Ranking Every Alfred Hitchcock Film of the 1950s

Let me make one thing abundantly clear: the monthly TCM recaps are staying. I've been doing them long enough now (8 months!) that stopping would feel like losing a language. But I've been wanting to do more than that for a while - to write about films outside whatever TCM happens to be programming in a given month, to sit with a filmmaker or a decade or a question and work through it at my own pace - and so starting in 2026, the Classic Film Chronicles blog is going to have a second track alongside the monthly previews.

The first one is this: all eleven Hitchcock films from the 1950s, ranked. It's a decade that started with him reestablishing himself after a run of critical disappointments and ended with North by Northwest and Vertigo in consecutive years, which is the most sustained run of formal ambition any Hollywood director achieved in that decade and possibly any other. How you rank the work between those poles depends on what you think Hitchcock was actually doing, which is a question worth having.

A few ground rules. I'm ranking these as films, not as Hitchcock films, which means I'm not weighting them by how purely they express his themes or how central they are to the critical literature. A film can be essential Hitchcock and not be a great film; a film can be a great film that Hitchcock himself didn't fully value. Both things happen in this decade. I'm also ranking them by the experience of watching them now, in 2025, with the full weight of what came after.

Eleven films. Here we go.

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11. The Trouble with Harry (1955)

Hitchcock loved this one more than almost any other film he made, which tells you something about the gap between what a filmmaker values in their own work and what the work actually delivers. The Trouble with Harry is an autumn Vermont comedy about a corpse that keeps getting buried and dug up by different characters who each think they killed him, and it is the most thoroughly Hitchcock-free Hitchcock film on this list - a film that uses his visual grammar and his eye for landscape and produces almost none of his tension, none of his cruelty, and none of the formal intelligence that makes his other work worth returning to. The autumnal color photography by Robert Burks is genuinely beautiful. John Forsythe and Shirley MacLaine in her film debut are charming. The humor is the problem: the film's comedy is gentle in a way Hitchcock's sensibility wasn't, and the gentleness feels like a costume rather than a characteristic. He was trying to make the English kind of comedy that had never really worked for him and it didn't work for him here. It's not bad. It's just inert in ways that Hitchcock films almost never are, which makes it feel like something made by a talented imitator who got the surfaces right and missed the engine.

10. Stage Fright (1950)

The standard critique of Stage Fright is the lying flashback - the film opens with a flashback that turns out to be a lie, narrated by a character who is deceiving the audience, and Hitchcock was criticized for this for the rest of his life on the grounds that it violated the audience's trust. His defense was that the audience had no right to trust a flashback narrated by a liar, which is both correct and slightly beside the point, because the problem with Stage Fright isn't the lying flashback, it's that the film around it isn't interesting enough to earn the structural gamble. Jane Wyman is miscast as the drama student playing detective - she's too stable, too solid, too fundamentally decent for a Hitchcock heroine - and the theatrical milieu of the London stage world doesn't produce the visual opportunities that Hitchcock needed to work at full voltage. Marlene Dietrich is everything the film has in the way of genuine menace, and her "The Laziest Gal in Town" number is the best five minutes in the picture. The problem is that she's in the wrong register for the film around her - Dietrich playing camp while Hitchcock is trying for genuine suspense - and the movie can't accommodate both. A transitional film, made between the Selznick years and the Warner Bros. period, and it feels like it.

9. To Catch a Thief (1955)

I know people who would fight me on this placement, and their argument is not wrong. Cary Grant as a retired jewel thief on the French Riviera, Grace Kelly at the peak of her beauty, John Michael Hayes writing the wittiest script Hitchcock had in the decade, and Robert Burks's color photography of the Côte d'Azur that is so beautiful it makes the landscape itself feel like a moral argument for not going anywhere else. The fireworks scene. The car chase on the cliff road. Kelly in gold. Grant in everything he wears. It is an immensely pleasurable film that I have never once thought about in the week after watching it, which is the honest critique of its position on this list. To Catch a Thief is a film that Hitchcock made because he wanted to spend summer on the Riviera with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, and the film is exactly as deep as that motivation suggests. He accomplished what he set out to do completely, which is more than you can say for some films. But what he set out to do was make a beautiful entertainment rather than a film, and in a decade that produced Vertigo, a beautiful entertainment is not enough.

8. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

The conventional wisdom is that the remake is better than the 1934 original, and Hitchcock himself said so, and he was probably right, and I still find the 1956 version the most impersonal film he made in this decade. James Stewart and Doris Day are a married couple in Morocco who witness an assassination and have their son kidnapped to prevent them from passing on what they know, and the film is technically flawless - the Albert Hall sequence, in which the assassination is timed to the cymbals of a symphony performance, is the most precisely engineered suspense sequence in the decade, executed with the kind of Hitchcockian calculation that makes you feel the stopwatch running. The problem is that Stewart and Day's marriage is underdrawn in ways that make the stakes feel thinner than they should, and Doris Day screaming "Hank! Hank!" while searching the embassy is the least controlled moment in any Hitchcock film of the period. The film is about parental panic, which should be the most immediately accessible emotion Hitchcock ever worked with, and he somehow keeps it at a distance. The Albert Hall sequence is essential. The film around it is good rather than great.

7. Dial M for Murder (1954)

The most theatrical film on the list and the one where Hitchcock's boredom is most visible and most productive simultaneously. He adapted the Frederick Knott play because Warners asked him to and he'd already committed to the year, and his solution to the challenge of opening up a one-room stage play was to refuse to open it up - to embrace the theatrical confinement and use it. The result is a film that is almost entirely about a single apartment and the geometry of deception within it, and the visual intelligence Hitchcock brings to a limited space is part of what makes the film worth watching. Ray Milland as the calculating husband planning his wife's murder is cool and precise in exactly the right register. Grace Kelly, in her first Hitchcock film, finds the quality that he'd develop more completely in Rear Window and To Catch a Thief - the sense of a woman who is more self-possessed than the situation allows her to appear. The scissors. The dropped key. The inspector who already knows. It's an elegant machine and Hitchcock runs it with one hand while clearly thinking about what he was going to make next.

6. I Confess (1953)

This is the one people skip and shouldn't. Montgomery Clift as a Quebec City priest who hears a murderer's confession and then becomes the prime suspect in the murder, unable to reveal what he knows because the sacrament of confession is absolute - and a film about a man who will not protect himself at the cost of his integrity, which is not the Hitchcock story anyone expects. The film is darker and more serious than anything in the decade except The Wrong Man, and Clift's interior stillness - the quality that made directors frustrated because he wasn't giving them surface - is exactly what I Confess needs, a man carrying knowledge he can't speak about, his face doing the work his mouth won't. The Quebec City locations give the film a European weight that the Los Angeles and New York settings of the other decade films don't have. The flashback structure is the most elegant Hitchcock uses outside Vertigo. The ending is ambiguous in ways the Hays Code was uncomfortable with and Hitchcock fought for anyway. It is a film about conscience and silence that has Hitchcock's fingerprints all over it and his usual cynicism almost nowhere, which is what makes it worth more attention than it gets.

5. The Wrong Man (1956)

The most underrated film of the decade and the one that Hitchcock himself seemed most ambivalent about afterward, which is how you know it got somewhere real. Henry Fonda as Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, a Stork Club musician who is misidentified as a holdup man and gradually, methodically crushed by a legal system that is not malicious but is simply indifferent to whether it has the right person - the film is shot in black and white with a documentary flatness that Hitchcock never used before or after, real locations in Queens and Brooklyn, the actual streets and police precincts and courtrooms where the real Balestrero's case was tried. There are no MacGuffins. There is no glamour. There is no stylized menace. There is only a man watching his life be dismantled by an error he cannot prove is an error, and his wife (Vera Miles, the best performance in the film) losing her mind under the pressure of it in a way the film depicts without flinching and without explaining. The moment where Fonda's Balestrero prays and the real killer appears in a superimposition over his face is the one moment of Hitchcock visual poetry in the film, and it is so abrupt and so strange that it almost doesn't survive the documentary realism around it. It does survive. The film is about what anxiety of false accusation does to the body and the mind, and it is one of the most honest films about that experience that anyone has made.

4. Strangers on a Train (1951)

Robert Walker's Bruno Anthony is one of the five or six greatest performances in the history of the thriller, and the film exists in a state of permanent imbalance between Walker's performance and everything else in it, which is less a flaw than a structural condition the film exploits. Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is the straight man, the normal man, the man the plot is happening to, and Granger's limitations as a performer - his inability to project interior life, the slight blankness behind his handsomeness - are exactly what the film needs, because Bruno is the film's interior life and Guy is merely its surface. The tennis match sequence, in which Guy must win his match quickly enough to stop Bruno while the camera cuts to Bruno's face in the crowd - still, while every other head swivels to follow the ball - is one of the most formally precise sequences Hitchcock assembled. The carousel finale is one of the most genuinely terrifying. And the film's central idea - two strangers who will swap murders, the transaction that was never agreed to but cannot be escaped - is the purest expression of Hitchcock's recurring argument that guilt is not limited to the person who commits the act. Bruno sees in Guy what Guy cannot admit seeing in himself. The film is about what we want from the people who are willing to want things we aren't.

