54 films in 50 years — many amongst the best of all-time
In my story on the best films of all-time, Alfred Hitchcock directed four films out of twenty on the list — an incredible achievement. This feat is all the more remarkable as those four films were released over only seven years during which time Hitch released five other films!
Hitch also directed two films on my survey of the best horror films of all-time — Psycho and The Birds. So Halloween seems like a good time to do a deep dive into the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
Hitchcock’s first entry in the all-time top 20 was Rear Window in 1954. But he was no overnight sensation. Before Rear Window, he had honed his craft releasing forty films over the previous twenty-nine years. Here is the full filmography. (This covers only cinematic features and excludes TV productions.)
The following chart shows Hitch’s output and the quality of his films (as measured by Rotten Tomatoes) for each decade of his career. He started at a frenetic pace with eight films over three years at the end of the 1920s. He then averaged over a film a year for the next thirty years and into the 1960s. The…
