Without a doubt Hitchcock's most personal film (and one of his favorites). > Joseph Cotten plays the beloved uncle Charlie, who's adored by his niece (Teresa Wright) but turns out to be a murderer. He's trailed by the police and seeks refuge with the small-town family of his sister. The focus is on the gradual realisation of the niece that her uncle has "two faces" but on a subliminal level it also is a satyrical analysis of middle-American life. Together with Psycho, this is the only Hitchcock picture in which the central figure is a villain.

The espionage plot in Notorious, of Nazis seeking refuge in South-America is merely a MacGuffin*. The real focus is on the sadistic relationship between a US agent T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant), the alcoholic Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) and the Nazi with a mother complex Alexander Sebastian > (Claude Rains) who's trying to poison her. In his famous interview with Hitchcock Francois Truffaut remarked: "...in Notorious you have at once a maximum of stylization and a maximum of simplicity". It remains one of his finest movies of the Forties with top-notch performances.

Hitchcock's return to the UK (London, Convent Garden) and the epitomization of his "wrong man" plotting. In one of the interviews concerning Frenzy he said: "If you choose Cary Grant in the leading part everyone knows he's not the villain". That's why he chose the unfamiliar theatre actors > Jon Finch  and Barry Foster in the leading parts. Frenzy is full of wonderful set pieces like the grisly corpse wrestling match on a truck loaded with potatoes, masterfully edited murder scenes and great acting with a very amusing role of Alec Mc Gowen as the inspector who's not only investigating the "Necktie Murders" but also his wive's "cooking". With this movie Hitchcock proofed, after a rather dull and failed series of pictures he made in the Sixties, that he was still able to appeal to a modern audience. It's nasty, humorous, manipulative and it's the last great work of the Master of Suspense.

Hitchcock was mainly interested in doing this movie because of the technical challenge in doing a purely cinematic picture but along the way while working on the script more importance was attached to the story itself. The idea of an immobilized man Jeff Jeffries (James Stewart) looking out of his window showing what he sees and then how he reacts. He called it the purest expression of a cinematic idea. The movie reveals every kind of human behavior in a small universe portrayed in a group of little stories. Hitchcock's movie > Rear Window has a wonderfully created (studio) set, a script that is larded with countless memorable lines and a magnificent ensemble cast with Grace Kelly as Jeffries' girl-friend, who's more beautiful than ever, Thelma Ritter as the sarcastic nurse and Raymond Burr as the malevolent salesman.

2) Vertigo (1958)

When police detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) resigns after having a traumatic experience (due to his vertigo - fear of hights) in which he lost a colleague after chasing a suspect on a rooftop, an old friend hires him as a private detective to trail his beautiful but suicidal wife Madeleine > (Kim Novak). During this followings he slowly falls in love with her and after she dies he becomes obsessed, seeing her everywhere. In the interview with Truffaut Hitchcock explained: "I was intrigued by the hero's attempts to re-create the image of a dead woman through another one who's alive". Vertigo is Hithcock's bleakest and most enigmatic picture (numerous books have been published concerning the various contexts, themes and subjects treated in the movie) with an excellent cast (Novak is sublime in a double role). It is also famous for Hitchcock's 'Dolly out/Zoom in' technique which is used in countless movies afterwards like Spielberg's Jaws (1975)