3. North by Northwest (1959)

The most pleasurable film Hitchcock ever made and the one that best demonstrates what happens when he decides to give the audience everything they came for without reservation or irony. Roger Thornhill is mistaken for a government agent, chased across America, falls in love while running, and discovers that the man he's been mistaken for doesn't exist. The plot is constructed of pure mechanism - each sequence exists to move Thornhill into the next situation, and the situations are: an auction, a cornfield, Mount Rushmore - and Hitchcock runs the mechanism at perfect speed. Cary Grant is the ideal vessel for the material because he can make competence and confusion coexist in the same frame; Thornhill is a man figuring out a situation the audience already understands, and Grant's timing lets you enjoy his intelligence even while the film is outrunning it. The crop duster sequence. Eva Marie Saint on the train. James Mason's Vandamm as the most civil villain in the decade. The film's politics are a joke and Hitchcock knows it - the Cold War MacGuffin is microfilm of no significance that no one bothers to explain - which is the point. North by Northwest is Hitchcock making explicit that the MacGuffin was always a joke, the threat was always about the experience of being threatened, and the pleasure of a thriller is the pleasure of controlled fear by a director who knows exactly how much fear to give you at any moment. He knew exactly. This is the evidence.

2. Rear Window (1954)

The most formally complete film of the decade and the one that most directly makes its argument about cinema visible. L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) sits at a window with a broken leg and watches his neighbors through the courtyard, and the film is organized so that the audience's experience of watching the film exactly replicates Jefferies's experience of watching his neighbors: we see only what he can see, from the same angle, and when he looks at people he shouldn't be watching, so do we. The woman who dances alone. The newlyweds. The childless couple with the dog. The composer. And the couple across the way, and what may or may not be happening to the wife. Hitchcock constructs the courtyard as a theater - each window a frame, each resident a character performing without an audience - and the film's moral question, which is whether Jefferies's voyeurism is reprehensible or simply honest about what cinema does, is also the film's formal question. It never resolves it. Grace Kelly's Lisa Fremont is the active character - the woman who goes into the apartment while Jefferies watches, who takes the risks while he observes - and the film knows exactly what it's doing with that division of labor, which is implicating the audience in the passivity it's been comfortable with for two hours. It is as close to a perfectly constructed film as Hitchcock made.

I put it second.

1. Vertigo (1958)

It is not the most pleasurable film of the decade. It is not the most formally complete. It is the most personal, the most disturbing, and the only film on this list that has continued to expand every time I've returned to it, which, coming from a 24-year-old, is more times than you’d probably imagine.

Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart, in the darkest use of his persona anyone put him to) is a retired detective hired to follow a woman named Madeleine who may be possessed by the spirit of her dead ancestor, and who falls from a height in the film's first act and in falling breaks something in Scottie that the rest of the film is about. When Madeleine dies and Scottie later meets Judy, who looks like Madeleine, he destroys the real woman to recreate the dead one. The film is about a man who loved a woman who didn't exist and when confronted with the real woman prefers to continue loving the fiction. The Bernard Herrmann score sounds like falling and then like obsession and then, by the end, like both simultaneously. Kim Novak's dual performance - Madeleine's dreamy remove and Judy's rawer, more visible need - is one of the most undervalued performances of the decade because the film's structure requires her to tell you the ending before Scottie knows it, to perform grief for a loss the audience understands and Scottie doesn't. The ending is the most spiritually violent conclusion of any Hitchcock film, which is saying something.

The film is about how men destroy women to preserve their fantasies, which is an argument Hitchcock was making partly about himself - his relationship with his leading ladies, his obsessive construction of their images, his need to control what they projected - and the honesty of the self-implication is what makes Vertigo the film that keeps expanding. It isn't a comfortable film to admire. It requires holding the thing being criticized and the criticism in the same space at the same time, and Hitchcock gives you no out. The film goes somewhere that the other ten films on this list approach but don't reach, somewhere genuinely dark about desire and image and the violence they do when they can't be separated. The decade produced Rear Window and North by Northwest, which are both better movies by most measures. Vertigo is the one I can't stop thinking about.

That's probably the correct criterion.

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So, what do you think? How would you rank these eleven films? Sound off in the comments below, and stay tuned for my next post, where I break down what happened to the Hollywood musical.