Alfred Hitchcock’s name is synonymous with the thriller genre, but the director also made a handful of non-thrillers that are must-watch movies for those fascinated by his work. He may be identified with suspense films like North By Northwest, Rear Window and Vertigo, but Hitchcock was capable of more than just keeping audiences on the edges of their seats.

Hitchcock said he wanted to play the audience like a piano, and though there were certain tunes he liked to bang out, he could stretch beyond his standard repertoire if needed. He could make his audience scream with fright, yes, but he could also make them howl with laughter.

There is romance in a lot of Hitchcock’s thriller movies, so it should be no surprise that he could explore such territory in non-thriller too. He could give things a melodramatic cast when need be, or depict the psychology of complex relationships.

Dark humor is present in most of Hitchcock’s movies, so black comedy was right in his wheelhouse, but he could do lighter humor too, and even pull off screwball. A more multi-faceted director than most give him credit for, Hitchcock was an overall master of cinematic storytelling, regardless of genre.

7

Under Capricorn (1949)

Hitchcock’s Last Movie With Ingrid Bergman

Hitchcock began experimenting with the ten-minute take on his 1948 thriller Rope. He continued his tinkering with Under Capricorn, an adaptation of a stage play that was itself based on a novel.

The long-take approach may not be entirely successful, but it’s still fascinating to watch as Hitchcock experiments with this new way of using the camera. The Dogme 95 crowd would later champion the self-imposed challenge as a way of unlocking inspiration, but Hitch beat them to it by several decades.

Under Capricorn is atypical Hitchcock for a number of reasons. Its tone is decidedly more melodramatic than suspenseful, in the Rebecca vein. Thriller mechanics are almost entirely absent, as Hitchcock focuses on the love triangle between Ingrid Bergman and two men.

Bergman’s performance may be Under Capricorn’s chief attraction. It marked her third and final collaboration with Hitchcock, and though the movie is a huge departure from Notorious and Spellbound, it still displays the special magic that existed for this actor-director duo, cementing Bergman’s place as an essential Hitchcock star.

6

The Trouble With Harry (1955)

Hitchcock Goes Full Black Comedy

The discovery of a ᴅᴇᴀᴅ body, and a group of otherwise normal people’s odd reaction to this event, would have made for a fun vignette in one of Hitchcock’s murder-mystery films (it would have been right at home in Blackmail). This time, the diverting episode takes up the whole movie, with the unexpected corpse serving as the MacGuffin.

Though standard suspense mechanics may be absent from the film, its playfully macabre tone could not be more quintessentially Hitchcock. Indeed, The Trouble With Harry may be the purest expression of the director’s twisted, ironic, very English sense of humor.

1955 critics didn’t know what to do with Hitchcock’s offbeat non-thriller, yet still found it amusing. The Washington Post’s Richard L. Coe offered:

An odd one—sparkling cider spiked with arsenic and a sprig of poison ivy. Although I can recognize its drawbacks, I must confess it almost made me drunk with perverse pleasure.

Though The Trouble With Harry is consistently filed under “minor Hitchcock,” the film’s 88% Rotten Tomatoes rating suggests it has been reᴀssessed dramatically upward in the decades since its release. The film’s humor may have struck critics as odd in 1955, but feels much more accessible 70 years and many Coen Brothers movies later.

5

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941)

Hitchcock Does Screwball

Mr. and Mrs. Smith stars Carole Lombard and husband Clark Gable were personal friends of Hitchcock and Alma Reville, and Hitchcock later claimed he only made the movie as a favor to Lombard. If he’s only impersonating a screwball comedy director for Lombard’s sake, then it’s a flawless act of mimicry.

Hitchcock’s fascination with fear made him the perfect person to become cinema’s Edgar Allan Poe. On Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the director set aside his morbid fixations for once, affording a glimpse of an alternate-universe Hitchcock who would have indeed given Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch a run for their money.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith cracks open a doorway to another intriguing alternate timeline, one where Carole Lombard and not Ingrid Bergman became Hitchcock’s muse of the ‘40s. Tragically, Lombard died in a plane crash not long after the film’s release, depriving the world of whatever she and Hitchcock might have cooked up next.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith may have been a lighter confection than normal for Hitchcock, but it is still a tasty one, sitting at 65% on Rotten Tomatoes.

