An advertising executive mistaken for a nonexistent spy is chased across the United States toward a crop-duster in an empty field and a climax on the carved faces of Mount Rushmore. Built by Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman around set pieces conceived before the plot that justifies them, it is Cary Grant at his most physically tested and Hitchcock's biggest production to date.
Hitchcock financed Psycho himself after Paramount balked at the material, shooting it fast, cheap and in black and white with his television crew. Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates, Bernard Herrmann's string score and a mid-film murder that removes the film's ostensible heroine turned a low-budget genre picture into the template for the modern horror thriller.
Confined almost entirely to one apartment and the courtyard it overlooks, Rear Window turns a photographer's boredom into a murder investigation conducted through binoculars. Built on a single elaborate Paramount set, it is Hitchcock at his most tightly engineered, with James Stewart watching and Grace Kelly eventually doing the one thing he cannot: crossing the courtyard himself.
Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film follows Scottie Ferguson, a retired police detective with a crippling fear of heights, hired to trail a friend's wife who believes she is possessed by a dead ancestor. What begins as surveillance turns into obsession, and after a death he could not prevent, Scottie tries to remake a second woman into the image of the first. Shot by Robert Burks with a spiralling title-sequence effect and scored by Bernard Herrmann, it earned back roughly three times its $2.5 million budget on release and has since climbed steadily in critical standing, unseating Citizen Kane at the top of one long-running critics' poll.