Lifeboat (1944)

There's a terrific scene early on where the lifeboat swings around and our attention moves from Tallulah Bankhead's character, who falls out of focus and becomes slightly muted, to a group of other characters towards the front of the boat, who come into focus and become audible, revealing how cleverly Alfred Hitchcock manages and keeps interesting his adaptation of John Steinbeck's story, a confined-space war drama set almost start to finish on a lifeboat.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Stage Fright (1950)

It's not lauded as a masterpiece like other Hitchcock thrillers, but I think this one about an acting school student (Wyman) who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery when her friend Freddie goes on the run from police, is, from the get-go, fun, romantic, thrilling, and star-studded with Pat Hitchcock, the director's daughter debuting as an adult in her father's films (in 1936's Sabotage, she was a very young extra) and Marlene Dietrich features as a sinister rival for Freddie's affections.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Paradine Case (1947)

Director Hitchcock and Producer Selznick's third collaboration, the rather conventional courtroom thriller The Paradine Case, based on a Robert H Hitchens book, may not soar to the heights that Rebecca and Spellbound did (their previous works together) but it is a grand and engrossing melodrama, so well-acted, directed, and staged that you can revel in it despite the ludicrousness of the central court case and despite the fact climactic scenes of Gregory Peck's lawyer's reckoning don't quite hit the nail on the head.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Joel McCrea is no Cary Grant, lacking charisma as the lead of this Hitchcock thriller, but then I suppose he is supposed to - an American crime reporter in London seconded as a foreign correspondent in Amsterdam, he is both a man out of his league and a fish out of water tasked with investigating the potential for war in Europe  - but the other problem is the plot is rambly and loose and barely holds Hitchcock's setpieces together, so thank goodness those setpieces - an assassination, thrills inside a windmill, dizzying scenes atop a hotel and a chapel, and a spectacular plane crash - are so, so memorable! 

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Rope (1948)

Alfred Hitchcock's "stunt", another of his confined space thrillers, is a cinematic stage play - based on a stage play and filmed like one with ten-minute long takes that had to be painstakingly choreographed on a purpose-built set of shifting walls to allow the camera to swing around main characters Phillip Morgan and Brandon Shaw's Manhattan apartment - in a manner of a cat, Vincent Camby perfectly described it in his review in the New York Times in 1984 - and just like Camby's wandering cat, the audience is an uninvolved, apathetic observer of the story of murder, one obviously influenced by the Loeb and Leopold case of 1924 (but embellished distastefully with theatrical flourishes and unlikely speeches) about private schoolboy toffs Phillip and Brandon, the killers who stage a party around the body they have concealed in a chest - a thoroughly disturbing idea and terrific basis for an icy Hitchcock thriller were it not for the fact the focus is not on the plot or the characters or the situation or the factual basis but on the set and the single takes, the director's self-references, the scene-stealing blown-glass clouds and recognisable buildings outside the apartment's windows..

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

The similarities between this 1956 Alfred Hitchcock thriller and the director's one in 1934 stop at the title and the fact both movies tell the story of a couple and their child becoming embroiled in a international intrigue, (this time in Marrakesh, Morocco, not Switzerland) so there is no point in comparing the two - viewers should sit back and enjoy this grand, elaborate and largely mindless thriller- a grand bubble of thrilling nothing - beautifully, interestingly filmed in exotic locations with terrific performances from unlikely Hitchcock blonde Doris Day and Hitchcock regular James Stewart as the couple thrust headlong into a long string of elaborate Hitchcock setpieces including the extended scene, unnecessary and entirely indulgent, at the taxidermist's office and the 12-minute dialogue-free Rififi-esque finale.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Number Seventeen (1932)

Based on a thriller play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, Alfred Hitchcock's 1932 movie starts engagingly enough as sinister characters descend upon a property, number 17, discover a body and try to work out why everyone has come to this ramshackle old property at night, but then things falter and the characters stumble around with not enough to do, clearly just biding time for the grand cinematic showpiece that comes towards film's end - an audacious runaway train scene that even today has your heart stop as the train rockets towards the end of the track! 

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Rebecca (1940)

*Spoiler warning*

Hitchcock's adapatation of Daphne du Maurier's romantic thriller, about the second Mrs de Winter struggling to live up to the image of the first glamorous socialite one, provides neat last minute outs for an abuser and body tamperer and literally concludes, "She was asking for it," but is thoroughly enjoyable and full of memorable moments, like the dreamy approach to Manderley, the amusing courtship that happens behind the back of  Edythe van Hopper, and that fiery ending.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

The filming on location in Santa Rosa, California reportedly had the support of the locals who attended shoots and behaved in exemplary fashion, quietening as cameras rolled and applauding wildly when they weren't, so perhaps when Alfred Hitchcock referred to this as the favourite of his movies he was referring to the process of filming it, not the plot, which is ludicrous, and there are many other reasons why his thriller about sinister Uncle Charlie's visit to his niece's home doesn't count as one of his best - none of the characters are sympathetic (and I found the mother, Emma, and 'Young Charlie' particularly one-note and irritating); there's an awkward staginess to the performances of the comic relief characters of the father and his murder-obsessed neighbour with his fanned-out magazines; the plotting around the home census researchers is especially clumsy; on several occasions, the editing appears to have been performed with the goal of ruthlessly shortening the movie, not letting it run its full and natural course; and while I think Joseph Cotten's Uncle Charlie is supposed to be a madman chameleon (based on the horrifying real-life case of the Gorilla Killer, who apparently posed as a devout Christian to inveigle his way into homes), scene by scene Cotten's Charlie changes in ways that don't really make sense, from guarded and secretive - a man with something to hide - to loud, brazen and obnoxious at the bank, and then coquettish and childlike with his niece.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

