“Murder mysteries are cerebral exercises,” he observed, “whereas suspense stories are emotional experiences.”) The rest include melodramas, social comedies, a boxing drama ( The Ring, 1927), staid adaptations of stage hits-and even a fluffy period romance, Waltzes from Vienna (1934), about the rivalry between the elder and younger Johann Strauss, which Hitch described as a “musical without music” and “my lowest ebb.” (1930’s Murder! is a whodunit, a genre Hitchcock always claimed to despise. Of the seventeen features Hitchcock directed before The Man Who Knew Too Much, nine of them silent, only three can be classified as suspense thrillers: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), Blackmail (1929-his first sound film), and Number Seventeen (1932), with its cheerful throwaway nonsense. Not until the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, released in 1934, did he embark on the string of suspense thrillers that would make his international name and become, with only rare exceptions, his chosen territory for the best part of the next half century. We are so used to thinking of Alfred Hitchcock as the Master of Suspense that it comes as a surprise to realize that he was nearly a decade into his career as a director before he definitively latched on to the genre that was to become his stock-in-trade.
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