Mabee Library's Alfred Hitchcock Collection

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window
PN1997 .R43 2001

Laid up with a broken leg, photojournalist L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) is confined to his tiny, sweltering courtyard apartment. To pass the time between visits from his nurse (Thelma Ritter) and his fashion model girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly), the binocular-wielding Jeffries stares through the rear window of his apartment at the goings-on in the other apartments around his courtyard. As he watches his neighbors, he assigns them such roles and character names as "Miss Torso" (Georgine Darcy), a professional dancer with a healthy social life or "Miss Lonelyhearts" (Judith Evelyn), a middle-aged woman who entertains nonexistent gentlemen callers. Of particular interest is seemingly mild-mannered travelling salesman Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), who is saddled with a nagging, invalid wife. One afternoon, Thorwald pulls down his window shade, and his wife's incessant bray comes to a sudden halt. Out of boredom, Jeffries casually concocts a scenario in which Thorwald has murdered his wife and disposed of the body in gruesome fashion. Trouble is, Jeffries' musings just might happen to be the truth. One of Alfred Hitchcock's very best efforts, Rear Window is a crackling suspense film that also ranks with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) as one of the movies' most trenchant dissections of voyeurism. As in most Hitchcock films, the protagonist is a seemingly ordinary man who gets himself in trouble for his secret desires. ~Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

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North by Northwest

PN1997 .N557 1996

While having lunch at the Plaza Hotel in New York, advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) has the bad luck to call for a messenger just as a page goes out for a "George Kaplan." From that moment, Thornhill finds that he has stepped into a nightmare - he is quietly abducted by a pair of armed men out of the hotel's famous Oak Room and transported to a Long Island estate; there, he is interrogated by a mysterious man (James Mason) who, believing that Roger is George Kaplan, demands to know what he knows about his business and how he has come to acquire this knowledge. Roger, who knows nothing about who any of these people are, can do nothing but deny that he is Kaplan or that he knows what they're talking about. Finally, his captors force a bottle of bourbon into Roger and put him behind the wheel of a car on a dangerous downhill stretch. Through sheer luck and the intervention of a police patrol car and its driver (John Beradino), Roger survives the ride and evades his captors, and is booked for drunk driving. He's unable to persuade the court, the county detectives, or even his own mother (Jesse Royce Landis) of the truth of his story, however -- Thornhill returns with them to the mansion where he was held, only to find any incriminating evidence cleaned up and to learn that the owner of the house is a diplomat, Lester Townsend (Philip Ober), assigned to the United Nations. He backtracks to the hotel to find the room of the real George Kaplan, only to discover that no one at the hotel has ever actually seen the man. With his kidnappers once again pursuing him, Thornhill decides to confront Townsend at the United Nations, only to discover that he knows nothing of the events on Long Island, or his house being occupied -- but before he can learn more, Townsend gets a knife in his back in full view of 50 witnesses who believe that Roger did it. Now on the run from a murder charge, complete with a photograph of him holding the weapon plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the country, Thornhill tries to escape via train - there he meets the cooly beautiful Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who twice hides him from the police, once spontaneously and a second time in a more calculated rendezvous in her compartment that gets the two of them together romantically, at least for the night. By the next day, he's off following a clue to a remote rural highway, where he is attacked by an armed crop-dusting plane, one of the most famous scenes in Hitchcock's entire film output. Thornhill barely survives, but he does manage to learn that his mysterious tormentor/interrogator is named Phillip Vandamm, and that he goes under the cover of being an art dealer and importer/exporter, and that Eve is in bed with him in every sense of the phrase - or is she? ~Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

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Psycho
PN1997 .P79 1995

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was already famous as the screen's master of suspense (and perhaps the best-known film director in the world) when he released Psycho and forever changed the shape and tone of the screen thriller. From its first scene, in which an unmarried couple balances pleasure and guilt in a lunchtime liaison in a cheap hotel (hardly a common moment in a major studio film in 1960), Psycho announced that it was taking the audience to places it had never been before, and on that score what followed would hardly disappoint. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is unhappy in her job at a Phoenix, Arizona real estate office and frustrated in her romance with hardware store manager Sam Loomis (John Gavin). One afternoon, Marion is given $40,000 in cash to be deposited in the bank. Minutes later, impulse has taken over and Marion takes off with the cash, hoping to leave Phoenix for good and start a new life with her purloined nest egg. 36 hours later, paranoia and exhaustion have started to set in, and Marion decides to stop for the night at the Bates Motel, where nervous but personable innkeeper Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) cheerfully mentions that she's the first guest in weeks, before he regales her with curious stories about his mother. There's hardly a film fan alive who doesn't know what happens next, but while the shower scene is justifiably the film's most famous sequence, there are dozens of memorable bits throughout this film. The first of a handful of sequels followed in 1983, while Gus Van Sant's controversial remake, starring Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche, appeared in 1998. ~Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

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Shadow of a Doubt

PN1997 .S53 1999

One of Hitchcock's best films of the 1940s, Shadow of a Doubt is both a fascinating psychological case study and a scathing portrait of the American middle-class family. The film is often considered one of Hitchcock's darkest, and the director himself reportedly claimed it as his favorite. Cynicism underlies all the proceedings, from young Charlie's "miraculous" summoning of her Uncle Charlie (tantamount to calling up the Angel of Death) to Uncle Charlie's chilling exposition of his view on life, relayed to his niece: "You live in a dream. Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?" This is one of Hitchcock's most unsettling films, preoccupied like many other Hitchcock works with good vs. evil, and the capacity for evil that lurks within us all; and it is also one of his most stylized, gorgeously shot by Joseph Valentine. Featuring stellar performances from Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten (as well as Hume Cronyn's comical debut as a dim-witted, self-appointed murder "expert"), Shadow of a Doubt is a memorable experience as both a major Hitchcock film and an enduringly creepy commentary on human nature. ~Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide

Vertigo
PN1997 .V48 1997

It did middling business and the critics were unimpressed in 1958, but Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo has come to be considered his greatest film for its complex examination of romantic pathology. Seamlessly combining evocative imagery and thematic concerns, Hitchcock structured Vertigo through numerous visual and narrative circles and twists, beginning with Saul Bass's opening title sequence. Steadily drawing the viewer into the figurative whirlpool of Scottie's mind as he investigates Madeleine, Hitchcock then broke the rules of suspense (as he would again in Psycho) with a mid-movie revelation that transforms the film from an eerie mystery into a deeply disturbing story of necrophiliac obsession. Using such visual effects as a track-out/zoom-in to signal Scottie's vertigo, Judy's hazily green-lit reemergence as Madeleine, and a surreal nightmare sequence, Hitchcock reveals Scotty's tortured psyche, belying James Stewart's nice-guy surface. Further ducking convention, Hitchcock allowed a character to get away with murder, while leaving Scottie metaphorically hanging in uncertainty. Admired by the film school generation of Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma but unavailable for years due to rights problems, Vertigo had its critical reputation further burnished by its 1983 reissue. Its 1996 restoration returned the washed-out colors to their original clarity and digitally enhanced Bernard Herrmann's haunting score. ~Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

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