Alfred Hitchcock Movies

Want to know the best Alfred Hitchcock movies?  How about the worst Alfred Hitchcock movies?  Curious about Alfred Hitchcock’s box office grosses or which Alfred Hitchcock movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Alfred Hitchcock movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place …. because we have all of that information.

Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) directed well over 50 films in his six decade career. Hitchcock directed his first 26 movies in England from 1922 to 1939. He directed his last 30 movies in the United States from 1940 till 1976. Some of his early successes in England were 1926’s The Lodger, 1929’s Blackmail (considered to be the first movie from England with sound), 1934’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1935’s The 39-Steps and 1938’s The Lady Vanishes.

Legendary producer David O. Selznick signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning in March 1939, when the Hitchcock family moved to the United States. Talk about getting off to a good start, Hitchcock’s first Hollywood movie was 1940’s Rebecca. Rebecca would be a smash hit, earned 11 Oscar® nominations, including Hitchcock’s first ever nomination for Best Director and won the Oscar® for Best Picture of the year. The 1940s produced the classic Hitchcock movies Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound and Notorious. The 1950s were the peak years for Hitchcock…with movies like Strangers on a Train, To Catch A Thief, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Dial M for Murder.

This page will only be ranking Alfred Hitchcock’s Hollywood movies….not because I have anything against England…..other than they kept very poor box office records in the 1930s.  Alfred Hitchcock movies are ranked in five sortable columns of information in the following table.

James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954).
James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).

Alfred Hitchcock Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.

Alfred Hitchcock Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about ther table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort by the star of the Alfred Hitchcock movie
  • Sort Alfred Hitchcock movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
  • Sort Alfred Hitchcock movies by yearly box office ranking
  • Sort Alfred Hitchcock movies by critic reviews and audiences voting.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
  • Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Alfred Hitchcock movie received.
  • Sort Alfred Hitchcock movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.

Alfred Hitchcock Adjusted World Wide Box Office Grosses

Possibly Interesting Facts About Alfred Hitchcock

1.  Alfred Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, Essex, England.

2.  Alfred Hitchcock’s opinion about actors….”I never said all actors are: what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle”.

3.  Alfred Hitchcock love to have MacGuffins in his movies.  MacGuffins are basically decoys…they get the audience to think something is important and by the end of the movie the audience realizes they were not really important at all.

4.  Alfred Hitchcock was nominated five times for a Best Director Oscar®…but he never won…he was nominated for Rebecca, Spellbound, Lifeboat, Psycho and Rear Window.

5.  Alfred Hitchcock made 4 movies with James Stewart and Cary Grant. The Stewart 4….Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rear Window and Vertigo.  The Grant 4….Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch A Thief and North by Northwest.

6.  Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite actress was Grace Kelly…..they made three movies together…..Dial M For Murder, To Catch A Thief and Rear Window…..Hitchcock kept hoping Kelly would return to movies….but she never did.

7.  Alfred Hitchcock has been described as the most influential filmmaker of all time.

8.  Alfred Hitchcock wanted to call North by Northwest….”The Man on Lincoln’s Nose”….he was overruled….but he sneak a Shakespeare reference into the title.

9.  Alfred Hitchcock was given an honorary Oscar®….the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1968.

10.  Alfred Hitchcock was famous for his cameo appearances in almost all of his movies….for a great movie page on his cameos check out Film Historian Steve Lensman’s Hitchcock’s Cameos which also includes a video of the Hitchcock cameos.

Steve Lensman’s Alfred Hitchcock Expanded You Tube Video

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.  Golden Globes® are the registered trademark and service mark of the Hollywood Foreign Press.

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154 thoughts on “Alfred Hitchcock Movies”

  1. 1 Because Hitchcock’s films stretch way back into the classic era worldwide grosses of them are hard to get so a table of 14 should be comprehensive enough to interest any film buff who likes stats from the old days. I see the split is approx 63.5 domestic/36.5 foreign.

