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..

★★★★☆

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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.

★★★★☆

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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.

★★★★★

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Rear Window (1954)

Alfred Hitchcock's mystery suspense masterpiece has an incredibly elaborate purpose-built film-set of 31 apartments (eight of them fully furnished) and it stars James Stewart as a wheelchair-bound man who entertains himself by sitting at his apartment window observing his neighbours, one of whom may be a murderer!

★★★★★

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