Summary

• Hitchcock and Grant's collaboration elevated each other's work and created classic cinema with complex themes and high star power.
• Suspicion, their first film together, showcased Grant's ability to play a morally ambiguous character while maintaining his signature charm.
• Notorious was the pinnacle of their collaboration, featuring a powerful love triangle and representing Hitchcock's evolution as a director.

Legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock and iconic actor Cary Grant had a long-running collaboration and made four movies together between 1941 and 1955. A match made in heaven, Grant pushed himself to the limit in Hitchcock’s films and played characters that were much more layered and nuanced than many of the charming leading man roles he had become known for in Hollywood. At the same time, Hitchcock was provided with an expert performer who helped elevate his suspenseful thrillers with a high level of star power that ensured audiences would follow him as he explored increasingly complex themes.

Hitchcock and Grant first came together for the 1941 thriller Suspicion, which laid the groundwork for all the interesting concepts they would later pursue. Their partnership ended with To Catch a Thief in 1955, which was a fond farewell to almost 15 years of moviemaking and a duo that helped make each other’s already impressive body of work even better. The films of Hitchcock and Grant are truly classics of cinema, and while some are slightly better than others, they all stood as immensely watchable, enjoyable experiences.

4 Suspicion (1941)

Cary Grant played Johnnie Aysgarth in Suspicion

As Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant's first collaboration together, the pair's dynamic was still finding its feet in the romantic psychological thriller Suspicion. Up until this point in his career, Grant was known as a charismatic leading man, but in Suspicion he took on the darker, more morally ambiguous character of Johnnie Aysgarth, a charming playboy whose love interest only discovered his gambling, dishonest nature after they got married. Grant expertly captured the exploitative nature of Johnnie as his con man tricks, embezzling nature, and general money troubles were revealed to his newly married wife Linda, played by Joan Fontaine.

Suspicion had all the trademarks of a classic Alfred Hitchcock suspense story, including Hitchcock's signature cameo. Linda began to fear her husband intended to murder her and live off her family's riches. However, it never reached the heights of Hitchcock and Grant’s later work. Suspicion faltered primarily due to his ending, which deviated from the sinister nature of the novel and gave the couple what felt like an unearned happy ending. Hitchcock originally planned for Johnnie to murder his wife (via Slash Film); however, the studio interfered and made him change it much to the determinant of Suspicion.

In an interview with French director François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock outlined his original plan for the ending of Suspicion by stating: “The scene I wanted, but it was never shot, was for Cary Grant to bring her a glass of milk that's been poisoned, and Joan Fontaine has just finished a letter to her mother." He stated that Linda then drank the milk and died but the letter would have revealed all of Johnnie’s murderous crimes. “Fade out and fade in on one shot," Hitchcock said. "Cary Grant, whistling cheerfully, walks over to the mailbox and pops the letter in."

3 To Catch A Thief (1955)

Cary Grant played John Robie in To Catch a Thief

The final collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant also featured one of the most iconic actresses of all time, Grace Kelly, and was an exciting romantic thriller about crime and distrust. In To Catch a Thief, Grant played John Robie, also known as The Cat, a former diamond thief suspected of stealing from wealthy tourists along the French Riviera. To clear his name, John tried to capture the real thief all while falling in love with Kelly’s character, s Stevens. To Catch a Thief featured many twists and turns and was a farewell to Grant and Hitchcock’s long-running partnership.

However, while To Catch a Thief was an exciting mystery story, it lacked the intense suspense of Hitchcock’s best work and came across as much slower than his last movie, Rear Window, released the previous year. By the time, To Catch a Thief reached its grant conclusion and a rooftop face-off against the real burglar, the film had audiences on the edge of their seats, but the story took its time getting there and unfortunately stalled in the first half. While To Catch a Thief was a classic Grant and Hitchcock movie, they had previously produced more thrilling work.

2 North by Northwest (1959)

Cary Grant played Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest

As a story of mistaken identity, it did not get any better than North by Northwest, which was the most iconic of all Grant and Hitchcock’s work together. Grant played Roger Thornhill, opposite Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall, a New York advertising executive who was mistaken by a group of foreign spies for a government agent. This dangerous misunderstanding led to Grant being pursued across the country, escaping burning vehicles, and famously evading a plane that was chasing him in Hitchcock’s most ridiculous scene.

The over-the-top nature of North by Northwest made for thrilling viewing and Cary really gave it all to his role as the unfortunate Thornhill. North by Northwest was visually iconic, has gone on to be considered one of the best films Hitchcock ever made, and was the perfect showcase of how well he and Grant worked together. Much lighter than the brooding dark psychology of Hitchcock’s previous film Vertigo, North by Northwest was an influential movie that left its mark on subsequent spy-based action films such as in the James Bond series.

1 Notorious (1946)

Cary Grant played T. R. Devlin in Notorious

Out of all the incredible films Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant made together, the very best has to be Notorious, which co-starred Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains in one of the greatest love triangles ever committed to the big screen. A watershed moment for Hitchcock, Notorious represented the point where he went from a very good director into a truly great one and featured character depth, emotional resonance, and gut-wrenching humanity not previously seen in his body of work. The emotional intensity of Grant’s character, T. R. Devlin, also showcased acting abilities previously unseen in his Hollywood career.

Notorious told the story of Grant’s government agent enlisting the help of Bergman, a war criminal's daughter, to infiltrate Rains, the Nazi associate hiding in Rio de Janeiro after World War II. A serious love story, Notorious was categorized by themes of bitterness, distrust, and jealousy, and all three leads brought real humanity to their roles. A classic conflict of duty and love, Notorious was one of Hitchcock’s great artistic statements and remained Hitchcock and Grant's most personal, layered, and deeply sentimental movie.

Sources: Slash Film, François Truffaut Interview