My Year With Hitchcock: January

This year (2026), from January until December, I'll be watching every Alfred Hitchcock I can find. This is similar to the viewing projects I did for Woody Allen in 2016 and Disney Animation in 2022. I'll be watching a different movie each week, in chronological order and reviewing them as I go. The rule for the reviews is that I cannot reference any movie I have not yet watched. They don't exist yet. Each film is reviewed as if it were brand new (sort of). The only difference this time is that I have to watch two movies a week in January and February, since there are more than 52 movies to watch. Reviews will also be posted on my Letterbox'd page.

This is everything viewed in the month of January.

WEEK 1 (two films)

Always Tell Your Wife (1923) - 8 min.

Watched on 1/4/26

Availability: YouTube (converted to blu-ray)

According to everything I’ve seen, there are only two reels of this farcical short film available. About eight minute’s worth. That’s sort of enough to gauge what’s going on here. It’s a slapstick affair supplemented with the usual hijinks at play: People crashing through windows, wandering into wrong rooms, misunderstandings involving a face mask, keystone cops, dogs being horribly treated only to become a foil for our main character and, finally, a magician (right?). 

We know there are better versions of this sort of thing from Chaplin, Keaton, Mack Sennett and Harold Lloyd, but the historical significance of it keeps it from disappearing into total obscurity. The film’s original director, High Croise, got sick during the filming, so a couple new directors, Seymour Hicks and Alfred Hitchcock, stepped in to finish it. 

As of now, it’s still “unfinished,” so who knows if there’s actually a small comedic masterpiece in here somewhere? Probably not, but maybe back in the day, audiences took to it anyway. The slapstick is fast and funny enough to not care too much about the familiarity of it all.

The White Shadow (1923) - 42 min.

Watched on 1/4/26

Availability: New Zealand Film Archive DVD (converted to blu-ray)

Only 42 minutes exist of this film, thanks to the discovery of it in New Zealand and the release of the Archives DVD. What’s here has the makings of a compelling melodrama where we’re never quite sure who will end up with who, who will run away when and who will die. It reminded me of “Pandora’s Box” and “Our Dancing Daughters,” in that we have another young woman who can’t see herself staying in one place for the rest of her life and whose lifestyle choices come under scrutiny and scorn from the men around her (in this case, her father). This one benefits from her having a twin sister who gets confused for her sibling and often makes the choice to go along with it in hopes of salvaging her sister’s reputation. 

Alfred Hitchcock lent his writing talent, as well as his eye for art direction and editing to this film. He made sure to keep in wide shots of every room he designed to get the most out of his effort. Starting in on a close-up of a deranged-looking cat in the first shot at the Cat nightclub was a nice touch. 

We’ll never quite know if the film ultimately worked. The New Zealand Film Archive people filled in all the blanks where they could to give an overview of everything that happens in the film. 

WEEK 2

The Pleasure Garden (1925) - 60 min.

Watched on 1/11/26

Availability: YouTube, transferred to blu-ray

(watched the 60-minuite version on YouTube before I knew there were longer versions)

Hitchcock’s first film, one that the studio had no interest in actually exhibiting, showed a confidence that rose above the film’s shrug-worthy storyline, which had to be paired down to fit within the margins of the small budget. The result is a fast-paced film that never wastes a second, but also doesn’t leave a hugely lasting impression for this first-time director. 

“The Pleasure Garden” centers on two chorus girls: Miss Patsy (Virginia Valli) and Jill (Carmelita Geraghty), who is new to the stage, but impresses her way into the forefront with her audition (didn’t dazzle me at all, but okay). Much like Hitchcock himself at this point, she is hugely ambitious and is putting her best possible foot forward the first opportunity she gets. Jill has a fiance, Hugh (John Stuart), who has to work for 2 years before he can afford to marry. Jill says she will wait, but that looks increasingly doubtful, thanks to “stagedoor tomcats” hitting on Jill. At one point, she uses her extended, lit cigarette to ward off a kiss from Hugh. She’s become cruel to him. Meanwhile, Patsy accepts a marriage proposal from the other guy Levet (Miles Mander), Hugh’s friend and co-worker. We eventually find out, when Hugh and Levet begin their work overseas, that Levet has a mistress, whom he treats just as badly as he treats Patsy. 

