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Is Alfred Hitchcock the best British film director of all? While Michael Powell was vilified after Peeping Tom, and David Lean fell in love with his own importance, Hitch never lost his bearings. That self-deprecating chink of black humour is evident to the very end.

Like Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch, Hitch survived the invention of sound and the switch from Europe to Hollywood. He made Britain’s first “talkie”, Blackmail (1929). After smash hits such as Rebecca (1940) and Psycho (1960), he became a national icon in America, presenting his own hit TV show. His name on posters started looming as large as the titles.

The irony is that Hitchcock seemed unaware of his influence on film grammar. He was a PostModernist who travelled from German Expressionism to gaudy American Gothic. His true genius was to borrow ripping yarns from John Buchan, Patricia Highsmith and Daphne Du Maurier and make them his own.

Hitchcock could never be accused of high art. His obsession with buxom blondes in peril coupled with memories of the creepy backstreets of Leytonstone was all the art he ever needed. He is not as complicated as you might think, which for my money is an excellent reason for calling him the greatest.
(James Christopher)

50 Jamaica Inn (1939)
The kidnap of Mary Yellan
Charles Laughton’s sleazy Justice of the Peace terrifies young Maureen O’Hara in his murky Cornish mansion. The corpulent star, spookily reminiscent of the director himself, steals the picture.
JAMES CHRISTOPHER

49 The Wrong Man (1956)
The arrest
Manny’s growing terror as he is wrongly booked and processed by the police is beautifully synched to a growing cacophony of confusion and noise. The intensity is almost intolerable as Manny is finally locked up in jail where his fellow prisoners are heard, but never seen.
JAMES CHRISTOPHER

48 Notorious (1946)
The wine cellar
Caught by Ingrid Bergman’s husband as they try to discover the secrets hidden in his wine cellar, Cary Grant snatches an illicit kiss from Bergman as an alibi. By the way she melts in his arms, it’s clear that she’s in love, despite his cruelty.
WENDY IDE

47 I Confess (1953)
Opening sequence
Hitchcock, at his most literal and his most mischievous, opens with a montage of Quebec at midnight, deserted, unexceptional, but for a lone distant figure (Hitch himself) and a series of bold signs marked with the word “Direction”. The signs eventually lead to an open window, inside which is a dead body.
KEVIN MAHER

46 The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The dining car on the train is uncoupled
It’s teatime. Every English traveller on this European express duly turns up in the dining car to eat crumpets. The comedy of Victorian manners is Hitchcock at his scathing best.
JAMES CHRISTOPHER

45 Suspicion (1941)
The glass of “milk”
Fragile heiress Lina (Joan Fontaine) isn’t feeling well. The threat of murder from her money-grabbing husband Johnnie (Cary Grant) is getting her down. Johnnie offers to bring her a glass of milk. He walks slowly up the stairs with the milk, actually poison, on a tray. The milk, famously, is lit from within by a bulb.
KEVIN MAHER

44 Marnie (1964)
The rape of Marnie
Compulsive thief Marnie (Tippi Hedren) reveals to new playboy husband Mark, on the first night of their honeymoon cruise, that she is chronically frigid. Mark says this is OK. Three minutes later, he bursts into her bedroom and pushes her on to the bed. Marnie freezes, the camera blurs, and Bernard Hermann’s strings go crazy.
KEVIN MAHER

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