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The Guardian (25/Jun/2007) - 1000 films to see before you die

(c) The Guardian (25/Jun/2007)

During the week commencing 25th June 2007, The Guardian newspaper in the UK published a five part series titled "1000 films to see before you die". The following Hitchcock films appeared in the list:

  • The Birds (1963)
    "An apocalyptic tone-poem", Fellini called Hitchcock's last masterpiece. What sets the birds off? Mother's incestuous sexual jealousy? The son's burgeoning emotional independence? Tippi Hedren's lime-green dress? Whatever - the sexual tremors beneath the avian horror are the movie's true motor; and the effects, instantly dated in 1963, now seem horrifyingly retro-beautiful.

  • The Lodger (1927)
    Subtitled "A Story of the London Fog" and based on the Jack the Ripper killings, this was the most accomplished of Hitchcock's silent films, the atmosphere heavy as the pea-souper air. And you can see the young master working on his signature motif, the question of whether mysterious lodger Ivor Novello is innocent or guilty of serial murder...

  • North by Northwest (1959)
    Why is everyone chasing Cary Grant - or trying to get him into bed? Because the fate of the world is at stake; or, if not quite that, the happiness of Eva Marie Saint. Hitchcock at his most entertaining, ignoring realism and walking all over George Washington's face.

  • Notorious (1946)
    One of Hitchcock's nastiest and most effective thrillers sees cynical CIA agent Cary Grant essentially prostituting the woman he's falling for (Ingrid Bergman, luminous) so as to net creepy, mother-fixated neo-Nazi Claude Rains in postwar Brazil. Perhaps his most sexually anguished, emotionally punishing film until Vertigo.

  • Psycho (1960)
    Described by its director as "a fun picture", this technical tour de force plays mercilessly on audience voyeurism. Janet Leigh is the thief on the lam who holes up at the Bates motel and is dispatched in the shower. Genius editing, knockout performances and twisted Freudian plotting -- all shot through with Hitch's slyly sadistic humour. Genius.

  • Rear Window (1954)
    Surveillance classic from the master. Who but Hitchcock could squeeze so much tension from an incapacitated James Stewart stuck in his apartment with only a telephoto lens and Grace Kelly to keep him company? As a murder mystery seems to appear out of nowhere from the everyday routines of the neighbours he spies on, Stewart's paranoia and frustration builds to a nervous climax.

  • Rebecca (1940)
    The first project Selznick gave to Hitchcock when the director came to America -- and it's a ghost story. Rebecca is dead -- and did she deserve it! Maxim is the husband she left behind, a wreck, and "I" is the new wife. But Mrs Danvers stands guard over Rebecca's room, her clothes and her power.

  • Strangers on a Train (1951)
    Robert Walker's suave psychopath approaches Farley Granger's pro-tennis star with a novel approach to murder; Hitchcock, in easy command of his powers, unwinds the homoerotic tension of Patricia Highsmith's novel. The obsessive psychological set-up constantly surfaces in astute imagery and unleashes a sickening momentum, skidding along the edge of a moral precipice.

  • Vertigo (1958)
    Vertigo's present prominence within Hitchcock's oeuvre contrasts very pleasingly with the obscurity in which it languished for many decades after its disappointing critical reception in 1958. It simply disappeared for 25 years. If you didn't know a film collector with a bashed-up, bleached-out 16mm college-circuit print, or know someone archive-savvy at Paramount or MCA, then you probably had to wait until its re-release in 1983 to see what all the fuss was about. The simultaneous reissue of five of his Technicolor American films - two of them, Vertigo and Rear Window, certifiable masterpieces - seemed at the time a characteristically Hitchcockian publicity gambit, guaranteeing massive attention for the quintet. And of course you felt like he was speaking to you from beyond the grave, which would have put a smile on his great, pinkly beaming face. And Vertigo - the lost jewel of legend finally disinterred - proved worth the long wait. Now it enjoys the esteem it always deserved, being often cited as one of the enduring masterpieces of world cinema, and one of Hitchcock's foremost achievements. As dreamlike as anything by Buñuel, and quite as fetishy, it tells the same story two times: a man twice falls in love with a woman who isn't there, and twice he causes her death, the first time by abetting her murder; the second time destroying her sense of herself and, with it, his own soul. James Stewart gave his darkest, most disturbing performance, Kim Novak showed depths she never plumbed again, and Hitchcock's technical skills and formal gifts were never more eerily displayed.
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