This soap opera is generally standard fare for its time, but Hitchcock has some playful moments when he can find them, the aforementioned cigarette moment being one of them. The scene where the two women are disrobing in the same room is cut together in a suggestive way that may have been subtly influenced by an encounter he had with two lesbians during this time, an encounter that left a deep impression on him. The simple close-up of Patsy’s hand waving goodbye to Levet and Hugh, then cutting to a close-up of Levet’s mistress’s hand waving hello to them as a way to condense time and cleverly introducing a new character, showed that Hitchcock was absorbing the visual language of the medium during this era and making it his own. 

The film keeps us watching and makes a macabre turn in the last few minutes, just enough to make it an interesting film, if nowhere near a great one. It’s a “first film,” one that is not without some promise.

WEEK 3

The Lodger: A Story Of the London Fog (1927) - 90 min.

Watched on 1/22/26

Availability: Criterion blu-ray

Though it will always remain a mystery what Hitchcock’s lost second film, “The Mountain Eagle,” would have given us as a stylistic bridge between the confident, but unmemorable “The Pleasure Garden” and this, his third feature, the leap from the first film to the third is remarkable even without that reference point. With “The Lodger,” Hitchcock has fully come into his own as a director, both with actors and as a craftsman. This tale of a serial killer who has all of London living in fear as every Tuesday the papers report of another grizzly killing keeps us watching even if we think we are several steps ahead of the characters on screen.

The film opens with the face of a terrified woman whom we gather is the first victim. From there, we get a tight exposition of everything we need to know going in: The killer, The Avenger, murdered a chorus girl with golden hair, making every surviving showgirl nervous about how they look, lest he have a “type” of victim he desires most. The police chief (Malcolm Keen) is dating a girl, Daisy (June Tripp), whose parents run an inn where a tenant, the titular “lodger” (Ivor Novello), has just checked in. He’s a bit eccentric and it doesn’t help that he shows up at the door with his face partially covered by a scarf, looking as guilty as can be. 

His actions and demeanor throughout keep us in suspense as we worry for the safety of the landlady (Marie Ault) and her husband (Arthur Chesney). To put the viewer at great unease, Hitchcock uses shadows to show the lodger’s first approach to the house, the shape itself being just as memorable, if not more so, as any face on screen. Likewise with the lighting, the lights in the house go dim before his arrival and magically come back on when he’s through the door. 

Perhaps the film’s most famous shot, of course, is a fascinating trick shot of our three heroes gazing up at the floor above them as The Lodger paces back and forth in his room, his feet seemingly walking on a see-thru platform, superimposed over their suspicious faces. This alone shows a director who has obsessed over the idea of playing with the form and conveying a piece of economic storytelling in the process. We feel their panic as they look upon the tenant they know they’re stuck with, unable to make a move to try and maybe get rid of him. 

Hitchcock was already a fan of German expressionism (and all other European movements of this era) at this point and clearly drank in their unique, eye-catching stylistic devices and used them to his advantage. The diagonals are there in several shots, both in the lighting and the set design. One shot, though, that also stands out is an overhead shot of a staircase as the Lodger descends one evening, an image that takes the shape of a gravestone when looked at from this angle. It's a shape that comes back repeatedly throughout the film. 

“The Lodger” is a lot of fun and a tight 90 minutes. Even as a predictable love triangle begins to form, we never stop watching, if only to see a young director let loose on a story he clearly enjoys, using every tool he can think of to make it leap off the screen. 

Criterion’s restoration blu-ray is essential and the only way the film should be viewed. Discard any other un-restored versions and pick this one up.

WEEK 4 (two movies)

Downhill (1927) - 111 min.

