Free Hitchcock Films — Watch the Master of Suspense Online

Most of Alfred Hitchcock's best-known work is still tightly held by studios, which makes the two films of his that did fall into public ownership worth seeking out on their own terms rather than as also-rans — both from his British period, before Hollywood gave him the budgets that made him famous. "The 39 Steps" (1935) is the film usually credited with inventing the modern spy thriller: an ordinary man wrongly accused of murder, fleeing across the Scottish Highlands at one point handcuffed to a woman who doesn't believe his story, racing to stop a spy ring before the authorities catch him first. "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1934), Hitchcock's first attempt at a story he liked enough to remake in Hollywood twenty years later, sends an English couple on a Swiss holiday into a plot involving a dying spy's secret, their kidnapped daughter, and an assassination timed to a cymbal crash at the Albert Hall. Watching them together is watching Hitchcock assemble his own toolkit in real time — the guilty-until-proven-innocent hero, the ordinary setting turned menacing, the set-piece built around a mundane object — years before the polished 1950s classics that usually get the credit for inventing it.