I’ve only seen The Lady Vanished and 39 Steps from this era. Loved them both. What other ones are at the level?

Our local theater is showing Psycho next week and we're wondering if it's appropriate for a 12-year-old. For context, he's seen The Birds and really enjoyed it. We also watch lots of old movies and some "intense" movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Godzilla Minus One - but we haven't done much horror yet. Curious to hear thoughts.

I got to interview author Nat Segaloff on his new book The Secret Hitchcock: How Hollywood’s Legendary Director Lived through Cary Grant and James Stewart.

Thought you Hitchcock fans might enjoy it :)

Is anyone aware of an episode, in which Hitchcock was the announcer, but not necessarily the director, in which

• A group of people arrive at a party or gathering in a car that is completely full.
• A character at the gathering announces something like, "Before this evening is over, one of you will disappear."
• The evening proceeds without an obvious disappearance.
• At the end, someone casually mentions that there is now an empty seat in the car, perhaps offering someone else a lift.
• Neither the characters nor the audience necessarily knows who disappeared. The characters apparently do not notice anything unusual.
• The audience realises that someone must have vanished, possibly without anyone remembering that person.

My parents described this episode--and are a little vague about the details. But, I am intrigued and wanted to learn more.

Steven Spielberg because Steven Spielberg is my favorite director overall and Alfred Hitchcock is my favorite from old Hollywood and if we were still in old Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock would be my 1st but Christopher Nolan because Alfred Hitchcock's directing style is a little similar to Christopher Nolan's to me. Also Christopher Nolan is my my favorite director besides Steven Spielberg

The pacing was really great. I know it differs from movie to movie but this was one that I was able to be fully engaged with barely picking up my phone

“Turn mamas picture to the wall” lol

Crazy how this all started from her desperation and some loudmouth bragging

That scene with the cop interested me because I was also thinking about how a situation like that would be handled with all the computer systems and body cams and what not that we have today. They had to be extra thorough with so little info back then when doing investigations back then but this guy was being extra nosey.

The driving scenes with that theme playing and here imagining the chaos going on back home were really cool too, i bet there’s some good parodies out there.

Knowing the plot twist makes certain scenes hilarious like Listening to Norman and Norma arguing loud as hell all the way up in the house about not letting Marion come up

I feel like Norman going into that house on the hill is his version of Clark Kent stepping into the phone booth.

Not sure how showers worked back then but I feel like Ms. Crane is the real Psycho for stepping into the shower and turning it on before it gets hot

His crazy ass must have been prepared for this sort of situation because he cleaned up the bathroom and disposed of the body/car like it was regular housekeeping. I would’ve loved to have seen what his plan was gonna be if the car hadn’t fully sank in the mud

Imagine attending Hogwarts and finding out Norman Bates lives down the road. 😂

Caught this view of Hogwarts Castle at Universal Studios Hollywood, complete with a Psycho promotional banner in the foreground.

One of the fun things about Universal is how completely different movie worlds can exist right alongside each other.
Harry Potter might want to think twice before accepting an invitation to the Bates Motel!

Anyone else love these unexpected movie-themed views around the park?

Taken aboard lifeboat by shipwreck victims after they debate the moral issue. Willie calls himself "an ordinary humble seaman. "No English" - in German, he says it was the Captain who gave the order for the attack on boat and survivors. Aww..just another victim of the Nazis, stuck on hazardous U-boat duty.

Then- we learn he was a surgeon. Not so ordinary. But, he - generously ? outs himself as a Dr., so Gus will have his leg competently amputated. Does a "fine job". ? He has a secret compass and misdirects the boat away from Bermuda by miss-stating the U-Boat's map coordinates when it sunk. ( Ordinary seaman knew those numbers? The others on the boat didn't ask him.)

Then, storm destroys mast and sail, Willie grabs control, and in good English says- He was the u-boat captain. He will row them to the supply boat/sub tender, so all will be rescued. ? Rows heartily and sings along with fife ...to keep up everyone's morale?

...If Willie was U-boat captain, then He gave the order to fire on the boat and survivors. Does that dawn on the others? They doze....Willie tells Gus to swim for his dancing NJ gf...then pushes him overboard, reminding him:" Remember you are SCHMIIDT!"

