Alfred Hitchcock

In Rope, two men strangle a classmate and then host his family for dinner in the same rooms, and the audience is the only guest who knows. Hitchcock almost always hands the information over early: a photographer stuck in a wheelchair watching a neighbour across the courtyard in Rear Window, a woman sent to seduce a Nazi hiding in Brazil in Notorious, an advertising man in North by Northwest mistaken for a spy who does not exist. Every set piece is then built as a machine that can run on its own. You spend the film wanting to warn somebody who cannot hear you.

Signature

• The audience told early, the character told last.
• Watching treated as the subject and used as the method.
• Ordinary men wrongly accused and forced to become competent.
• Set pieces designed to work as self-contained machines.