10 Films that will always stay with you and why

And thank you! How nice of you to ask. Well, here goes (and I think I've received spiderwort's permission to throw caution to the wind with respect to quantities). These are among those exerting the greatest "pull" for me (again in chronological order).

The 39 Steps - Young and Innocent - Saboteur: I group these together for the purpose of representing Hitchcock's most oft-revisited theme: the wrongly-accused man on the run, later examples (figurative or literal) of which would include Strangers On A Train, I Confess and To Catch A Thief among others, before being brought to its most colorful and spectacular fruition in North By Northwest. Saboteur was the first of these that I saw, and indeed may have been the first Hitchcock picture I'd ever seen. I couldn't have been more than 10 or 11, but there was something about this film that set it apart. Retrospectively analyzing it in ways I was unable to at that age, I believe it had to do with the power of Hitchcock's senses of the visual and the rhythmic in eliciting viewers' emotional involvement and understanding, all of which come into play in even his weaker work. While not a children's film, I "got" everything even at that young age, which says less about me than it does about Hitchcock's ability to tap into and excite viewers' intuitive and instinctual capacities. It all felt very special, and the same distinctive feeling was evident when I saw North By Northwest - my first Hitchcock seen in a theater - a year or so later (and the others later still). Here were films that were intelligent and challenging enough for adults yet fully appealing and understandable to a child without compromising the requirements of either. There's a lot to be said for any film that allows a kid of 10 or 11 to feel he's smarter and even more sophisticated than he might have thought.           

Lifeboat: Although Hitch was constantly experimenting, this was the first instance of an entire film being an experiment. He joked about someday shooting a whole film in a phone booth; this was as near as he came. With the exception of, I believe, only two distant establishing shots and a couple inserts of a fish underwater, the camera otherwise remains entirely within the boat, forcing viewers' immediate and sustained identification with the characters, regardless of our feelings toward them; nothing is seen at a remove, and we get no escape from any of them any more than they can escape each other. And as with that in The Boys In the Band, camera placement, focus and movement along with editing are endlessly varied and inventive in depicting the claustrophobia and tension of a confined space while avoiding visual stasis.

This technique also facilitates Hitchcock's attention to detail; little things that add both texture and subtext. The run in Connie's stocking and her disgust over it in the midst of chaos speaks volumes about her before we've heard her say a word. The quick insert of Stanley's legs, crossed at the ankles and suddenly uncrossing to dangle limply, silently communicates his growing attraction to Alice and disappointment as she tells him of the married man with whom she's been involved. There's a marvelous closeup of only the upper half of Willie's face as beads of sweat form on his forehead before our eyes when the others confront him, and one of Gus's boot casually tossed aside as his leg is about to be amputated; in addition to the poignant commentary this detail provides about what Gus is about to go through, it's important that Hitchcock calls attention to it so that viewers will remember it later when it's employed with ironic and poetic justice at a turning point in the plot.  

Beyond the on-set physical challenges of such a shoot, the photographic accomplishments of balancing lighting against backgrounds that were only rear projection or simple backdrops were as seamless as they could be in 1944; rarely if ever is it evident that we're seeing nothing more than actors in a mock-up boat within a 20th-Fox soundstage, and the vastness and isolation of being in, as Ritt says, "a very small boat on a very big ocean," is credibly depicted. Another remarkable aspect of maintaining that atmosphere is a complete absence of background scoring. There's some singing and flute playing among the characters, but for other than the opening credits and the final fadeout, not a note of studio orchestral music is heard once the story begins. I haven't even said anything about that story, its construction, sharply defined characters and their fascinating byplay or the casting and performances (although I feel they speak for themselves). But for all these aspects among others, such as carefully modulated rhythmic shifts from light to tense, I count it among Hitch's most compelling and re-watchable work. 

Yikes! I'm delivering a lecture!! Well, I have the fortitude to continue if you have.