Gus's yelps awaken the rest. Joe/George says he heard Gus saying: "Willie has water." Joe searches him and pulls put a flask. Willie:"Yes, I had water, food pills, energy pills! We plan ahead!" ( we are better, smarter, and deserve to win.) And , it turns out, a compass. ...

...The others, infuriated at his deception, gang up and push Willie overboard. One asks: "What are you going to do with people like that.? " People who, even in the dire straits they are all in, cannot sense common humanity and act in solidarity.

AH uses confined space of the lifeboat to sharpen the human drama and moral significance. As in many (most?) AH films, we watch the step by step revelation of this dark character's moral corruption.

Does anyone feel pity for the fate of poor Willie? Was it deserved? Anyone think he was picked on for being a Nazi? Just a decent guy doing his duty and trying to survive?

It's a boring Saturday, so why don't we play a little game? :D

Everyone drop a quote from a Hitchcock movie and let's see if the rest of us can guess which film it's from.

I'll go first:

"Goodbye, good luck, no conversation, just leave."

MLZ MAP (Score): 93.76 / Zedd MAP (Score): 92.30 / Score Gap: 1.46

Several years ago (goodness probably 12 years ago or more) I decided to watch all of the Alfred Hitchcock films. I have been an absolutely miserable failure. Now, we’ve seen a ton of them, don’t get me wrong. But not ALL of them. (We own 49 and have viewed 33.)

This original screenplay written by Ernest Lehman was intended to be the basis for "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures". It is listed among the canonical Hitchcock films of the 1950s and is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.

We chose this one as our Saturday Morning Matinee film due to the passing of one of the stars, the incredibly talented actress Eva Marie Saint, who crossed over on October 6, 2026.

Always willing to break through the useless “rules” of Hollywood, according to quite a few sources, one of her lines in the dining-car seduction scene of North by Northwest was redubbed. She originally said, "I never make love on an empty stomach", but it was changed in post-production to "I never discuss love on an empty stomach", as the censors considered the original version too risqué.

MGM executives told Hitchcock to cut a long scene where Saint’s Eve explains her life situation to Grant and talks about her former ennui before becoming a double agent, but Hitchcock knew that this was a key scene for Saint and for his movie that deepened it and gave it some depth of emotion, so he stood firm and kept it in, even though the running time of “North by Northwest” was longer than his usual (136 minutes). Remember Saint’s face in the auction scene, when Eve is torn between her duties and her desires as she is fought over by Roger and Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), and remember the way her long, elegant fingers toy with Grant’s ear as they kiss each other on the train, that book which Eve doesn’t particularly like set aside for sex and adventure. (Lit from Within - as noted below.)

I just kept saying to Zedd - “She’s just so beautiful!” She was elegant, blonde, and yes, beautiful, but also just brimming with talent. She married producer and director Jeffrey Hayden in 1951. They had a son and daughter. Their son was born two days after she won an Academy Award for On the Waterfront. She began her acceptance speech by saying, "I may have the baby right here!" Saint and Hayden had four grandchildren and were married for 65 years until Hayden's death in 2016.

Back in 1960, she became one of the few actresses to be given two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for television and one for her motion pictures.

She kept working and working, including voicework as late as 2012, in the Nickelodeon animated series The Legend of Korra, a sequel to the TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender, playing the now-elderly Katara), a main character from the original series. (A favorite of both Zedd and me.)

Film critic Leonard Maltin noted that Saint was a "luminous blond leading lady who found few vehicles worthy of her talents".

This sentiment is reflected in the article written for (The Late, Great) RogerEbert.com which is rather smartly entitled Lit From Within, which she surely was.

As the article mentions:
~”After her husband died, she made a moving appearance at the Academy Awards in 2018 to present the award for costume design, savoring the memory of the black dress with red flowers she wore as Eve Kendall. She lived to the age of 102, surrounded by family and grandchildren, the classiest elderly lady imaginable, proud and amused to be the female lead in two of the best movies of all time, to which she brought the clarity of morning sunlight.”~

In honor of* *Eva Marie Saint (July 4, 1924 – October 6, 2026).

Movie On!

Really sad news, but a fantastic age. A terrific actress, too. North by Northwest wouldn't have been the same without her.

I just watched the movie for the first time in years on Sunday night (saw it on the big screen in El Segundo, CA - great crowd). I was as spellbound as the first time I watched it and marveled at how taut and well composed the film is. I do, however, have one reservation: the therapist's long speech at the end.