To Catch A Thief (1955)

All the ingredients of a ripping Hitchcock comedy thriller are here - the exotic French Riviera setting beautifully photographed in VistaVision; a book's ripping plot with Cary Grant starring as "The Cat", a retired jewel thief wrongly accused of a string of copycat robberies; Grace Kelly as the blonde who wavers between suspecting and loving the hero; experimental camerawork using colour filters; a cameo by the director; and yet reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia is a more exciting thing to do than watching this, one of Hitchcock's most tedious movies, repetitive, low on suspense, and to the end unthrilling.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Murder! (1930)

By today's standards, the mystery is hohum (and is in fact a scenario that Hitchcock goes on to reuse many times over in his later superior films) and its solution is very heavily signposted, but even the modern viewer will be aghast! at the cinematic boundaries Hitchcock dares to push in his 1930 black-and-white murder mystery, like his long, cold appraisal of a woman struggling to pull up her knickers as she dresses in a hurry, plus the grisly spectre of a very public suicide, and a whole lot more of what appears to be wild experimentation on the director's part.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Birds (1963)

Alfred Hitchcock's third Daphne du Maurier adaptation is her short story about birds attacking the residents of du Maurier's hometown of Cornwall, except the Master of Suspense transfers everything to San Francisco and extrapolates the bare context of the novella into a slow burn psychological drama featuring a Paris Hilton-type socialite with nothing better to do than to pull elaborate practical jokes on a potential new beau, but she has the ice cool smile wiped from her face when she finds herself trapped with him, his mother, his ex, his niece and his Oedipal complex in Bodega Bay, a small town under attack from even more unsettled birds!

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Wrong Man (1956)

Alfred Hitchcock refrains from many of his tricks and lets a harrowing true story do all the work in this 1956 thriller about a New York musician (Henry Fonda) accused of a string of armed robberies and his wife (Vera Miles) who suffers a psychological breakdown during what becomes a protracted Kafkaesque criminal investigation.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Their daughter is kidnapped when a clay pigeon shooter and her husband in Switzerland learn from a dying man the details of an international intrigue, in this 1934 Alfred Hitchcock thriller with memorable scenes involving a sun-worshipping cult and a heart-pounding dentist appointment.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Secret Agent (1936)

Somerset Maugham's short story character, Ashenden, is brought to life in Alfred Hitchcock's spectacular-for-the-time 1936 spy thriller featuring John Gielgud as the war hero in Switzerland charged with the task of finding and killing an enemy agent, a mission he, his spy 'wife', and his deranged, racially stereotyped accomplice known as The General accomplish by way of a stupendous bungle that helpfully narrows down the list of suspects from two to one.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Trouble With Harry (1955)

In fact, not one of the oddball characters in this Hitchcock comedy cares less about Harry whose body turns up on its back in the Vermont countryside, but they all come together in a claustrophobic sphere of action to deal with the matter of his body which, for no satisfactory reason, they wish to disappear.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Vertigo (1958)

Alfred Hitchcock's noirish thriller about a detective hired by a friend to follow his wife, who dies, hinges on an obsessive and controlling relationship that develops between James Stewart's detective, John "Scottie" Ferguson, and Kim Novak's character who resembles the wife and it is hard to swallow, first, that the actor James Stewart plays this kind of weirdo and, second, that Novak's character Judy Barton would allow things to progress to the point that Ferguson does creepy things like dye her hair and dress her up, but innovative dolly zooms and flashing primary colour filters coupled with some Freudian psychology about obsessional love and second chances help turn these problems into trifles in another Hitchcock masterpiece.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

North By Northwest (1959)

This Hitchcock masterpiece has Cary Grant as debonair ad man Roger Thornhill embroiled in a case of mistaken identity and an international intrigue that sees him framed for murder, famously chased by a crop-duster, dangled from Mount Rushmore, and head-over-heels in love with an icy Eva Marie Saint.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Strangers On A Train (1951)

Based on Patricia Highsmith's first novel, this Hitchcock masterpiece is notable not just for its stand-out inventive scenes (the out-of-control merry-go-round, the murder reflected in a dropped pair of glasses, the staring face among tennis spectators) but also for its unnerving portrait of delusion - Robert Walker plays the oddball who embroils a tennis star into a warped murder scheme.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

A serial killer kills a blonde woman each Tuesday night in this 1927 silent movie, a must-see for Hitchcock completionists who will enjoy spotting the themes and ideas Hitchcock would return to again and again over the course of his career including murder, damsels-in-distress who end up in handcuffs, accusations against the innocent, plus there is a first-run of the Psycho shower scene and a chance to wonder at the extent of Hitchcock's own notorious obsession with blondes.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS