The massive career of Alfred Hitchcock can be broken down into three sections. There’s his early British career (that includes both silent films and talkies) that ends with Jamaica Inn in 1939. Then there’s the first half of his American period; he crossed the ocean and found instant success with Rebecca and continued to hone his craft and try out different genres during the 1940s and early ‘50s. And then finally there’s his most celebrated period beginning around ’54 with Rear Window and Dial M for Murder, where the name Hitchcock became a brand and most of his films were events in themselves. Of that middle period, besides Rebecca there are a number of celebrated and still admired flicks including Spellbound, Shadow of a Doubt, and Strangers on a Train. But one film that really stands out, less flashy than the others but more emotionally devastating, is Notorious. On paper it’s an espionage thriller, but it’s actually one of the great heartbreaking love stories of the era.

In the world of bad movies, most are boring and just unwatchable - lazy filmmakers just trying to slap something together to make a buck or ambitious filmmakers overreaching and missing, big time. Every once in a while a movie comes along that splits the difference and is so bad it becomes a wonderful experience. Director Edward D. Wood Jr.’s now legendary would be sci-fi flick Plan 9 From Outer Space has become the Citizen Kane of bad, so amazingly inept, yet so innocently earnest and good-natured that it’s not hard to kind of love it. Literally every scene in its 79 minutes is filled with amazingly laugh-out loud, quotable dialogue, horrible acting, ridiculous special effects and utterly inane directing. Ben Hur might have won the Best Picture Oscar in 1959, but Plan 9 From Outer Space is way more memorable and special.

It turns out that the granddaddy of torture-porn and Slasher-poitation, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, isn’t as exploitive or graphic as its reputation would make you think. It’s actually just some good old fashioned psychological horror, much closer to the economically controlled thrills of Hitchcock than the splatter flicks of Herschell Gordon Lewis. The film is kinda-sorta based on the misdeeds of serial killer Ed Gain (also an inspiration behind the book Psycho), but perhaps more of a direct result of the graphic violence from the Vietnam War seen nightly on television news. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may have a set-up that now seems overly familiar, but where it goes was wholly original and how it gets there is utterly horrifying. Shot in a docudrama style, its ultra realistic feel makes it seem even more real; it’s like The Battle Of Algiers meets The Hills Have Eyes.

Three cheers are due for the unsung back lot maestro, John Brahm. His work is fairly ubiquitous; in his day he directed several major studio films and later countless episodes of several different TV shows, but his name isn’t found on most lists of great Golden Age directors. This is a shame because within a couple of years (roughly 1942–1947) he directed some superb thrillers for Twentieth Century Fox that gave producer Val Lewton, and directors Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Alfred Hitchcock a run for their murder movie money. Brahm, like the Warner Brothers’ in-house dynamo, Michael Curtiz, was a filmmaker so adept at the art of directorial craftsmanship that you remember his great films more than you remember his authorial imprint on them.  Though his last name never became critical shorthand for a specific style (unlike the terms “Wellesian” or “Hitchcockian”) he was a director who, with the right project, was second to none.

Hangover Square is a thriller set in London during the gaslight era and things get off to an appropriately grisly start as it opens with a brutal murder and a corpse in flames. Laird Creggar plays George Harvey Bone, a troubled pianist who works too much and is just on the cusp of greatness with the latest piece he is writing. He suffers from blackouts and he worries that he may have been the one who committed the aforementioned murder. George Sanders plays a Scotland Yard detective who doesn’t think George is capable of homicide but later learns otherwise. George leaves his fiancé, Fay (Barbara Chapman) for the low-rent charms of a burlesque performer, Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell) who is conspiring against him with another of her lovers to fleece the composer of his songs for her own use.  This arrangement is not, shall we say, sustainable, and pretty soon there are more blackouts and more murders.

Back in 1958 Vertigo was considered a misfire from the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, but now over 50 years later, with a strong restoration and a number of clever reissues, many deem it one of Hitch’s best films and maybe his most personal. Like Notorious before it, underneath the suspense it’s a love story, but a twisted kind of love, obsession. Jimmy Stewart finishes off his Hitchcock trifecta after The Man Who Knew Too Much and Rear Window (not counting the much earlier Rope), putting a twist on his everyman and giving one of the most complicated psychological performances of his career. Vertigo also proves to be career peaks for the stunning Kim Novak and for film composer Bernard Herrman. If you can get past some of the plottyness of the film's first act Vertigo proves to be a film worth obsessing over.