Torn Curtain.. and other less celebrated Hitchcock films

Everyone concedes that this 1941 Hitchcock film is a failure, yet it displays so much artistic seriousness that I find its failure utterly mysterious--especially since the often criticized ending (imposed on Hitchcock by the studio) makes perfect sense to me. This is the first film in which Hitchcock puts his dazzling technical imagination wholly in the service of his art: note his subtlety in establishing the menace of the Cary Grant character by never allowing him to be seen walking into a shot; he simply appears in the scene, his entrance covered by a cut or dissolve. Grant gives what is perhaps the finest of his many great performances for Hitchcock: required to play two different, completely contradictory characters simultaneously, he never cheats or flattens out, but plays in magnificent, mysterious depth.

Joan Fontaine is just a little better here than she is in Rebecca (which I also like a lot), I think.

I liked The Trouble with Harry too, it's a very dry and black English sort of comedy, raises chuckles instead of guffaws, but fun to watch anyhow. Marnie is great too, but I think it's undergone a critical reappraisal, so it's higher rated nowadays than it was in the sixties.

What about Hitchcock films that are deservedly less celebrated? My vote would go for Secret Agent. It's got to be the worst Hitchcock film I've ever seen.

Amid from the Albert Hall sequence, he cuts back to the villain's lair at one point and Peter Lorre dismisses a dopey question with a wave of his fork, mid-meal. Great gesture.

http://www.filmforum.org/films/hitchcock.html

I see that 1/4 is failed experiment night! "Essential", indeed! The Wrong Man is OK although boring and not very "Hitchcock", but Rope is awful! Are there any good movies that are straight adaptations of mediocre stage plays?

Spellbound is lame and corny even for Hitchcock, but it might be fun to go and laugh at the rear projection skiing and the Dalí scenes. The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps will be a fun double bill, even though they don't come close to touching the later, more "Hitchcock" stuff. I wish I could be around to see Strangers on a Train and I Confess. I didn't even know that Montgomery Clift did a Hitchcock film!

posting this here too (re: No Country For Old Men)
watching Torn Curtain. definitely getting an Anton Chigurh vibe off Wolfgang Kieling as Hermann Gromek. especially the provocative unyielding stare while mockingly repeating back what was said to him. wonder if his performance/character was one of the inspirations for the Coens/Bardem? he's the highlight of the film for me so far (even over the infamous *no-spoiler* Hitchcockian scene).

by the way, Carolyn Conwell really is a DEAD RINGER (no double meaning intended) for Liv Ullman!