Watched on 1/26/26

Availability: Criterion blu-ray

After “The Lodger,” Hitchcock settled back in for more conventional tales of ordinary people trying to figure out the way of the world and their relationships to one another. “Downhill” and “The Ring” (released within a month of each other) may feel like a step backwards after the diabolical and satisfying “The Lodger,” but at least there are moments where Hitchcock hasn’t lost his interest in the form. “Downfall” is certainly watchable and engaging in its first half, but there are some dramatic moments that remain frustratingly vague and the viewer is left to fill in the narrative blanks.

Ivor Novello returns, this time as Roddy, a school boy who, with his best friend, Tim (Robin Irvine), gets entangled in a pregnancy, which causes him to confess to something he really didn't do with a store owner named Mable (Annette Benson). Tim is a coward, while Roddy sticks to a code of silence that will save Tim, but ruin himself. He gets thrown out of school, much to the dismay of his rich parents, and is forced to eke out a living in various odd jobs: Vaudeville-like stage extra, dancer-for-hire, and finally, a worker on a ship. At one point, he inherits $30,000 from a deceased relative, but it isn’t long before it’s all gone and he ends up deep in debt.

Rather than give us title cards of what Mable is accusing Roddy of, Hitchcock uses superimposed flashbacks of the indiscretion over Mable’s angry expression. This device might have been a welcome change of pace to Hitchcock, who tries to steer away from conventional means of telling an otherwise conventional story, but the scene ultimately lacks a bit of clarity, at least upon first viewing. 

Roddy walks through the gigantic hallways, dwarfed by the prestige of it all. The color tint changes to standard black-and-white when Roddy leaves, entering a new world that gets physically bigger with each dissolve, from the hallways of the college to the bustling streets of the city. His first “downhill” image: Roddy, with his back to us, descending down the slow escalator, the only straight and narrow path he has left.

Hitchcock tries to elevate the material with chapter-break title cards that read “The World Of Make-Believe” and “The World of Lost Illusions,” aware of the audience’s awareness that Roddy is two steps behind the rest of the world as he tries to navigate it on his own without any society-based prestige guiding his actions. We know Roddy isn’t going to succeed anytime soon, so these title cards are better suited in another kind of film. In the end, it’s more fun to see Hitchcock work his camera and use superimpositions in a grand fashion than it is to see Roddy make a fool of himself over and over. It’s a simple case of style over substance. The wholly cinematic choices Hitchcock uses to keep the story moving and to surprise the audience wherever possible (the reveal of the Vaudeville show is pretty great) elevates the film on its own, making it far from a chore to sit through.

The Ring (1927) - 104 min.

Watched on 1/27/26

Availability: Amazon Prime (the DVD looked truly awful. This was a BFI restoration)

The title “The Ring," of course, has multiple meanings. There’s the boxing ring. There’s the wedding ring, as well as the ring around The Girl’s (Lillian Hall Davis) arm that keeps haunting her fiancé. And there’s the circular nature of the film itself, one that starts with our two opponents in the boxing ring and ends with them there as well. In between is a standard-fare film about two guys vying for the same Girl. 

Hitchcock, who also wrote the film, obviously sees the appeal in boxing as a visual representation of man’s obsessions, but the films’ two male athletes, “One Round” Jack Sander (Carl Brisson) and Bob Corby (Ian Hunter), don’t come off as multi-dimensional, but rather flat. Perhaps that’s the point, that when it comes to desire for a woman’s hand, you become consumed with love, paranoia and the fragile male ego taking a beating when the other fellow wins a round. There’s not much room for nuance. There’s a lot going on in terms of what these people are thinking will happen or is happening, a lot of fantasy and paranoia on Jack’s part as Bob appears to be moving in on The Girl. But is he? Jack can’t seem to let go of the fact that Bob beat him in the ring. 

Hitchcock represents this with his usual flair for superimposition, as well as kaleidoscopic imagery and a green tint used to convey disorientation, either when someone is too drunk or is getting knocked out. He also attempts a few comical asides, as with the first boxing match in the tent where the first few boxers get pummeled by “One Round” Jack. There’s also a funny sight gag involving Siamese twins arguing over where to sit in the pew at a carnival-based church. 

Like “The Pleasure Garden” and “Downhill, “The Ring” explores a fairly standard love triangle and the potential for a fall from grace.