Notorious!: This is Hitchcock at a peak: attractive, sympathetic and charismatic players (Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman enabling viewers' acceptance of their characters' harder edges); glamorous settings; intrigue; betrayal; personal jeopardy. It's all in service to the true emotional center of the story (and the element that appealed most to Hitchcock's perverse yet highly romantic feelings about human relationships): a man who, in the cause of duty, sacrifices the woman he loves to danger and sexual enslavement by an enemy; that woman, in the cause of love and to prove herself worthy of the man, allowing him to do it.

Although sacrifice in a noble cause (as Devlin simply puts it in the film, "Patriotism") figures into this exercise, the core aspect of romantic emotional sacrifice is what Hitchcock was interested in exploring, and represents perhaps his second most-revisited theme. It crops up in Rebecca (an awkward girl willingly assumes what she perceives to be the role of "second best" in the life of a dashing man who, she believes, has never gotten over the death of his first wife), Suspicion (a newlywed remains committed to the ne'er-do-well husband she suspects may be plotting her murder), Spellbound (a psychiatrist hopes to cure the amnesiac she loves who may be a killer), Rear Window (which I'll cover shortly) and Vertigo (a woman allows herself to be made over in the image of a dead one by the man still mourning her, and in whose death she was involved) to name some.

Toward the end of Gone With the Wind, Rhett tells Scarlett, "It seems we've been at cross purposes." Nothing could better describe the relationship of rigid government agent Devlin and Alicia, "notorious" daughter of a convicted Nazi operative. After enlisting her help in Miami for some espionage involving her father's associates, Devlin and Alicia have fallen for one another by the time they reach Rio de Janeiro, where their assignment is to commence. "When he told me a few years ago what he was, everything went to pot," she tells Devlin. "I didn't care what happened to me," and she's become a loose, hard-drinking party girl. Describing what she calls his "copper's brain," she says, "Every time you look at me, I can see it dwelling over its slogans: 'Once a drunk, always a drunk. Once a tramp, always a tramp.'" It's only after Devlin has given in to his feelings for her that he learns their assignment will require her seduction of one of her father's associates. He wants to believe that she's, as she put it, "been made over by love," and will refuse the assignment. She waits in vain for a signal from him that she shouldn't accept it.

Neither gets what they want from the other, and the seeds are sown for their being "at cross purposes" through the rest of the film. In spite of his love for her, he convinces himself that her willingness to go through with it makes her "always a tramp," and she does so in spiteful bitterness over his apparent indifference...and in a last-ditch hope to gain his respect and belief in her. Their series of hurtful snipes at one another furthers their mutual misunderstanding, broadening the gulf between them even as their assignment continually throws them together. So as well as being among Hitchcock's most elegant, polished and deeply suspenseful works, it's also among the most thematically rich and resonant. Making it even more so is the nature of the nominal villain Alex, expertly played by Claude Rains, who not only truly loves Alicia but is pulled in opposing directions by a passive/aggressively tyrannical mother and, ultimately, by his own senses of duty and betrayal when he learns of Alicia's subterfuge and must begin acting out of self-preservation (to Alicia's peril). Rains's portrayal deftly negotiates everything from slimy repellence to sympathy, and his Alex emerges as perhaps Hitchcock's most complex and pathetic figure of evil, leaving viewers with a surprising sense of pity as he helplessly surrenders to his presumed doom.

Rear Window: Along with North By Northwest and Psycho, this is surely one of Hitch's most popular films. And another of his cinematic experiments: restricting the main body of action entirely to the point of view not only from a tiny Greenwich Village apartment, but from that of a wheelchair-bound protagonist within. And the large window through which he views the activities of his neighbors itself becomes a symbolic theater screen (just to drive the point home, Hitchcock at one point has Grace Kelly roll down the shades, announcing, "Show's over for tonight," and flashing a filmy negligee, adding, "Preview of coming attractions"). And about that protagonist: Hitchcock indulges in one of his most explicit exercises in crafting action to arise organically from character traits: L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries is an itinerant news magazine photographer; while his personal bent is to remain footloose and fancy free, his job - and indeed natural talent - is observing and documenting, so his immobilization by a broken leg kicks his professional instincts into overdrive...with nowhere to direct them except toward the neighbors visible through his window. And when the climactic moment of greatest peril arrives, it's with tools of his trade that he attempts to defend himself. 

