The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie

In the six masterpieces in a row that Hitchcock made from 1957 to 1964, the Master drew extraordinary work from every actor in his casts. He carefully molded the performance of Vera Miles as a wife who succumbs to depression in The Wrong Man (1957), rehearsing with her over and over again so that the scale of her work would be exactly right, and he let Henry Fonda “do nothing” in this picture in a super-controlled way that ranks with Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca for ambiguous expressiveness under a tightly unyielding surface. Kim Novak gave perhaps the ultimate tensile and contrasting Hitchcockian performance in a dual role in Vertigo, and Novak was matched in that film by James Stewart and Barbara Bel Geddes, both of whom cleanly plumbed the deep pain of their respective characters. Hitchcock worked one more time with Cary Grant for North by Northwest (1959) and brought the Grant persona to its latter-day apotheosis, especially in the love scenes with a somber and very carnal Eva Marie Saint. The Master patiently and closely directed Janet Leigh in Psycho, even sitting off camera and reading the lines her character Marion Crane was supposed to be thinking as she drove to her doom at the Bates Motel. And then Hitchcock controlled the work of Tippi Hedren in The Birds and Marnie, and they both achieved his ideal of maximum expressiveness with minimal means before he crossed a line off screen and their working relationship deteriorated.

Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Suspicion

Hitchcock guided the inexperienced Joan Fontaine through his first American film, Rebecca (1940), going to great lengths to get her into the mood she needed to be in, and he also inspired and controlled a major performance by Judith Anderson as the vengeful housekeeper Mrs. Danvers while allowing Laurence Olivier to give a merely external performance as the male lead. In the work of Fontaine, Anderson, and Olivier, Rebecca penetratingly surveys different styles of acting, favoring Fontaine but finally letting Anderson dominate with work where she is “doing nothing well” on the surface but with clearly contrasting emotions battling underneath the mask of her face. The Master was mainly let down by the actors in Foreign Correspondent (1940), but he brought out dark undercurrents in the expert comic performances of Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941). Hitchcock used Cary Grant for the first time in Suspicion (1941) as a sexy, irresponsible playboy who may or may not be murderous, and he reveled in Grant’s ability to do or say one thing ambiguously enough to suggest another thing at the same moment.

Blackmail

Hitchcock’s first talking film, Blackmail (1929), presented the Master with a dilemma when it came to the performance of his lead actress, Anny Ondra. Blackmail had been shot first as a silent film, but when it was decided to do a sound version, Ondra’s thick Czech accent was judged unacceptable because she was playing the part of a working-class London girl. Hitchcock did not want to replace Ondra, and so he got the young British actress Joan Barry to read the lines for her off-camera as Ondra mimed to them. The result is often awkward, of course, but it also says something about the difference between what an actor is like as an image and what an actor is like when they speak.

Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, Family Plot, AFI Award

Hitchcock’s last four films do not contain much in the way of acting excellence, alas. But in his last appearance at the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in his honor in 1979, the Master did “nothing” for the camera until Ingrid Bergman came down to his table and embraced him, at which point their mutual emotion was clear as a white-haired Cary Grant looked on and smiled and lied to the camera. This was a final Hitchcockian image with two key collaborators that perfectly expresses what the camera can see and what it cannot.

Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much

In three films, Hitchcock drew out and glorified the young blonde Grace Kelly. In Dial M for Murder (1954), the Master put her through an ordeal and began to get her to relax on camera, and then in Rear Window (1954), he emphasized all of Kelly’s non-naturalistic strengths while allowing James Stewart to do some of the most nuanced acting in all of Hitchcock as the voyeuristic photographer L.B. Jefferies. Finally, Hitchcock presented Kelly as the sexiest of ice blondes in To Catch a Thief (1955), where she pursued Cary Grant along the French Riviera. Hitchcock got understated work from his cast in the macabre comedy The Trouble with Harry (1955), and then he probed the persona of Doris Day in a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, with results that were both genuinely painful and just slightly “too much.”

Notorious, The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn, Stage Fright

Still in Ingrid Bergman’s thrall, Hitchcock made one of his most romantic pictures for her, Notorious (1946), in which she and Cary Grant work out many of the contrasts and tensions in their screen personas. Hitchcock was stymied by casting decisions not his own on The Paradine Case (1947), which was the last film he made for producer David O. Selznick, and then he foundered on miscasting again when James Stewart was given the central role of a queer academic in Rope (1948), his first color picture. Hitchcock made Under Capricorn (1949) as a valentine to Ingrid Bergman, allowing her to dominate an eight minute and forty-seven second take where her character confesses to a crime, a rare instance of acting for its own sake in Hitchcock’s work. Though Marlene Dietrich was superficially in the mode of the liberated women that Hitchcock enjoyed like Carole Lombard and Tallulah Bankhead, the Master was mainly bemused by Dietrich’s demands for special lighting in Stage Fright (1950), and so he lets her have her way as he lets Charles Laughton dominate Jamaica Inn.

Strangers on a Train, I Confess

On the first day of shooting, Hitchcock referred to Strangers on a Train (1951) as “my real first film,” and the Master drew a charismatic, shoot-the-works performance from Robert Walker, who was cast against type as the colorful psychopath Bruno Anthony. But then Hitchcock was annoyed by the extensively labored-over Method acting of Montgomery Clift in I Confess (1952), a case of an actor doing too much, albeit very expressively, underneath a surface that keeps cracking because of lack of control. He also had to use the breathy Anne Baxter when he would have preferred the Swedish actress Anita Bjork.

Rich and Strange, Number 17, Waltzes from Vienna

An in-depth consideration of one of Hitchcock’s best and most undervalued films, Rich and Strange, in which he draws unerringly precise, layered, and touching work from four actors: Henry Kendall and Joan Barry, who play a straying married couple on holiday; Percy Marmont, who plays a shy British major in love with Barry’s timid wife; and Elsie Randolph, who gives a performance as the outcast Miss Imbrie that is as terrifying as anything in Psycho or The Birds. Hitchcock was not happy with either the thriller Number 17 (1932) or the operetta Waltzes from Vienna (1933), where he found no common ground with musical star Jessie Matthews, but the first period of his successful sound thrillers soon followed.

The Mountain Eagle and The Lodger

Hitchcock’s lost second film is represented by various stills where we can see how he carefully deglamorized his star Nita Naldi, who was a star from America. In his third film, The Lodger (1926), which made his reputation, Hitchcock carefully handles the queer matinee idol Ivor Novello, experimenting with ways of shooting him that emphasize his sex appeal and his strange way of moving. This film also features one of the first “Hitchcock blondes,” as played by an actress simply known as June. There is also a discussion of gayness in Hitchcock films and what it can mean to have a gay actor in a straight part and a straight actor in a gay part.

Young and Innocent, The Lady Vanishes, Jamaica Inn

If Young and Innocent (1937) is the weakest Hitchcock film of this period partly because of poor or insubstantial acting from most of its players, then The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the height of his British career in large part due to the lively excellence of its cast, particularly Michael Redgrave as the all-out charmer hero. But then Hitchcock came to grief directing the demanding Charles Laughton in Jamaica Inn (1939), a film that is lopsidedly centered around Laughton’s self-indulgent, effortful performance, which is filled with lots of face making and external signifiers that could not be further from Hitchcock’s own concept of what acting for the camera should be, which he outlined in detail in a 1939 interview for Film Weekly called “What I’d Do to the Stars.”