June is a thriller lover’s dream: Alfred Hitchcock takes over Netflix

Alfred Hitchcock began making movies in the early 1920s, half a decade before the advent of the talking feature film. Fifty years later, he was still at it. During his long career, he not only moved from silents to talkies – he also moved from his native England to Hollywood. It was a shift in working conditions that would have a major influence on his output.

Beginning on June 1, Netflix will be featuring six films from the latter part of Hitchcock’s career, along with several other interesting companion pieces. This is by no means a complete compendium of the director’s final years. The newly available titles represent about half of the movies he made over his final 20 years.

However, except for two, as of June 1, you will be able to watch most of Hitch’s best films from this final stage. Some of them ranked right up there with the best and most iconic suspense films ever made. Even the ones that fall short of that mark are entertaining and quirky enough to merit a watch, especially if you are a fan of this genre.

Which Alfred Hitchcock films are coming to Netflix in June?

Hitchcock’s most famous movie, Psycho, is already available to stream on Netflix, so it is not technically included in this “new” list. The six that are indeed new to the service surround Psycho, both chronologically and thematically.

Three came in the 1950s, when the British director was hitting his peak. Three others come after Psycho (1960), when the aging Hitchcock was struggling to maintain his magic touch. Let’s take a brief look in chronological order.

Rear Window (1954)

It is hard to overstate the sheer brilliance of Rear Window. To many scholars and fans alike, it is Alfred Hitchcock’s towering achievement. It has virtually everything we would come to expect from a great Hitchcock suspense story.

Hitchcock was always fond of giving himself a challenge. After coming to the USA in 1940, he made movies like Lifeboat, which was confined to a single set – a lifeboat floating in the middle of the ocean – and Rope – a murder mystery filmed in continuous time, ostensibly in one single camera shot. Rope was the first Hitchcock movie to star American actor Jimmy Stewart. It would not be the last.

Stewart worked again for Hitch in Rear Window. The challenge the director set for himself in this one? The hero (Stewart’s L.B. Jeffries) is confined to his apartment with a broken leg. A naturally curious and active man, Jeffries passes the time by spying on his neighbors in the apartment building across the alley. And he becomes convinced he has uncovered a murder.

Featuring Hitch’s trademark blend of suspense, romance, and humor, Rear Window also boasts sensational performances by the preternaturally beautiful Grace Kelly and the barbed tongue wit of Thelma Ritter. It may well be the most engaging, entertaining suspense movie ever filmed.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

Hitchcock teamed up with Stewart again a few years after Rear Window. The results were not nearly as good, but The Man Who Knew Too Much remains a fascinating movie because it was the second time Hitchcock had made it.

He filmed his original version as a black-and-white film during his years in England (1934). Twenty-two years later, he tackled the same story again. Stewart and Doris Day take over the roles originally played by Leslie Banks and Edna Best. They are parents who are sucked into the world of international intrigue by chance, and have to tread carefully or risk the life of their young son, who has been kidnapped to ensure their silence.

Though Hitchcock was nominated for an Oscar five times during his career, he and his films rarely took home a statuette. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 version) was an exception. The song “Que Sera, Sera,” which would become Doris Day’s signature, won the Best Original Song Oscar.

Vertigo (1958)

You would be hard-pressed to find a greater run of three American movies than the trio Hitchcock produced at the very end of the 1950s. Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho represent the pinnacle of Production Code suspense. The Production Code was a set of standards that governed all American films from the early 1930s into the late 1960s.

Many fans of classic American cinema believe that the restrictions imposed by the code forced filmmakers to be more clever in getting their points across. That was never more true than in Vertigo.

This is another classic suspense story and the fourth, and final, pairing of Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart. He plays a former cop haunted by a past failure, who is drawn into a twisting story of manipulation and betrayal. In its fascination with a regular man being overwhelmed by obsession, it predicts the movies of David Lynch that would come a few decades later.

Since 1952, the British magazine Sight and Sound has been commissioning an impressive panel of international experts to select the greatest movies of all time. They redo the list every decade. For half a century – from 1962 to 2002 – Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane topped the list. Vertigo is the movie that finally dethroned it in 2012.

Some have argued that Vertigo appeals more to scholars than to average audience members, owing to its fascination with the very nature of voyeurism and watching. That was a subject near and dear to Hitchcock. It certainly was at the heart of Rear Window as well. But I would not be scared off by perceived critical snobbery.

That may be somewhat more true of the movie that claimed the top spot in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll (Vertigo fell to number two behind Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles). Vertigo, despite its status as a critical darling, remains very accessible.

The Birds (1963)

Hitchcock followed up the raging success of Psycho with one of his strangest and most hypnotic horror films – The Birds. It has been parodied repeatedly because the premise – seemingly benign birds violently attacking a pleasant seaside town – can get downright silly.

But there is something weirdly pervasive in the way the director slow-rolls his obsession. This may be the closest Hitchcock ever came to his own personal equation of sexual desire with horror, and it has enough symbolism to fill multiple Freudian theses.

Most of all, it has the uneasy brutalization of his lead actress, Tippi Hedren, which essentially amounted to the culmination of a career-long fixation on a particular type of blond-haired woman.

The Birds is not a grand slam like Rear Window and Vertigo. It contains elements that don’t always work. But over the years, it has grown into something of a cult-movie, recognized for all the affecting and troubling psychology it manages to unearth in a borderline campy monster movie.

Frenzy (1972)

Hitchcock made three movies between The Birds and Frenzy. They were not good. Marnie (also starring Tippi Hedren), Torn Curtain, and Topaz were pretty obvious suggestions that the master of suspense had lost his touch. The Production Code ended in the late 1960s, and Hitchcock, now past 70, was showing his age.

So he returned to England to film a movie for the first time since the War. The result, Frenzy, is a marvelous jumble of the best and worst of Alfred Hitchcock. Eminent British film critic David Thomson has said Frenzy plays like a parody of a Hitchcock movie. There’s a lot of truth to that. And that often makes it riveting.

The director is very clearly out of step with the world of the 1970s, and that is part of the incongruous fun. There are moments in which you will groan and other moments in which you will get swept up in the audacity of the murder story. I can’t say that Frenzy is a great movie. It is not.

However, whereas some Hitchcock movies are really only worth watching if you are looking to complete his filmography, Frenzy can stand on its own as a weirdly compelling slice of that particular British queasiness with sexually-tinged violence.

Family Plot (1976)

The final film in an illustrious career is more of a whimper than a bang. Nonetheless. Family Plot is engaging enough to serve as a diversion. I wish I could say more, but damning with faint praise is the most I can manage.

What is interesting to contemplate is how the movie would have been received had it come from John Smith or Bill Jones. Without the elevated bar associated with a Hitchcock film – even a very late one – I suspect public opinion would have been somewhat more upbeat.

Family Plot has a quirky little story and some fine moments. And perhaps this one, being the last, does deserve to be watched for the sake of completeness. At the very least, I can say that while I don’t know anyone who loves this movie, I don’t think I know anyone who hates it either.

Netflix has several other interesting titles accompanying the Hitchcock collection. Sacha Gervasi’s 2012 fiction film, Hitchcock, chronicles the making of Psycho, and features excellent performances by Anthony Hopkins in the title role, Helen Mirren as his wife and long-time collaborator Alma Reville, and Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh, another of the “Hitchcock blondes,” who starred in Psycho.

There are also a couple of contemporary horror/suspense movies that were at least partially inspired by Hitchcock, including Jordan Peele’s 2019 movie Us and Zach Cregger’s compelling 2022 horror movie Barbarian.

Taken together, they make June a very good month for suspense on Netflix.