Finding His Style: Alfred Hitchcock's British Films

Working in Blighty for the final time, the 73 year-old Hitchcock returned to his roots for this adaptation of Arthur LaBern's novel, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square. As a greengrocer's son, Hitch would have been familiar with the Covent Garden environs being stalked by the Necktie Murderer and he ditches the Swinging London image to present the city as a place of decline, decay and despair. Copper Alex McCowen provides some gallows humour, but Hitchcock and screenwriter Anthony Schaeffer exploited the relaxation of the rules relating to the depiction of sex and violence to present a graphic summation of the themes and stylistic traits that had characterised Hitchcock's career.

Partly inspired by the 1920s Thompson-Bywaters murder case, Selwyn Jepson's 1948 novel, Man Running, allowed Hitchcock to revisit the theme of actorly artifice that he had explored in Murder! However, he was also keen to discuss the shell-shocked Britain's new role on the world stage and the notion that everyone is a player in their own daily drama. As his daughter, Patricia, was at RADA during the shoot, Hitch fondly pokes fun at thespian aspiration in allowing Jane Wyman's impersonation of a Cockney maid to flirt with amdram excess, as she seeks to discover whether ageing star Marlene Dietrich murdered her husband and implicated Wyman's dream man, Richard Todd.

Hitchcock ventured into the past for the third and last time with this adaptation of a James Birdie play that the Scot had based on a novel by Helen Simpson, the co-author of the book that had inspired Murder! Set in Australia in 1831, the action contained elements of both Rebecca and Notorious, as Ingrid Bergman's neglected wife is targeted by scheming housemaid Margaret Leighton so that she can ensnare her master, Joseph Cotten. Striking electricians and bad weather hampered the Elstree shoot, while Hitchcock and producer Sidney Bernstein had a long-distance falling out during editing. But the melodrama simmers nicely, while Jack Cardiff's Technicolor photography is glorious.

Romance further flourishes in the face of adversity in Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat's amusingly tense take on Ethel Lina White's tale, The Wheel Spins. Margaret Lockwood and the debuting Michael Redgrave make a sparkling team, as they scour an express crossing the Central European state of Bandrika for the little old lady who has inexplicably disappeared from Lockwood's compartment. They are matched by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, as the cricket-mad Charters and Caldicott. But the suspense is not entirely escapist, as Hitchcock conveys the sombre mood of the continent and the lengths to which a dangerous foe was prepared to go to achieve its aims.

Hitchcock was forever pinning crimes on the 'wrong man'. Here, the fugitive is unproduced screenwriter Derrick de Marney, who is charged with a clifftop killing and has to team with police inspector's daughter Nova Pilbeam to catch the real culprit. The brilliant climactic dolly shot was one of several refinements that Hitchcock made to Josephine Tey's novel, A Shilling For Candles, as he played up notions of disguise and visual impairment, while also emphasising the playful nature of De Marney's burgeoning romance with Pilbeam, which anticipates Cary Grant's liaisons with Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief (1955) and Eva Marie Saint in North By Northwest (1959).

In Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, Tsarist spies attempt to blow up Greenwich Observatory. In Sabotage, with war clouds gathering, Hitchcock and screenwriter Charles Bennett blurred the origins of the dastards coercing East End cinema owner Oscar Homolka into planting a bomb at Piccadilly Tube station. While wishing he had been able to cast Peter Lorre as the villain and Robert Donat as the undercover cop on his trail, Hitchcock also bitterly regretted having Homolka's adolescent brother-in-law carry the device, although Donald Tester's fateful dawdle across London is excruciatingly tense. Moreover, the sequence in which sister Sylvia Sidney watches a Disney cartoon after his demise is quietly devastating.

Such was the delicacy of the European situation in the mid-1930s that British film-makers were urged not to attribute specific nationalities to their villains. However, there's little doubt that John Gielgud's foe is Germanic in this morally complex adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's 'Ashenden' stories. Reluctantly recruited to track down an enemy agent in neutral Switzerland during the Great War, Gielgud's soldier novelist is anything but a natural hero and, once again, Hitchcock made his heroine (Madeleine Carroll) the more resourceful member of the partnership. Returning as a ruthless Mexican assassin, Peter Lorre features in the two best scenes, in a church organ loft and on an Alpine hillside.

Little of John Buchan's source novel remains in this wittily thrilling adaptation by Charles Bennett, who invented the handcuffed heroine played by Madeleine Carroll, who typified the cool blonde who would become a Hitchcock fixture. Yet, this interpretation would go on to influence the remakes starring Kenneth More (1959) and Robert Powell (1978), although neither quite matches Robert Donat's charismatic turn as Richard Hannay, as he pursues a nest of spies after a dead body turns up in his London flat. The famous match cut between his landlady's scream and the steam engine transporting Donat to Scotland was one of many ingenious touches that catapulted Hitchcock to international celebrity.

Having signed a five-year deal with Gaumont-British, Hitchcock hit his stride with this tale of everyday terror that was supposedly inspired by his 1927 honeymoon to St Moritz. The initial Swiss setting soon switches to an unfamiliar London of sinister backstreets, however, as Leslie Banks and Edna Best search for their kidnapped daughter. In his first English-speaking role, Peter Lorre thoroughly merits his billing as 'Public Enemy No.1 of All the World'. But the fascination lies in the fact that Best's Olympic clay pigeon-shooting champion is markedly more proactive than Banks, whereas James Stewart and Doris Day assumed more traditional hero-heroine roles in the 1956 colour remake.