    2 Hitch certainly did well out of Cary as the 3 Grant/Hitch movies for which we have WW grosses come to over $1.1 billion and if just for fun we apply to your Catch a Thief domestic figure the overall ratio that I have mentioned you are at nearly $1.5 billion WW for just 4 movies – WOW that ought to please YOU ! And look at Psycho’s WW gross – stupendous for those days. Overall a very satisfying ‘collector’s item’ for me.

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob
      1. 14 is almost half of his “American” movies….but it is less than I want….then again….I am always shooting for 100%. That domestic/worldwide split seems pretty reasonable.
      2. I did a fair amount of research on To Catch A Thief’s worldwide box office….but I can up empty…so the missing Grant/Hitch movie is bothersome…but as you point out….it was part of a massively success team in Grant and Hitch.
      3. Glad you enjoyed this page and the update. One of the movies…Mr. and Mrs. Smith fell off the $100 million hit wagon….but other than that…the domestic numbers looked really good when I was importing the new numbers…in other words….I did a good job of coming up with grosses the first time…patting myself on the back….lol.

      Reply

      1. 1 For fun I have provisionally used the 65/35 split to come up with tentative worldwide figures for a lot of stars in the classic era, that is to say I have taken you domestic figures and multiplied by 150% where you hadn’t given a WW figure and when you ultimately did provide WW stats I discovered that the totals were not too far apart with ‘swings and roundabouts’ coming into play.

        2 However the strategy only seems to work reasonably well for movies up until the late 50s so that you couldn’t apply it too far to Wayne/Peck movies for example as those guys had hits extending into the 70s when ratios were changing and varied widely When you take GWTW out of King Gable’s stats your total WW grosses for everything else of his comes to almost exactly 150 % of domestic total. Anyway we’re lucky to be getting even domestic grosses for many of those old films so thanks for your continuing efforts on the WW front.

        3 Thanks too for for highlighting that part of Raft’s career was with Paramount. As he was one of the great gangster era stars, as they mostly tended to be with Warner Bros and as They Drive by Night, Manpower etc WERE Warners films I naturally assumed George had always been with that studio. It reinforces advice given to me once by a friend in relation to movie contracts “Never assume!”
        Have a good weekend BOB

        Reply

        1. Hey Bob
          1. I would imagine that a 150% multiplier would get you close for most movies….but like everything….it would not work for some occassional movies that had a an usual domestic/worldwide breakdown.
          2. When I do my updates….I have added “check for worldwide” grosses to the checklist….along with Co-Star links, new box office calculation and new UMR calculation.
          3. Yep Raft was mostly a Paramount man…which means his box office numbers are locked up in the vaults of Paramount….and the vaults are buried in concrete….and located in a Top Secret location….lol.
          When I updated the Bergman page….I found only 8 of her movies….but that was still 25% of the movies listed on my page.
          4. Yes never assume anything…..thanks for the comment and the visit.

          Reply

  2. Seeing the name Hitchcock at the top is like a magnet drawing me in, I have to have a peek inside…

    Looking at the worldwide grosses, which you won’t find anywhere else I’ll bet. Psycho was huge, $611m worldwide adjusted! Has to be Hitch’s biggest hit. Maybe the most successful horror movie until The Exorcist in 1973?

    Is Psycho a horror movie, or a psychological thriller? I think if it frightens people than it deserves the ‘horror’ label, heck Psycho was more frightening than the Hammer Horrors coming out at that time. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was about a family of psychopaths and that’s definitely a horror movie. But what about Silence of the Lambs? (cue murmuring, head scratching, and some yawning in the back row)

    US grosses – Psycho is no.2, Rear Window was bigger. Rebecca tops the UMR chart. All favorites of mine so I can’t complain. 🙂

    A fine update on my favorite director Bruce. Vote Up!

    Reply

    1. Hey Steve…I figured that a Hitchcock page would get your interested…lol. Too bad Hitch did not direct Heston in a 1950s science fiction film…..that would probably give Ben-Hur….a run for the money when deciding your favorite movie.

      I think you are correct…Psycho was the biggest horror ever….at least until The Exorcist arrived. I think all 4 of the movies you mention fall into the horror category…..but Psycho and Silence of the Lambs seem more of a psychological thriller.

