Sabotage - 1936 (76 min.)

Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 drama, among his darkest, is the one to which he regretfully pointed later as the exception that proved his usual rule about good suspense: you have to let an audience know the precise danger that a character doesn't know he imminently faces. Then you have to withdraw or cancel out the danger lest viewers feel betrayed. The "betrayal" in Sabotage rather famously involves a bomb, a boy, and a bus. But in the context of the story (based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, inevitably confused with Hitchcock's quite different film called Secret Agent), the twist has a devastating significance, ushering in the director's pet themes about the proximity of chaos to ordinary life and the nature and transference of guilt. Sylvia Sidney stars as the naive American wife of a German spy, the latter using a movie theater as a cover for his terrorist activities. When he asks his wife's young brother to make a delivery--a package containing a ticking bomb, unknown to the child--a bus delay causes the boy to die in the timed explosion. Sidney's character murders her spouse in revenge, but as in Hitch's great Blackmail, the deed is obscured by a sympathetic lawman who ultimately shares her secret. Wrong or right, right or wrong--the clear distinctions don't often exist in the great director's movies, and Sabotage is no exception.

The Lodger - 1927 (100 min.)

Although Alfred Hitchcock had made two movies before The Lodger, he told François Truffaut that this was his first true film. And indeed, The Lodger contains elements that would appear again and again in the Master's later, more famous creations. It boasts the first of the famous "wrong man" plots and contains the first sequence in which handcuffs play a significant role. If your eye is quick, you'll also catch the first of Hitchcock's famous cameo appearances (he actually appears on-screen more than once).

The Lodger is also one of the first memorable pictures about the hunt for a serial killer. Terrified women and strange masked men walk the streets of London in a movie whose visual style was influenced by the German expressionists. In one tense sequence, the ceiling of a room becomes transparent and a character can be seen pacing back and forth on the floor above. The climactic chase is one of the most exciting Hitchcock ever filmed. This taut early film is a fine introduction to the silent cinema as well as to one of the world's greatest and most entertaining filmmakers.