Hitchcock lost the best director Oscar five times

Alfred Hitchcock was a British film director who shaped the modern suspense thriller, and the Academy nominated him for best director five times without ever giving him the award. The nominations were for Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window and Psycho. In 1968 the Academy gave him its Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for his body of work, but not the directing Oscar.

His reputation now rests on what other thrillers borrowed from him: the innocent man on the run, the plot device that hardly matters, the set piece in a famous place. Relay has 12 of his films, which covers his years in Britain from the silent era to the years just before he left for Hollywood, plus Rebecca, his first film in America.

Where did Hitchcock start?

Hitchcock made his first films in Britain, and in 2012 the British Film Institute, the national film archive, finished restoring his 9 surviving silent films. Relay has 7 of them: The Lodger, Downhill, Easy Virtue, The Ring, Champagne, The Farmer's Wife and Blackmail.

The Lodger, covered in the guide to silent films, holds his first cameo, the brief walk-on that he later made a habit of. In Blackmail he is the man on the London Underground pestered by a small boy.

Blackmail is the film to know. It was Britain's first talkie, a film with recorded speech, and it was made in both silent and sound versions. A woman kills a man in self-defence, then falls victim to a blackmailer, and the story ends in a chase in and on top of the British Museum. The actress Joan Barry supplied the voice of the star, Anny Ondra, in the sound version.

Crime

What did The 39 Steps start?

The 39 Steps (1935) is adapted from the 1915 novel by John Buchan, the suspense novelist. It made Hitchcock internationally famous and caught the eye of the Hollywood producer David O. Selznick.

It is also one of the first films to use what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: an object or goal that sets the plot moving but matters little in itself. Here it is a set of stolen design plans. Critics have traced the wrong-man thriller, where an innocent person flees the police while looking for the truth, from this film to North by Northwest and later films such as The Fugitive.

Crime

The Lady Vanishes (1938) takes the same light, quick tone onto a train across Europe, where an elderly woman disappears and the other passengers deny she existed. It is based on a 1936 novel by the writer Ethel Lina White. The cricket-obsessed Englishmen Charters and Caldicott were created for the film and went on to appear in others.

Mystery

Sabotage (1936) is loosely based on a 1907 novel by the novelist Joseph Conrad and it follows a London cinema owner made to plant a bomb. Hitchcock later said he regretted the death of the boy Stevie on a bus, because it broke his method of building suspense, which needed tension to be released.

Juno and the Paycock is his version of the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey's play, set in a Dublin tenement during the Irish Civil War.

Why did Rebecca win when he did not?

Rebecca (1940) was Hitchcock's first American film and the first he made for Selznick. It adapts Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel, in which a young wife arrives at the grand Cornish house of her widowed husband, Maxim de Winter, and finds that his first wife still rules it. The title character is never seen on screen. Laurence Olivier plays Maxim and Joan Fontaine the new wife.

The film received 11 nominations, the most of any film that year, and won best picture and cinematography. The best picture statuette went to Selznick as producer, and the best director award went to John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath. Rebecca is the only Hitchcock film to win best picture.

Mystery

What to watch first

Rebecca is the one to begin with, since it is the film the Academy rewarded. The 39 Steps shows the template he kept using, and Blackmail shows him at the moment film found its voice. For the silent years, The Ring follows two boxers and a woman, and is the one film for which critics say Hitchcock took an original screenplay credit.