Almost all of the films from Hitchcock’s American period, which began in 1939, are, for me, deeply dissatisfying. While those he had made in England – such as The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) – display an unselfconscious storytelling style, his American films seem to lean too heavily on the director’s unfortunate reputation as a dirty old man, and his fetishised ideal of the perfect blonde, such as Grace Kelly, or Tippi Hedren. Some I find downright repellent, Psycho (1960) above