For Fans of Cary Grant

Howard Hawks shot His Girl Friday with actors talking over each other at a pace no film has matched. Grant and Rosalind Russell deliver overlapping dialogue so dense that a single scene contains more words than most films do in an act. What makes it more than a speed showcase is that Grant's Walter Burns is genuinely terrible and genuinely lovable: manipulative, funny, and, in the final minute, completely disarmed. The script was adapted from The Front Page, a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, which has been filmed multiple times. None of the other versions come close.

Before James Bond, before the Bourne films, there was Roger Thornhill: an ordinary man in an extraordinary suit, chased across America by people who had mistaken him for someone else. Hitchcock and screenwriter Ernest Lehman constructed the film as pure cinema, a chase that never stops long enough to explain itself. Grant plays Thornhill with exactly the right note of irritated bewilderment: he is not a hero, he is a man who would very much like to go home. That quality, the reluctant protagonist with good shoes, became the template for a century of thrillers.

Notorious is listed as a spy film, a thriller, a romance. It is really a study in what it costs to love someone you cannot protect. Grant's Devlin sends Ingrid Bergman's Alicia into a marriage with a Nazi to gather intelligence, and then can barely stand to watch what he has arranged. The scene in which he finally comes to her is as quietly devastating as anything in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Hitchcock made the film in 1946, but the moral ambiguity at its center still lands.