The Big Picture · Discussion · Top Five · Roundtable
September 4, 2020/ 139 min/ Sean Fennessey · Amanda Dobbins · Chris Ryan · Wesley Morris
Four Big Picture regulars mark 60 years of Psycho with a long conversation about Alfred Hitchcock, then each bring an individual top-five Hitchcock list.
26 films across 6 segments.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
Psycho at 60the reason for the episode
The 40-minute bait-and-switch that kills its lead and flips from a 1940s noir about a theft into something else entirely. The shower scene and the Arbogast murder still land for the group; the closing psychiatrist scene, everyone agrees, doesn't.
Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot color remake, with Vince Vaughn, Julianne Moore, and Anne Heche. Wesley finds the exercise fascinating as an idea even though he doesn't like the movie; Chris just doesn't like it.
Wesley's Top Five Hitchcockranked best to worst
No. 1. Shared with Sean, at No. 5 on his list. Wesley's pick for the one perfect Hitchcock movie. He's seen it 15 times and still couldn't tell you exactly how the plot connects, which he considers the whole point.
No. 2. Shared with Amanda and Sean. The most purely glamorous thing Hitchcock ever made: Cary Grant mistaken for a man who doesn't exist, chased across a country that never stops looking good.
No. 3. No ornithologist shows up to explain the attacks, and Wesley loves that the movie just lets the terror be terror, a manifestation of the tension between Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, and his jealous mother.
No. 4. The only one of the four to put it on his list, even though he thinks it's the movie the group has collectively thought about the most.
No. 5. Tippi Hedren's kleptomaniac heroine and Sean Connery a year removed from three Bond movies. Wesley calls it a study in psychological repression that refuses to spell out the trauma until a weaker ending forces it to.
Amanda's Top Five Hitchcockranked best to worst
No. 1. Shared with Chris. Grace Kelly's best performance, and, per Amanda, a movie about how we're all a little bit perverted: staring out windows into other people's lives instead of living our own.
No. 2. Shared with Sean, at No. 3 on his list. A childhood favorite (she was handed the novel far too young), and the reveal that Laurence Olivier's character killed his first wife has stuck with her in every relationship since.
No. 3. Shared with Wesley and Sean; the Mount Rushmore chase and the best suit Cary Grant ever wore in a movie.
No. 4. Shared with Chris and Sean. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman as spies in Brazil, and, to Amanda, the rare Hitchcock movie that actually reckons with what it puts its woman through.
No. 5. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly on the French Riviera: pure pleasure-principle Hitchcock, low stakes, but still built on the same lies people tell each other to get what they want.
Chris's Top Five Hitchcockranked best to worst
No. 1. Shared with Amanda. Chris calls it note-perfect, down to the six-week rebuild of a Greenwich Village block on the Paramount lot. Nothing in it feels superfluous or tossed off.
No. 3. Two killers, played by John Dall and Farley Granger, throw a dinner party to see if they can get away with murder in front of their old teacher, played by Jimmy Stewart. Chris admires the one-shot technique more than he loves the movie.
No. 4. Joel McCrea as an American reporter dropped into a pre-WWII spy conspiracy; the windmill sequence and the umbrellas after the assassination have stuck with him for years.
No. 5. Ingrid Bergman trying to reshape a fragile, amnesiac Gregory Peck, plus the Salvador Dalí dream sequence. Chris calls it his Vertigo: endlessly respected, never quite loved.
Sean's Top Five Hitchcockranked best to worst
No. 1. Two men agree to swap murders on a train. Sean calls it Hitchcock's most acidic movie, and says the first three minutes alone tell you everything you need to know.
No. 3. Shared with Amanda, at No. 2 on her list. The only Best Picture winner Hitchcock ever made, and as close as he got to pursuing real heart.
No. 4. Shared with Chris and Amanda. Sean's favorite shot in Hitchcock's career is the crane move down to the key hidden in Ingrid Bergman's hand at the party.
No. 5. Shared with Wesley, at No. 1 on his list. Sean held this one back all episode, waiting for it to come up naturally as Wesley's pick.
Stray Hitchcock picks shout-outs before the credits
The rapid-fire ski-accident opening in St. Moritz, the kind of fast-cut montage Sean says Hitchcock only pulled off one other time, in the Psycho shower scene.
Part of a shout-out to Hitchcock's British-era work streaming on the Criterion Channel.
Left off her list only because it's essentially a smaller-scale North by Northwest, and it still plays like it was shot yesterday.
Not on his own list, but his wife's favorite Grace Kelly performance and the most-played Hitchcock movie in their house, anchored by Ray Milland.
Also mentioned raised along the way
More Hitchcock, in passing SaboteurSuspicionTorn Curtain
Beyond Hitchcock TenetPrisonersEnemyPulp FictionCasablancaThe Wizard of OzStar WarsE.T. the Extra-TerrestrialShutter IslandThe HappeningAlienInvasion of the Body SnatchersThe Witches of EastwickCompulsion1917The LimeyFear Strikes OutAround the World in 80 Days78/52
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
TV Perry Mason
Books Hitchcock/Truffaut