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 Number Seventeen, 1932
In 1934 Hitchcock filmed The Man Who Knew Too Much, a spy thriller that represented a turning point in his career. It was the first in a series of six consecutive thrillers he made between 1934 and 1938, a group of films would come to be known as Hitchcock's "classic thriller sextet"; it was followed by The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1938), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). It is not clear, however, that the making of these films reflected Hitchcock's growing realization that the thriller genre best suited his temperament. Indeed, all six were made for the same company, Gaumont-British Picture Corporation, and used many of the same creative and technical personnel.
These facts, as well as the subsequent variety of Hitchcock's Hollywood output of the 1940s, suggest that it was basically a question of studio economics and efficiency that led him to continue working in the thriller format from the mid- to late 1930s. Whatever the reasons, the "sextet" of thrillers worked in Hitchcock's favor, as his mastery of the genre led to unrivaled critical praise in Britain.
By the late 1930s, the New York critics had also joined the Hitchcock bandwagon. Applauding him as a "master of shock and suspense" (The New York Times) in such thrillers as The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), they concluded that his reputation as "England's greatest director" (The New York Times) and "one of the greatest directors in motion pictures" (New York Herald Tribune) was richly deserved. Impressed with his consummate craftsmanship in the comedy-thriller The Lady Vanishes, the New York film critics voted Hitchcock the best director of 1938.
The text in the Chronology section has been adapted from "Alfred Hitchcock" by Robert E.
Kapsis, from American National Biography, edited by John Garraty. © 1999
by the American Council of Learned Societies. Used by permission of Oxford University
Press, Inc.
Adapted by Robert E. Kapsis, Kathie Coblentz, and Amy Stoller.
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