Rebecca is an ageless, timeless adult movie about a woman who marries a widower but fears she lives in the shadow of her predecessor. This was Hitchcock's first American feature, and it garnered the Best Picture statue at the 1941 Academy Awards. In today's films, most twists and surprises are ridiculous or just gratuitous, so it's sobering to look back on this film where every revelation ...

Manufacturer: Anchor Bay
Starring: Judith Anderson, Florence Bates, Nigel Bruce, Leonard Carey, Leo G. Carroll
Directed By: Alfred Hitchcock

A suave tennis player (Ray Milland) plots the perfect murder, the dispatching of his wealthy wife (Grace Kelly), who is having an affair with a writer (Robert Cummings). Amazingly, the wife manages to stave off her attacker, a twist of fate that challenges the hubby's talent for improvisation. Alfred Hitchcock wisely stuck to the stage origins of Dial M for Murder, ignoring the temptation ...

Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Starring: Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, Robert Cummings, John Williams, Anthony Dawson
Directed By: Alfred Hitchcock

Billy Wilder cowrote and directed this brilliant 1957 mystery based on Agatha Christie's celebrated play about an aging London barrister (Charles Laughton) who's preparing to retire when he takes the defense in the most vexing murder case of his distinguished career. In his final completed film (he died of a heart attack less than a year later), Tyrone Power plays the prime suspect in the murder ...

Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Starring: Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, John Williams
Directed By: Billy Wilder

Manufacturer: Madacy Records
Starring: Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Leslie Banks
Directed By: Alfred Hitchcock

Manufacturer: A&E Home Video
Starring: Joan Hickson, Paul Eddington, Cheryl Campbell, Robert Lang (II), Polly Adams
Directed By: Julian Amyes, David Tucker, Norman Stone

This minor 1955 work by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the lighter entries of his creative peak in the 1950s, is still imbued with the master's stock themes of shared guilt and romantic ambivalence. It is also hardly lacking in Hitchcockian cinematic inventiveness, such as a famous, often-imitated sequence in which some smooching between stars Cary Grant and Grace Kelly is intercut with a fireworks show ...

Manufacturer: Paramount
Starring: Georgette Anys, Brigitte Auber, René Blancard, Cary Grant, Jean Hébey

Vacationing in northern California, Alfred Hitchcock was struck by a story in a Santa Cruz newspaper: "Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes." From this peculiar incident, and his memory of a short story by Daphne du Maurier, the master of suspense created one of his strangest and most terrifying films. The Birds follows a chic blonde, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), as she travels to the ...

Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: Malcolm Atterbury, Veronica Cartwright, Lonny Chapman, Richard Deacon, Ethel Griffies

Before Harrison Ford assumed the mantle of playing Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan hero in Patriot Games, Alec Baldwin took a swing at the character in this John McTiernan film and hit one to the fence. If less instantly sympathetic than Ford, Baldwin is in some respects more interesting and nuanced as Ryan, and drawing comparisons between both actors' performances can make for some interesting ...

Manufacturer: Paramount
Starring: Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn, Sam Neill, James Earl Jones
Directed By: John McTiernan

A strong candidate for the most sheerly entertaining and enjoyable movie ever made by a Hollywood studio (with Citizen Kane, Only Angels Have Wings and Trouble in Paradise running neck and neck). Positioned between the much heavier and more profoundly disturbing Vertigo (1958) and the stark horror of Psycho (1960), North by Northwest (1959) is Alfred ...

Manufacturer: Turner Home Ent
Starring: Ed Binns, Leo G. Carroll, Bill Catching, Philip Coolidge, Lawrence Dobkin

Like the Greenwich Village courtyard view from its titular portal, Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window is both confined and multileveled: both its story and visual perspective are dictated by its protagonist's imprisonment in his apartment, convalescing in a wheelchair, from which both he and the audience observe the lives of his neighbors. Cheerful voyeurism, as well as the behavior ...

Manufacturer: Paramount Pictures
Starring: James Stewart, Grace Kelley
Directed By: Alfred Hitchcock