Ranking Hitchcock's 1930s films

Note: Elstree Calling (1930) was only partially directed by Hitchcock and as Hitch himself said, it's of no interest whatsoever apart from a glimpse into British music hall. 

Juno and the Paycock (1930) - I couldn't find English subtitles for this so I had to follow along with a copy of Seán O'Casey's play which was no fun. No catastrophe but I'm struggling to discover a reason why anyone would need to see this beyond completism. B-minus

The Skin Game (1931) - A Hatfields and McCoys melodrama as nasty as anything in Hitchcock's oeuvre. But the film comes alive only in the auction scene. Everywhere else, Hitch seems bored. At times, he can't even be bothered to pan or track over to a character talking. Scholars of offscreen voices should thus derive more use value out of this than the rest of us. B-minus

Waltzes from Vienna (1933) - Reviewed here. Much better than its rep but forgettable. B

Jamaica Inn (1939) - Included in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. But it's actually quite fun. It would've been even more fun had it not been so indifferently directed. But producer/star Charles Laughton exerted far too much control. And maybe Hitchcock's heart was already in Hollywood when he took on this final project before leaving to fulfill his contract with David O. Selznick in April, 1939. Sexy bastard: Emlyn Williams as Harry the Pedlar. B+

Number Seventeen (1932) - A fascinating mess. It's a film of verticals with people falling through roofs and hanging from broken balustrades in the tall haunted house of the title. It ends with a bus speeding to catch up with a runaway train which slams into a ferry and, in a premonition of Lifeboat (1944), sends all the cars into the water. Silly, nonsensical, but only 63 minutes! B+

Secret Agent (1936) - Where looks in Hitchcock's oeuvre are menacing or duplicitous, here sound oppresses - an organ note held by a dead body on the keyboard; a deafening bell necessitating John Gielgud to shout in Peter Lorre's ear; a dog's gut-wrenching howl upon its owner's wrongful murder; a coin circling a ceramic bowl in an increasingly dissonant (Bulgarian?) folk song; a roaring chocolate factory; soldiers incessantly singing on a train; and yet another train wreck with all the attendant explosions and earth rattles. But I wish Hitch kept the play of identities in motion instead of ending with the (admittedly and blessedly brief) formation of the heterosexual couple. P. S. Is that toilet paper in the screenshot below?!? B+

Murder! (1930)/Mary (1931) - The overly narrative whodunit aspect (what I call the "well, she put her left shoe on her right foot so she must be the killer" school of storytelling) does this one in. What takes up two lines of synopsis on Wiki takes 30 minutes of running time in the film (and I'm being lenient here). And while those moments are not without interest, as Tania Modleski made clear in her essential The Women Who Knew Too Much, the Agatha Christieing grows wearisome. Solution: Mary, the German-language version Hitch directed a year later which comes in 20 blessed minutes shorter. Murder! B+/Mary A-minus.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) - Not much to say about this expert thriller which put Hitch on the international map except to note that the one sequence that stayed with me since I saw the film as a child was the throwing of the chairs in the church. And if you're in the market for a ripoff of this film starring Joan Crawford, then check out the fun, underrated Above Suspicion (Richard Thorpe, 1943). A-minus

The Lady Vanishes (1938) - I still think there's far too much narrative throat clearing here. They don't get on the train until 27 minutes in. After that, though, the superlative train film. A-minus

Young and Innocent (1937) - I've always preferred this underpraised entry because the wrong man business starts up almost immediately. Other selling points: a car falling into the earth reminding me of my beloved Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951); a children's party used to camouflage the wrong man; a dexterous tracking shot as astonishing as the one in Notorious (1946); and the formation of the heterosexual couple as a blissfully tacked-on afterthought much like the one in Secret Agent (and, indeed, most of his films of this era). A-minus

Rich and Strange (1931) - The most accurately named film in Hitch's oeuvre. A middle-class couple living a life of quiet desperation come into some money. They get drunk in France, sail to Singapore, fall in love with other people, get swindled, lose their money, survive a shipwreck, unwittingly eat a cat [sic], and finally return to their lives of quiet desperation, bickering during the final fade out. It comes off as a parody of not just coupledom but of narrative itself. It's so uncharacteristic, so deeply peculiar that I'm probably overrating it but it hypnotized me. A

The 39 Steps (1935) - Positively choked with implausibilities and I adore every single one of them. This is the quintessential Brit Hitch film complete with modern morality and an understanding of the city as both as a place of horror and refuge. Not even ten minutes in and Annabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim) is going home with Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) mere nanoseconds after they first meet. The scene in which Hannay is mistaken for a politician and rushed on stage to deliver a speech is both hilarious and nail-biting. And one of the most moving sequences in all of Hitch is the young farm wife Margaret (Peggy Ashcroft) asking Hannay about London and dreaming of a life beyond the brutal old crofter she's saddled with. A

Sabotage (1936) - The only thing potentially keeping this from an A+ is the apparent imperative of undercover detective Ted Spencer (John Loder) having to fall in love with the heroine Mrs. Verloc (Sylvia Sidney), a drawback Hitch himself mourned. Even there, though, the requisite formation of the heterosexual couple hardly feels celebratory at the end. In fact, the end proves that Mrs. Verloc gets away with murder, however emotionally justified. Sabotage takes the best qualities of The 39 Steps and amps them further. It's a great city film akin to, albeit slightly inferior to, M (Fritz Lang, 1931). And, perhaps perversely, its investigation of the space around the central location, a well-attended movie theatre, reminds me of Parade (Jacques Tati, 1974). As such, Sabotage is truly a cinemagoer's delight as Hitchcock explores the ticket booth, the area behind the screen, the living quarters upstairs, the aisles flanking the theatre seats, etc. Another reference point: Porn Theatre (La chatte à deux têtes) (Jacques Nolot, 2002). And his camera visits myriad other locations around the city, a perfect compliment to the restless pace of urban life. All that and quite possibly the nastiest death in his entire oeuvre, one so horrifying that even Hitch himself was upset about it. A