      I wish I had more worldwide grosses….but Hitch made movies everywhere…..so the Paramount, United Artist. 20th Century Fox and Universal ones provided no information on worldwide grosses.

      Thanks for the comment and the vote up….we were experimenting with a vote up button but it stopped working….so sad…..maybe we can get it running again.

      Reply

  4. I love that you have updated your Hitchcock page Bruce.

    I have seen all of these.

    Some movie I own on DVD and others I own on VHS.
    I have seen nearly everything he did but there are some British films I am still missing. I understand that they are in the public domain and that I can watch them on youtube.

    I recently saw The Lodger for the first time online. I know other versions of this story very well.

    Thanks!

    Flora

    Reply

    1. Hey Flora….yep about 25% done with the updates….a slow process….but I have been doing the pages when have been going to the page for other reasons. If there are links in the co-star column….then you know the page has been updated. I watched the Lodger for the first time myself recently…great minds thinking alike. Thanks for checking out the update.

      Reply

  5. Hitchcock updated! I can’t resist having a peek. My favorite movie director.

    As you may have guessed I’ve seen all of the films on your list but there are a few early British films I’ve missed. According to my database I have 40 Hitchcock films in the collection and the general consensus is that there are 53 noteworthy films in his oeuvre, so I’m missing 13.

    I love Rebecca, one of my favorites and wrote an article about it at hubpages but it doesn’t really belong at the top of the UMR chart. It’s the only Hitchcock film to win Best Picture and it was a hit but it’s not a ‘quintessential’ Hitchcock film, it’s not in the same league as Psycho, Rear Window or Vertigo. Hitch himself dismissed it as a ‘woman’s picture’.

    In fact if I had to pick ‘the’ quintessential Hitchcock film it would be North by Northwest. The critics chart is more accurate in my opinion, Rear Window at the top, Psycho at no.3. Rope and Lifeboat are too high though.

    Vertigo is too low on the UMR chart, its not even in the top 10. Vertigo is currently listed as greatest movie ever made by critics and filmmakers voting at Sight and Sound magazine. Citizen Kane has dropped to no.2. This might get reversed next time they vote, I think it’s every 10 years.

    I would say that Psycho is the most famous Hitchcock film of them all and the most popular, a horror masterpiece. The Birds is his most underrated movie, the movie has more fans now than it ever did at the time.

    Looking at the box office chart I’m surprised at how successful Rear Window is in adjusted dollars, more than North by Northwest and Psycho? Did not expect that.

    Great work as usual Bruce. Voted Up!

    Reply

    1. Hey Steve….finally got around to updating how the UMR score was calculated and how to calculate adjusted gross. So far I have done about 25% of the pages. Lots of work to do.
      I wish there was more information on his British movies….but there is not much out there….so I had to stick with his American movies.
      I like Lifeboat a lot….I just recently rewatched it. I think it is one of his better movies. As for Vertigo being to low….getting it 4th on the default setting is about as high as I can get it….it is his 14th biggest hit…and pretty much got no Oscar love. That hurts it in the UMR Score. But under the old scoring system it was even lower…I think it was around 20th….so it moved up 6 spots.
      I agree Psycho is his most famous movie….even non-film fans know that movie….but I think your quintessential Hitch list with Rear Window and North By Northwest is the a good place to start. Thanks for revisiting this page. This has always been one of my more popular pages…I should add your Hitch cameo You Tube video.

      Reply

      1. Actually the link is already there….I was thinking it was your You Tube video. But it is you Hub with somebody’s else video.

        Reply

        1. Thanks Bruce, appreciate the link. That was my very first hub btw, I’m surprised and relieved that that guys video is still working after all these years.

          Rear Window still seems huge for its time, $441m adjusted domestic would make it the equivalent of Avengers Age of Ultron or The Dark Knight Rises in box office success.

          Reply

          1. I just watched the video again….I think I have probably watched that video a 100 times. Rear Window is the 101st biggest hit of all-time….it was huge. Hitch owned the 1950s. All this Hitch talk has me motivated to watch a Hitch movie tonight.

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