with an understated English wit that makes this one of the master's most delightful concoctions. 16mm

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) • On one level, Shadow of a Doubt couldn't possibly be more schematic: Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright, uncle and niece, murderer and detective, happen to share the same name: Charlie. Could there be a message here about dual natures? But Hitchcock's not as interested in hammering home his all-too-neat structures as he is in showing off his newfound expertise in dissecting American mannerisms. Quiet little Santa Rosa seems culled from the sorrowful recollections of some future dweller, one who knows that this flourishing land, in which good always finds a way to triumph, is dead without knowing it. Archival. 35mm

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) • The Lacanians may never let this one out of their pscho(analy)tic death grip, though Cahiers du Cinéma had a different take. The set-up invites a Freudian reading of the first order: Jimmy Stewart as “Jeff” Jeffries is cooped up with a broken leg and spends his time sitting at the window, spying on the inhabitants of nearby apartments. Starting to get a good sense of the neighbors, the voyeuristic Jeffries believes that he witnesses a murder. The near-perfect cinematography is only matched by the excessively precise audio track. 35mm

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1949) • A period piece—rare in Hitchcock's filmography—Under Capricorn, set in 19th-century Australia, takes the claustrophobic tensions of Rope and fixes them upon the broken and precarious psyche of a single character, Lady Henrietta Flusky (Ingrid Bergman), as a newly-arrived Irishman takes her under his wing, seeing in her a chance to do good ("the first work of art I've ever done," he says at one point). The film hauntingly evokes Henrietta’s unstable self, and everything is revealed and connected in probing long takes. With perhaps the most magisterial camerawork in the director's entire career, Under Capricorn is an under-viewed masterpiece. 35mm16mm

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) • After years of neglect and derision, Vertigo has finally ascended to the rank of Hitchcock's finest achievement and quite possibly the greatest film of the twentieth century. Repeated viewings only confirm the impeccable precision of Hitchcock's craft. Vertigo is a reverie for masochistic desire and impossible romance, a story of love found, lost, and found again in ghostly image rather than flesh. James Stewart delivers his most nuanced and penetrating performance as Scottie, the retired San Francisco detective whose acrophobia stands between him and Kim Novak, the woman he was never supposed to love. 35mm

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) • This loose adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 novella of the same name follows the unsuspecting residents of a small California town that is overrun by a flock of vicious birds. At first more concerned with their budding romance, Melanie (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch (Rod Taylor) quickly realize that their survival is at stake as the bird attacks become increasingly violent and begin to turn deadly. Some claim that Hedren was actually injured by her avian costars during the making of the film, but it’s probably safe to say that this suspenseful thriller had a much more scarring impact on its audiences. 35mm

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1964) • The iciest Hitchcockian blonde of any of the director’s films, Marnie (Tippi Hedren) is a mysteriously disturbed woman who, after stealing the contents of her trusting employer’s safe, applies for a job with a man who knows of the theft. Intrigued, he hires her regardless and, when he too ends up robbed, catches her and blackmails her into marrying him. What ensues is a twisted, psychological meditation on sexuality and the puritanical mores of society, in true Hitchcock style. Considered by some to be an out-of-place addition to the Hitchcock oeuvre at the time, Marnie is, in retrospect, an essential and elucidating entry into the canon. 35mm

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1972) • Hitchcock’s return to the murder genre—based on Arthur La Bern’s Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester—is considered by many to be the director’s last great film. The movie follows the story of Richard Blaney, who is framed for the grisly rape and murder of his ex-wife and girlfriend, and Inspector Oxford, who only vaguely suspects error in Blaney’s arrest until speaking with his wife. Hitchcock’s signature tension, like silence being pulled from your ears, snowballs along in pursuit of Blaney, the inspector, and the true criminal until we are presented the eloquent, smirking finale. 35mm

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1976) • In Family Plot, a phony psychic and her cabdriver boyfriend (Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern), are promised $10,000 if they can locate the missing nephew of an aging woman. The hapless amateur detectives cross paths with a couple of serial kidnappers (Karen Black and William Devane) as their investigation reveals the estranged nephew's sordid past. Alfred Hitchcock orchestrates the complex intertwining narratives of Family Plot with typical aplomb, but adopts a lighthearted comedic tone that eschews his typically acerbic quality. Thus, his final film finds the director bowing out with charm and, literally, a wink. 35mm