Ranking the Pre-Hollywood Alfred Hitchcock Movies (1925-1939)

Here's what I suggest you watch, and avoid

Here’s master of public relations, Alfred Hitchcock circa 1966, stacking another film on top of all of his others. See the funny and tall picture below.

Proving the concept that just showing up and doing stuff can pay off, Sir Alfred completed at least 53 movies in 50 years. Plus the famous TV show, a couple of lost films, and a bunch of shorter bits and WW2 propaganda films.

I finally sat down and watched all of these chronologically. That includes all of those at the bottom of the stack you haven’t heard of, many silents and a few early talkies.

Which would I recommend you watch? What about those you can show to kids?

Before indulging in a complete 53-picture list, let me now just stick to about half of this stack. Those would be the pre-Hollywood films, the ones he made in Britain, before 1940’s Rebecca.

Truly it would’ve been a quite good career even if he had stopped directing in 1939.

However, there are some stinkers, as he admits in Truffaut/Hitchcock, the interview book he did with critic and director Francois Truffaut in the mid-1960s.

Let’s do a TL;DR here, and then below this bulleted list, I’ll make comments on these films.

By the way, if you want to see how these stack up against his famous Hollywood films, check out my list on letterboxd, roughly ranked according to my tastes.

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Tier 1 — Must-Watches

• The Lodger (1927)

• The 39 Steps (1935)

• The Lady Vanishes (1939)

Tier 2 — Hitchcock Basics

• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

• Sabotage (1936)

Tier 3 — Underrated Gems

• Blackmail (1929)

• Young and Innocent (1937)

Tier 4 — Precursors to Hitchcock Classics

• Murder! (1930)

• Rich and Strange (1931)

• Number Seventeen (1932)

• Secret Agent (1936)

Tier 5 — Only for Scholars

• The Pleasure Garden (1925)

• The Ring (1927)

• Downhill (1927)

• The Farmer’s Wife (1928)

• Champagne (1928)

• The Manxman (1929)

• Juno and the Payock (1930)

• The Skin Game (1931)

• Jamaica Inn (1939)

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Commentary

Tier 1 — Must-Watches

• The Lodger (1927) — Possibly one of the most watchable and entertaining silent movies I’ve ever seen, “The Lodger” is quite remarkable for being a sort-of blueprint for what Hitchcock would do later, in movies about innocent men and serial killers — e.g., “Psycho,” “Strangers on a Train,” “Frenzy.” This one has distinct early-20th century flavors of the existential plight of individuals in cities, mob psychology, and media frenzies. In my view, it’s perhaps the most socially potent Hitchcock ever got, as a kind of film philosopher. But you don’t need to notice all that. It still holds up as entertaining.

• The 39 Steps (1935) — If I’m sending anybody to early Hitchcock, it’s this one, based on the John Buchan novel, which is worth reading. Another “Wrong Man” movie — Hitchcock would make at least a dozen of these — it’s a pre-war spy movie that roams across Britain, featuring several unforgettable moments and the classic character “Mr. Memory.” This is my personal favorite of all the films listed here.

• The Lady Vanishes (1939) — I don’t care as much for this one as everyone else does. Nevertheless, I’ll let popular opinion prevail, including Truffaut’s. Hitchcock loved trains as places where identities erase or shift, and then weirdly commingle (e.g., think about Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint on the train in “North by Northwest”). In this one, an old lady disappears while a European train travels from one place to another. The heroine notices, but nobody else notices or believes her. Will there be a secret espionage plot? You already know the answer!

Tier 2 — Hitchcock Basics

• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) — Hitchcock made this movie twice, with a remake in 1956 featuring Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart. Arguably that one’s more entertaining than the 1934 version, yet several moments here remain unforgettable, including the culminating scene in Royal Albert Hall. Hitchcock at this point loved to interrupt Britain’s domestic bliss by constantly pointing out the secret criminal underbelly living right alongside the merry old Brits. He did this for the sake of entertainment, yet knowing WW2 is coming, you can’t help notice his persistent interest in xenophobic worries and the secretive meddling of bureaucratic espionage groups.

