Described by Peter Falk as, “a love story between a woman who’s half wacky and a guy who’s inarticulate”, John Cassavetes’ seventh feature from 1974 is without doubt one of his finest achievements. It’s one of several collaborations between Cassavetes and his actor wife Gena Rowlands, here giving a performance of show-stopping complexity.

Alfred Hitchcock famously loved his blondes, and they didn't come much more lovable than Barbara Harris. A Broadway star during the 1960s who later shifted her attentions towards film, Harris was at the peak of her talent in Family Plot, a delightful if minor Hitchcock entry distinguished by a fine quartet of American leads (Karen Black, William Devane and Bruce Dern are the others) among whom Harris stands apart. Indeed, by the time of the conspiratorial wink from Harris that closes the film, audiences will surely find themselves already grinning right back.

Never one to underestimate the potency of a cameo (as evidenced by his own appearances in his films), Alfred Hitchcock had a particular genius with supporting roles – generating menace, intrigue or comedy with the fewest of brush strokes. Two of his earliest, and slightest, creations would also prove two of his most enduringly popular: cricket-obsessed duo Caldicott and Charters from 1938’s The Lady Vanishes.

Shadow of a Doubt was reputedly Hitchcock’s personal favourite among his films. Joseph Cotten was cast against type as the glamorous, homicidal uncle, fleeing from the police and pitching up unexpectedly in his sister’s household in a sleepy Californian town. Hitchcock’s decision to shoot Thornton Wilder's script largely on location gives the film a unique flavour.

Like his great contemporary Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant not only gave some of his best performances for Hitchcock, he also grabbed the opportunity to darken his screen persona. It was never the case, with either of them, of simply playing “baddies”. Far more significantly, they revealed the dark psyches of average, even good men, in performances that leave the audience with the bitter aftertaste of familiarity.

There’s an affecting moment in the café scene in Torn Curtain (1966) when the physicist Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) and his fiancée-assistant Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews), desperate to flee East Berlin, are awed into compassion for the jittery Polish Countess Kuchinska, who offers to help them if they will sponsor her bid to emigrate to the U.S. It looks a little as if Newman and Andrews themselves were awed by Lila Kedrova’s fabulously flowing performance.

For all that’s been said about Orson Welles – usually focusing on his towering genius and sizable ego - he was above all a great contrarian. In interviews he was often genial and self-effacing and of course a scintillating raconteur. During his later years he could be avuncular, entertainingly unpredictable and very funny, like a mischievous lecturer. His The Lady From Shanghai (1947) is so loaded with eccentricity it’s positively cock-eyed and Welles was of course an outcast in Hollywood, that is until he cast himself out.

The relationship between Hitchcock and Hedren was already subject to scrutiny, and is symbolic of his fascination with blondes. Soon, with Sienna Miller playing the leading lady of 1963’s terrifying The Birds and Toby Jones as the director, it’s going to be revisited with the TV film The Girl (2010’s Hitchcock’s Women had trodden this path). Hedren has advised Miller, and also told press that Hitchcock “was an extremely sad character…deviant almost to the point of dangerous”. (See the clip below for more of her views on Hitchcock.)

Hitchcock was fond of the locked-box mystery, but never in the obvious form: whether it’s the leads in Rope, stuck in their apartment with a body shut up in a trunk, or the survivors from a ship murderously bobbing along together in Lifeboat, the trap was all. James Stewart as LB Jefferies in Rear Window is another man locked in a box, this time kept in his apartment by his broken leg. But clever old Hitchcock – he sets the mystery outside the box.

Some actors build their characters from the feet up. In fact, it’s a theatrical commonplace to think that shoes can hold the key to a character's psychology. Hitchcock takes the idea and applies it to the opening sequence of Strangers on a Train, his 1951 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 debut novel.