4

Rich And Strange (1931)

The Emphasis Is On Strange

When marital infidelity comes up in Hitchcock’s films, the takeaway is almost always the same: testing the waters can be a fun diversion, but that’s all it is – a diversion. In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the тιтular pairing is uncoupled by a legal screw-up, but after dallying with others, they find that separation has only strengthened their love.

Hitchcock’s 1931 film Rich and Strange made a very different stew from some of the same ingredients. In it, a young couple go on an extended sea cruise, where each strikes up a new romance, but in adherence to the formula, wind up back in each other’s arms, more certain than ever of their undying affection.

The later Carole Lombard film is an ᴀssured screwball comedy. Rich and Strange is an oddball romance whose charms are harder to clock, given the movie’s awkward part-silent/part-talkie mix of techniques.

Rotten Tomatoes has 13 reviews to draw from in ᴀssigning the movie a 69% fresh rating, reflecting a consensus view that, though not one of Hitchcock’s classics, Rich and Strange has enough going on to warrant a look.

3

The Paradine Case (1947)

Hitchcock Works With Selznick Again

The Paradine Case is not only not a Hitchcockian thriller, it arguably isn’t even a Hitchcock movie. The director’s tumultuous relationship with David O. Selznick began with Rebecca, a film Hitchcock dismissed as not his own, due to Selznick’s overwhelming input. That teaming ended with Paradine Case, a courtroom drama made largely in reshoots, dictated by Selznick’s incessant note-giving.

Rebecca famously was the only Hitchcock film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. The Paradine Case snagged just a single nomination, a Best Supporting Actress nod for Ethel Barrymore. Though not as acclaimed as Selznick’s 1940 Best Picture winner, the 1947 movie had its admirers, among them the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, who praised the film effusively:

With all the skill in presentation for which both gentlemen are famed, David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock have put upon the screen a slick piece of static entertainment.

The Paradine Case sits at 67% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film’s cast receives much of the praise, with special mention to Gregory Peck, whose performance as a lawyer presages his later Oscar-winning work as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.

2

The Manxman (1929)

An Early Hint Of A Famous Hitchcock Trope

Madeleine Carroll is most frequently cited as the first “Hitchcock blonde” (with all the problematic baggage that term entails). If there was a proto-Hitchcock blonde, it was Anny Ondra, the Austrian and Czech actor Hitchcock worked with on The Manxman, and then cast for his fantastic early-career suspense movie Blackmail.

Love triangles come up a lot in Hitchcock’s non-thriller output. Under Capricorn hinges on one, and so does The Manxman. There is suspense in such stories, of course, as the viewer is kept in doubt about who will end up with whom. Maybe that’s why Hitchcock was drawn to these scenarios.

The New York Times’ Mordaunt Hall found plenty to like in Hitchcock’s romantic melodrama, saying, “The Manxman is filled with enchanting scenes and the story itself is quite well told.” Rotten Tomatoes has found 12 reviews, almost all positive, resulting in a 92% fresh rating.

1

The Birds (1963)

Hitchcock’s One Indisputable Horror Movie

The Birds may contain thriller elements, but it’s at heart a horror-fantasy. There is suspense in its unfolding, but its tension-and-release pattern might be closer to a slasher film than something like Psycho, a thriller with horror elements. What makes The Birds more horror than thriller, above all, is the violence.

Hitchcock may have amused himself with the odd gruesome touch over the years, like when the would-be killer falls on the scissors in Dial “M” For Murder, driving them further into his back, but it never felt like violence was the point.

Psycho’s shower scene marked the turning point. Hitchcock could get away with being more lurid and perverse, so he began laying it on. The Birds is his most relentlessly sadistic film, and the violence, this time, is absolutely the point.

The Birds sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, certifying it as one of Hitchcock’s most acclaimed movies. It was a huge hit in its day, grossing $11.4 million on a budget of $3.3 million. It’s often said that Vertigo is the key to understanding Hitchcock, but the brutally nihilistic The Birds might frankly be a more revealing work.