It's been said that Hitchcock cast Cary Grant in roles representing who he wished to be, and James Stewart in roles representing who he felt he was. Stewart's Scottie in Vertigo may have symbolized Hitchcock's most deeply-felt yearnings and obsessions, but Jeff most closely resembled the functional Hitchcock: the observer; the documenter; the imaginer of sinister plots and tales; the emotionally isolated loner. Among the company of Cary Grant's Devlin, Richard Todd's Jonathan Cooper in Stage Fright and Jon Finch's Richard Blaney in Frenzy, Jeff is one of Hitchcock's prickliest and most unsympathetic protagonists, directing barbed remarks at everyone in his orbit: his editor; the nurse who comes in daily to look after him; the detective friend whose assistance he solicits; most pointedly, Lisa, the charming, accomplished, lovely and loving woman devoted to (and willing to make any sacrifice for) him. He's satisfied to enjoy her company and charms, but unwilling to compromise his independence for any kind of commitment and - as Hitchcock himself did with so many - is inclined to allow her only so close and no closer. Hitchcock lays his thematic menu out before us with crafty subtlety: what Jeff sees in every neighboring window is interpreted as some form of romantic futility; his physical and emotional isolation mirror one another; immobility thwarts and mocks his need for physical distance; vicarious involvement in the lives of strangers reflects his desire for emotional distance.  

"She's too beautiful, she's too sophisticated, she's too everything but what I want," he tells Stella the nurse. "I need a woman who's willing to...to go anywhere and do anything and love it." Yet Lisa's verbal offer to embody that very role is rejected: "Lisa, you're not meant for that kind of a life. It would be the wrong thing." It's only after she begins putting herself in harm's way to aid his investigation of the neighbor suspected of murder that Jeff starts to appreciate her, and to realize that, while she may not be what he wants, she may just be the woman he needs.

Stewart's folksy, all-American appeal, along with audience good will earned by nearly 20 years of appearances as earnest characters of integrity, no doubt contribute a great deal to counterbalancing Jeff's less appealing qualities. This film was the first to fully display the breezy, airy elegance for which Grace Kelly would be so fondly remembered, Thelma Ritter's gently acerbic yet plain-spoken personality and Hitchcock's mischief and abundant creativity are only some of the attributes that make it so much fun. Seduced into becoming voyeurs of a voyeur, viewers can find themselves as fascinated by what's going on in Jeff's apartment as he is by what goes on in those of others. 

Still there? Aren't you glad you asked? Only two more to go.

Psycho: The Hitchcock film about which everything is known by even those who've never seen it. Is it a perfect one, or even his very best? No. It's arguably his most iconic, but as much as anything, it's what I call a textbook film: with careful study, one can learn more from it than from any other about the artistic tools of film making, and about Hitchcock's own art in particular. It's yet another experiment; in visual story telling; in narrative structure (and misdirection); in creation of atmosphere; in the power of montage; in economy (both fiscal and artistic); in casting and performance; even in marketing and exploitation. I hate to leave off saying so little about this film after saying so much about the others. But if I say more, I'll say too much (as though I haven't already).

Frenzy: With his penultimate film after nearly a decade in critical and box-office wilderness, Hitchcock charged back to full creative life by returning to his roots: as with his first notable picture, The Lodger, yet another wrongly-accused man on the run; filmed in and depicting the London environs of his youth; a modest and intimately-scaled production examining personal and relationship failings; the most genial yet psychotic of villains; envelope-pushing cinematic technique and thematic content; mischievous toying with audience loyalties and identification (what he called "transference of guilt," last so successfully exploited in Psycho); a collection of eccentric characters ranging from charmingly amusing to lethally duplicitous. At this point in Hitch's career, less was indeed more: no harrowing action set-pieces; no cross-country chases or grand climaxes on national monuments; simply the things that first put him on the map...as he liked to say, "A quiet little murder or two and some expert cutting."

And with that, I'm done pontificating. I had fun. Hope you did too.