HOWZAT

43 Secret Agent (1936)
Death of a tourist in the Swiss Alps
A ghastly moment between secret agents John Gielgud and Peter Lorre as they quibble over who should push a suspect German spy over the cliff. You can’t slip a cigarette paper between the irony and the sadism. Hitchcock spikes the scene with images of the innocent victim’s dog whining for his master back home. Cruel.
JAMES CHRISTOPHER

42 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
The Albert Hall
This epic 12-minute scene, entirely sans dialogue, is cut to Australian composer Arthur Benjamin’s Storm Clouds – the very cantata that’s playing in the Albert Hall when family doctor Ben McKenna (James Stewart) and wife Jo (Doris Day) race to stop the assassination of a bigwig European leader in the audience. Thankfully, at the climax, Jo screams, and the assassin misfires.
KEVIN MAHER

41 Notorious (1946)
The drunk-driving scene
A sloshed Ingrid Bergman takes mysterious party guest Cary Grant for a late-night drive. The subtext is sexual – he’s determined not to lose his cool; she is determined to crack his calm exterior.
WENDY IDE

40 Rope (1948)
Maid and the body
Off camera there is a heated discussion between the dinner party guests; meanwhile the camera rests on the maid as she potters about tidying up around the truck which conceals the body. Discovery of the crime seems inevitable.
WENDY IDE

39 Psycho (1960)
Arbogast interviews Norman Bates
The office walls in the Bates motel are covered with stuffed birds in alarming poses. Norman is being interrogated about Marion Crane with a brilliant shot of Norman’s head stretched out looking like one of his mounted feathered friends.
JAMES CHRISTOPHER

38 Lifeboat (1944)
Starring Alfred Hitchcock . . .
Perhaps the most ingenious of all Hitchcock’s cameo appearances: he appears in a newspaper that one of the rescued passengers is reading. Hitchcock is the “before” photograph in a diet advertisement.
WENDY IDE

37 Rope (1948)
Giveaway guilt
A nervous Farley Granger gives away his guilt with his stricken expression when he sees that John Dall has tied a pile of books with the very rope they used to murder their classmate.
WENDY IDE

36 Topaz (1969)
The blood dress
The killing of Juanita is a stunning and pivotal moment. It is shot from above; as she sinks to ground her purple gown billows out like a pool of blood.
WENDY IDE

35 Spellbound (1945)
Dream sequence
Hitchcock himself was barely involved in the most memorable scene: the dream sequence designed by Salvador DalÍ. Giant eyes float in space, a sinister faceless man in a tuxedo stalks the subconscious.
WENDY IDE

34 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Concert at the Embassy
James Stewart searches an embassy in London while Doris Day sings for a foreign prime minister. The camera “follows” her voice as the song drifts, weaker and weaker, down empty corridors and stair-wells to the keyhole of the room where her son is kept hostage.
JAMES CHRISTOPHER

33 Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
“Fat, greedy women”
The camera slowly closes in on the face of Joseph Cotton’s serial killer as he launches into a hate-filled rant about wealthy widows. “Horrible, faded, fat, greedy women. Are they human or are they wheezing animals?” Chilling.
WENDY IDE

32 Foreign Correspondent (1940)
The plane crash
Herbert Marshall and Laraine Day are shot down by a German gunboat on a plane to America. In one stunning take, Hitchcock films the crash from inside the cockpit as the plane hits the sea and slowly fills up with water.
JAMES CHRISTOPHER

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010