This peculiar thriller is best known for introducing that trademark Hitchcock gambit, the MacGuffin. The device that sets the plot in motion is a stolen necklace. But Hitchcock was so uninspired by J. Jefferson Farjeon's play (which had been filmed by Géza von Bolváry in 1928) that he used the story of a tramp allying with a detective to outwit a gang of crooks to lampoon the conventions of the genre. He also mocked the 'old dark house' scenario and made such obvious use of models in the climactic chase between a bus and a locomotive that he appears to have been aiming for laughs as much as thrills.

Anticipating another comedy of marital manners, Mr & Mrs Smith (1941), this parable about being careful what you wish for was adapted from a novel by Don Collins. Yet Hitchcock insisted that Henry Kendall and Joan Barry's ill-starred world tour was inspired by his own honeymoon with Alma. They shared the writing credit and clearly relished slipping in references to William Shakespeare's The Tempest, as Kendall and Barry fall for fellow passengers Betty Amann and Percy Marmont aboard a liner heading into choppy waters. The opening silent sequence of Kendall's homeward commute in the rain is superbly choreographed and recalls the equally striking umbrella sequence in Foreign Correspondent (1940).

Having starred in both the original 1920 West End production of John Galsworthy's play and BE Doxat-Pratt's 1921 Anglo-Dutch silent screen adaptation, Edmund Gwenn and Helen Haye must have relished locking horns once again, as the nouveau-riche industrialist reneging on a deal to protect the tenants of the Lancashire plot he has purchased from an impoverished toff and as the blue-blooded wife who discovers that the interloper's daughter-in-law is a former prostitute. Despite being a huge admirer of Galsworthy, Hitchcock found himself hemmed in by the terms of the author's contract with BIP and opted to shoot some scenes with multiple cameras to add a little visual intrigue.

Adapted from Enter Sir John, one of the three crime novels written by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, this blend of courtroom drama and whodunit mirrors Blackmail and Sabotage in having a female murder suspect being defended by a dashing champion. Herbert Marshall is splendid as the famous thespian who questions the verdict brought against actress Norah Baring while doing jury duty. Their roles were taken by Alfred Abel and Olga Tschechowa when Hitch remade the film as Mary for Süd-Film in Berlin. But the British version made a little screen history, as the scene in which Marshall ponders the case while shaving contains the first interior monologue.

Having admired Sean O'Casey's 1925 play when it transferred to London from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Hitchcock entrusted its adaptation to his wife, Alma, while he sought ways to prevent the story of a family that comes into an unexpected fortune from seeming like canned theatre. He persuaded O'Casey to write the opening pub sequence and the skirmish that follows street orator Barry Fitzgerald's impassioned speech. But much of the talkative action is confined to the poky tenement room where Sara Allgood struggles to cope with preening wastrel husband Edward Chapman and morose son John Laurie, who lost an arm fighting for freedom with the IRA.

Donald Calthrop had the distinction of appearing in the UK's first talking pictures to be released in both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film formats. Having co-starred with Benita Hume in Arthur Maude's Phototone adaptation of Edgar Wallace's The Case of the New Pin, he cropped up in Hitchcock's Photophone take on a Charles Bennett play as the blackmailer threatening Anny Ondra after she kills a rapacious artist in self-defence. Surreptitiously shooting silent and sound versions to exploit public curiosity about the talkies, Hitchcock had to place Joan Barry off-camera to deliver Ondra's lines because her Czech accent was so thick. Future director Michael Powell conceived the British Museum finale.

Hitchcock had little time for his penultimate silent, which was adapted from a bestselling novel by Sir Hall Caine that had previously been filmed by American George Loane Tucker in 1916. Cornwall stands in for the Isle of Man, as Hitchcock chronicles the romantic entanglements of fisherman Carl Brissom, lawyer Malcolm Keen and innkeeper's daughter, Anny Ondra. Tormented by their passion after Brissom asks Keen to look after Ondra while he seeks his fortune in an African gold mine after her father denies his marriage proposal, the lovers put a brave face on things when the prodigal returns. It's not Hitch's subtlest work, but Jack Cox's seascapes are sublime.

Walter Mycroft originally conceived this effervescent comedy as a sobering morality tale, in which a girl working in a champagne factory in Reims heads to the big city to see what happens to the bottles she spends her days packing. When BIP signed 'Queen of Happiness' Betty Balfour, however, Hitchcock had to tweak the text and started shooting with a patchwork script. As a fizzy flapper living the high life on father Gordon Harker's millions, Balfour views her fellow passengers on an ocean liner through a champagne glass. But she finds herself selling flowers at a cabaret after Harker teaches her a lesson by pretending to be broke.

Based on his own novel, Widdecombe Fair, Eden Philpott's 1924 West End hit may seem an odd choice for Hitchcock. But, thanks to the location shooting in Devon, Somerset and Surrey, it shares a wry insight into rural life with The Trouble With Harry (1955). Jameson Thomas stars as a widowed farmer, who asks doting housekeeper Lillian Hall-Davis to help him find a suitable bride. Much to the amusement of philosophising handyman Gordon Harker, however, haughty fox hunter Louise Pounds, timid spinster Maud Gill, jolly postmistress Olga Slade and free-spirited barmaid Ruth Maitland want nothing to do with the pompous Thomas, who becomes increasingly irate with each rejection.

Adapted from a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes that drew on the infamous crimes of Jack the Ripper, Alfred Hitchcock's finest silent achievement bears the unmistakable influence of such German Expressionists as FW Murnau and Fritz Lang. However, the Londoner makes astute use of his hometown, as its citizens pore over stories about The Avenger, a serial killer who only slays blondes on Tuesdays. Producer Michael Balcon refused to let matinee idol Ivor Novello play a murderer and Hitchcock responded by shrouding the denouement in ambiguity. However, imposed collaborator Ivor Montagu did tone down Freudian allusions to homosexuality and incest.