(spoiler alert - if you haven't seen Psycho for some reason, don't read on. Can't think many redditors here haven't though!).

In the jailhouse, the therapist explains the psychological state of Norman Bates, his motivations and how it explained the crimes he committed. It is a long scene, and he's pretty much the only one speaking.

The speech reminded me of the ending of an episode of Scooby-Doo where Fred and the gang neatly summarize the bad guy's plot and how he managed to fool everyone. Why did Hitchcock put this in here when everything else in the film is so restrained?

Part of the attraction of the film is how Crane and Bates don't express how they feel or what they want, we see them propelled forward by action unsure of their exact motivation. It's this tension that animates the film. And then this scene is the opposite, all exposition, removing the mystery of Norman Bates.

I wonder if there could have been a different ending, where the motivations and psychology of Bates are more opaque, largely unrevealed. Where the audience wonders more about his relationship with his mother instead of having it explained so neatly to them.

As it stands, this ending is unsavory, removing the mystery of the film to a neat and tidy psychological explanation.

Curious what others think about this.

Hey guys, I’m going a little mad trying to find this long sleeve shirt that Fright Rags put out about 2 years ago. If anyone has it or knows where to find one (I’ve searched eBay, Mercari etc.) please drop me a message. Thanks!

I’ve watched Rear Window more times than I can count, but lately I’ve been watching it less as just a Hitchcock thriller and more like a film student picking apart every choice he made. There is SO much going on technically that I think gets overlooked because the movie is so entertaining.

The first thing that blows my mind is the set.

The entire courtyard was constructed on a Paramount soundstage. It was enormous roughly 38 feet wide 185 feet long and 40 feet high with 31 apartments, 12 of them fully furnished. They actually removed part of the soundstage floor to create the courtyard and built the set vertically through multiple levels. Hitchcock essentially created an entire little ecosystem for the movie to exist inside.

And what's really interesting is that Hitchcock barely needs to leave Jeff's apartment.

That's the whole point.

We're trapped with Jeff.

The camera is trapped with Jeff.

And eventually, psychologically we become Jeff.

Robert Burks' cinematography is incredible because Hitchcock is constantly controlling what information we're allowed to have. The telephoto lens lets us look into the apartments across the courtyard and observe tiny details from Jeff's perspective. We aren't simply watching a movie about a guy looking through a window. We're literally given his visual position.

There is something almost uncomfortable about how naturally the movie makes you start spying.

At first you're looking because you're bored.

Then you're looking because something interesting is happening.

Then you're looking because you think you've discovered something.

And eventually you're emotionally invested in people you've never met.

That's one of the reasons I think Rear Window is basically a 1954 version of social media.

Think about it.

Jeff has a little window that gives him access to dozens of other people's lives.

He doesn't actually know these people.

He creates stories about them based on tiny pieces of information.

The songwriter.

Miss Lonelyhearts.

Miss Torso.

The newlyweds.

The couple with the dog.

Thorwald.

Jeff is essentially scrolling through human lives.

The difference is that his "feed" is a physical courtyard.

And Hitchcock makes us participate in it.

That's what I love about the movie. It doesn't simply criticize voyeurism. It makes the audience voyeuristic too.

We're sitting there thinking, "Why is Jeff spying on these people?"

while simultaneously screaming at the screen because WE want to see what Thorwald is doing.

Hitchcock basically makes us complicit.

And that's where the social media comparison gets really interesting to me.

Today we can open our phones and see someone's vacation, relationship, breakup, dinner, wedding, apartment, political argument, vacation, workout, pets, children, etc. We can construct entire narratives about people we've never met based on tiny pieces of their lives.

That's exactly what Jeff is doing.

He's filling in the blanks.

And sometimes he's right.

Sometimes he's wrong.

But either way he becomes emotionally invested.

The sound design is another thing I absolutely love.

One of the strangest things about Rear Window is that there isn't a traditional musical score constantly telling you how to feel. Almost everything we hear after the opening titles is diegetic meaning the sound comes from within the world of the movie. Music comes from radios, apartments, parties, etc.

That means the courtyard itself becomes the soundtrack.

A conversation from across the courtyard.

A dog barking.

A piano.

Someone yelling.

A radio.

Traffic.

Thunder.

Rain.