• Sabotage (1936) — Ditto the last sentence here. A seemingly pleasant foreigner, husband to a native British lady, is a secret would-be killer. Funny enough, he’s a movie-theater owner. Probably Hitchcock’s darkest movie until . . . well, maybe he never topped it. And that’s because the famous bombing scene is about as shocking as you could get at this point in the early-mid 20th century.

Tier 3 — Underrated Gems

• Blackmail (1929) — I should comment now that Hitchcock’s titles are often so ridiculously basic, even lame in a seductive theater-marquee way, that it’s clear he was always partly about pandering to a mass audience — as he admits about 50 times in Hitchcock/Truffaut. Imagine “Blackmail” in huge letters outside a theater. Now note the stack of movies in the picture above: Sabotage, Saboteur, Murder!, Psycho, Secret Agent, Suspicion, The Wrong Man. That about sums up his filmography! Anyway, “Blackmail” is quite an intriguing movie and would be a classic, except for what we would think is poor pacing now. It’s a silent that has all the seeds of later Hitchcock — a wrong man accused, a cliffhanger of an ending literally, a beautiful mystery blonde, and even a weird precursor to the shower scene in “Psycho.” Truly you can find anything in early Hitchcock that’s in later Hitchcock, including angry birds.

• Young and Innocent (1937) — Another classic bland title, Hitchcock would make a similar kind of “young and innocent” thing happen for a young lady in his great “Shadow of a Doubt.” Here, a young woman helps an accused murderer flee the law. Is he innocent? Well, it doesn’t matter because he’s hot! This movie has possible murderers invading the quaint British countryside ala “The 39 Steps.” The basic contrast between city and country — a Hitchcock favorite, including highlighting mystery mansions ala “Rebecca” and “North by Northwest” — shows up here as a suspenseful contrast. Yet this is the closest that Hitchcock ever got to a screwball comedy.

Tier 4 — Precursors to Hitchcock Classics

• Murder! (1930) — Now we’re at his most ridiculously plain title yet. The premise of this movie could work forever: a cute young woman is found guilty of murder, yet a member of the jury gets the hots for her. He votes “guilty” but yet thinks she may be innocent, so he pursues the case on his own. While this movie has moments, it’s got a stage-play element to it that Hitchcock was too seduced by. So many of the movies in my Tier-5 below are shot like they are filmed plays. Those experiments got him to single-locale movies like “Rope” and “Rear Window” later, but they aren’t exactly entertaining from our current point-of-view.

• Rich and Strange (1931) — The “strange” part of “Rich and Strange” is a bit daring. A married couple on a worldwide cruise decides that they would like to pursue other people they meet on the cruise, and they do while married. I note that in Hitchcock’s filmography, besides “The Lodger,” he seems to have grown up in this movie as an editor. Anyway, he made a few marital sex-comedies, weirdly enough, this being an early one.

• Number Seventeen (1932) — An interesting single-locale film for at least its first hour, if you can follow the plot, you’ve done better than everybody else. Yet Hitchcock’s keen interest in staircases shows itself here, with about a hundred unique shots of the same staircase in a murder-mystery mansion. I’m higher on this movie than the average letterboxd user, so I think it has merit.

• Secret Agent (1936) — Made after “Sabotage,” which is based Joseph Conrad’s novel “The Secret Agent,” this one is not based on the Conrad novel! It does have a really bizarre moment that prefigures the Mount-Rushmore sequence in “North by Northwest,” proving that Hitchcock knew that literal cliffhangers worked best as climaxes in suspense movies. Unfortunately, despite John Gielgud and the great Peter Lorre’s involvement here, this one’s pretty pokey.

Tier 5 — Only for Scholars

• A majority of these are early silents, except for the unconscionably bad “Jamaica Inn,” which Hitchcock made right before going off to Hollywood (it was a box-office hit, so go figure). You aren’t watching these unless you are bored or you wish to study Hitchcock’s life and work. I may be wrong, however, about “The Ring.” It’s the silent made right after “The Lodger,” about a love-triangle involving a boxer, which a great number of people laud. I couldn’t fathom its critical or entertainment value, though.