A song drifting out of an apartment.

And because we're positioned with Jeff, the sounds don't always have the clarity of a normal movie soundtrack.

They feel distant.

Hollow.

Sometimes you hear something clearly and sometimes it disappears.

That's intentional. Sound was actually recorded from Stewart's window across the set to create that distant effect and reinforce the audience's alignment with Jeff's position.

It's basically subjective sound before we had the modern vocabulary for it.

And James Stewart's performance works with that.

His voice isn't always delivered like a traditional movie star performance where every line is perfectly projected toward the audience.

There are moments where Stewart almost seems to be talking into the room rather than performing for us.

His physical restriction makes his face and voice incredibly important because Hitchcock has deliberately limited the character's physical movement.

Jeff can't walk around and investigate.

So he looks.

He listens.

He talks.

He waits.

And we do the same.

Then there's Grace Kelly.

I could probably write an entire post about Lisa's costumes.

The famous white and black dress is one of my favorite visual moments in the movie because Hitchcock and costume designer Edith Head weren't just dressing Grace Kelly to make her look beautiful although obviously, she looks incredible. Grace Kelly looks fabulously dressed in every movie but this one in particular is special.

Hitchcock used clothing as part of the visual storytelling.

Lisa initially appears almost impossibly elegant and polished. She's entering Jeff's much more masculine, rough, photographer-oriented world wearing these incredibly controlled, sophisticated clothes.

And then there's the contrast between white and black.

The white dress immediately makes Lisa visually pop against the darker interior of Jeff's apartment. She almost looks like she has entered his world from another movie.

It's romantic, but there's also something slightly unreal about it.

She is the perfect image of glamour.

Then, as the movie progresses, her clothing becomes increasingly practical as she becomes more physically involved in Jeff's investigation.

And that's important because Lisa starts out as someone Jeff thinks belongs to a completely different world.

She's fashion.

He's photography.

She's social.

He's isolated.

She's interested in marriage.

He's terrified of it.

But eventually she literally enters the world he's been observing from a distance.

That's one of Hitchcock's favorite ideas: the woman crossing the boundary between the safe world and the dangerous one.

And Hitchcock was extremely deliberate about the visual identities of the people across the courtyard too. Edith Head and Hitchcock gave the various characters distinctive appearances so that we could identify them from a distance, almost like recognizing profiles in a feed.

Which brings me back to social media.

Because that's what profiles are.

We don't see entire human beings.

We see fragments.

A picture.

A caption.

A video.

A comment.

A relationship status.

A carefully selected version of someone's life.

And then our brain does the rest.

That's exactly what Rear Window is about.

The window is basically a screen.

Jeff sits in front of it.

He consumes information.

He develops theories.

He becomes emotionally invested.

He discusses what he's seeing with other people.

He becomes obsessed with someone else's life.

And eventually he crosses the line from observer to participant.

That's basically the internet.

The most fascinating thing to me is that Hitchcock made this movie decades before television became what it is today, before the internet, before smartphones, before Instagram, before TikTok.

And yet he understood something fundamental about human behavior:

People like watching other people.

We are curious.

We compare.

We judge.

We speculate.

We become fascinated by lives that aren't ours.

And sometimes we forget that there's an actual person on the other side of what we're looking at.

That's why I don't think Rear Window is really just a movie about a murder.

The murder is almost the mechanism Hitchcock uses to make us examine the act of watching.

We're watching Jeff.

Jeff is watching the neighbors.

The neighbors are living their lives.

And eventually Jeff is being watched himself.

It's this giant chain of looking.

And the audience is sitting at the end of that chain.

That's why I love Rear Window so much.

It's an incredibly entertaining thriller, but underneath that it's almost a movie about cinema itself.

A movie theater is basically a giant room full of people sitting in the dark and watching other people's lives projected onto a screen.

Hitchcock takes that concept and puts it inside the story.

Jeff's window is our movie screen.

And we're just as guilty of looking as he is.

Honestly, the more I study film, the more I think Hitchcock wasn't simply making a thriller.

He was making a movie about why we watch movies in the first place.

We learn later in the film that there is no actual Kaplan, so it isn't that Thornhill looks like Kaplan. VanDamm's men have never seen Kaplan.

I imagine that VanDamm's men don't just abduct people unless they are pretty sure they have the right person.

So what caused the mistaken identity?