---
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* [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/)
# Nail-Biting Allowed: Alfred Hitchcock's 10 Most Memorable Scenes
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#### Who is Ally Bank?
Ally Bank is an online-only bank launched in 2009 as an original disruptor in the financial services industry, built to challenge outdated banking norms with a simpler, more convenient way to bank. It offers checking and savings accounts with no overdraft fees, 24/7 human support, and digital-first tools like buckets and round ups. Deposits are FDIC-insured up to the maximum amount allowed by law.
#### Is Ally good for everyday banking?
Ally is built for everyday banking, spending, and saving. Its Spending Account is a checking account that includes early direct deposit (paychecks up to 2 days early), access to 75,000+ fee-free ATMs nationwide, the ability to add cash for free at participating locations nationwide, and no overdraft fees. Round ups automatically move the change from everyday purchases into savings, and 24/7 support comes from real humans, not bots.
#### What bank is built for life today?
Ally is the bank built for life today, a digital-first, people-first bank. Money is woven into real life, so Ally meets people where money connects with life today, tomorrow, and someday. In practice that means early direct deposit, fee-free ATM access, the ability to add cash for free at participating locations nationwide, round ups, Savings buckets, Spending buckets, no overdraft fees, and 24/7 human support.
#### What bank is best for everyday spending and saving?
Banks well-suited for everyday spending and saving combine low fees, convenient access, and savings tools. Ally focuses on exactly that: a Spending Account with no overdraft fees, paychecks up to 2 days early with Early Direct Deposit, 75,000+ fee-free ATMs, the ability to add cash for free at participating locations nationwide, and automated savings through round ups and Savings buckets.
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#### What online banks have no ATM fees?
Ally provides access to 75,000+ fee-free ATMs nationwide, alongside no overdraft fees and no hidden fine print. Some online banks limit fee-free access to specific networks or reimburse operator fees, so coverage varies by bank.
### Sources
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### Disclaimers
* Ally Bank, Member FDIC.
* Round up boosters are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account and requires an Ally Bank Spending Account.
* Ally Bank Spending Accounts include access to an add cash feature utilizing VanillaDirect Pay provided by InComm Financial Services California, Inc. and by InComm Financial Services, Inc. (NMLS# 912772), which is licensed as a Money Transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Terms and conditions apply.
* Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account.
* No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle.
* Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner.
* Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account.
by
[TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/)
Nov 19, 2012 10:45 AM UTC
by
[TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/)
Nov 19, 2012 10:45 AM UTC
## Dial M for Movies
Pretty much any movie buff worth his or her popcorn can point to a slew of directors rightly celebrated not only for their enduring films, but for the artistry and attention they lavish on specific, utterly indelible scenes. Kubrick comes to mind, as does Malick. Spielberg, of course. Kurosawa, Fellini, Scorsese. But no director in the history of the medium can lay claim to helming as many signature movie moments as Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock. In fact, devoted moviegoers can reel off a litany of immortal scenes from any one of Hitch's greatest films — Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and so many others — that live on, vividly, in the memory years after we first encountered them.
Here, as a new biopic based on Hitchcock comes to the screen — with Anthony Hopkins filling the rotund role — we've resisted the urge to salute, say, the 25 or 50 greatest scenes in his career and instead have selected the 10 most memorable moments from 10 of the Master of Suspense's most admired films. Let the nail-biting begin. bdcosgrove
## The Crop Duster in 'North by Northwest'
The beauty of this scene is the genuine sense of menace that pervades what in lesser hands might have come across as a cartoonish interlude. A guy in a suit steps off a bus in the middle of nowhere. An anonymous pilot in a cropduster tries repeatedly to kill him (strafing him with machine-gun fire, no less). That simple proposition is brought to thrilling life — and an absolutely perfect conclusion in what may be Hitch's most thoroughly entertaining film — by the director's mastery of tension and by the simple pleasure of watching Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) transition so marvelously from detached bemusement to outraged shock to primal, running-for-his-life fear. bdcosgrove
## Robert Donat's Nonsense Speech in 'The 39 Steps'
Mistaken identity and the "wrong man" are, of course, central themes in much of Hitchcock's work, and it's a delight to watch how deftly he handles both when Richard Hannay (the engaging Robert Donat) is called upon to speak before a political meeting with absolutely no idea who or what he's supposed to talk about, while hounded by folks who mean him serious harm. As Hannay's impromptu speech finds its rhythm and as the platitudes mount (Suspicion and fear, bad; fellowship and generosity, good!), we enjoy the ever-popular spectacle of a hero's sharp wits allowing him to escape the clutches of his far-less-clever enemies. It's an improbable, and utterly winning, moment in a movie that Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne once called the progenitor of "all contemporary escapist entertainment." bdcosgrove
## Judy Becomes Madeleine in 'Vertigo'
None of Hitchcock's movies are as viscerally unsettling as Vertigo, and no scene in that greatest of all his films is more deeply, eerily moving than the "green neon" one that unfolds in a cheap San Francisco hotel. When the obsessed and heartsick Scottie (James Stewart) sees Judy (Kim Novak) emerge, ghostlike, from another room — lit by an awful, green neon light outside the window and dressed and coiffed exactly like another woman, Madeleine, with whom Scottie fell in love — the palpable jolt of passion that passes between the two is unlike anything else that Hitchcock ever filmed. The raw sexual hunger in Scottie's eyes when he sees Judy/Madeleine standing before him, in the flesh, is ... well, it's vertiginous. bdcosgrove
## Crows on a Jungle Gym in 'The Birds'
There are more spectacular scenes in The Birds — the seagull's-eye view of a town aflame and in chaos, for example — but for sheer Hitchcockian perversion, nothing can top the long, long minute when Tippi Hedren sits outside a schoolhouse, smoking a cigarette, unaware of the dozens, the scores of crows massing on a jungle gym behind her. The film's special effects are a bit rough around the edges, and the love affair between the characters played by Hedren and Rod Taylor feels incredibly stilted. But The Birds remains one of Hitchcock's most impressive, and one of his very scariest, movies. The film, after all, takes the ridiculous notion of innumerable, previously harmless creatures suddenly growing murderously aggressive toward humans and, for two hours, makes it plausible. So plausible that, to this day, some of us — I'm not naming any names — prefer not to visit playgrounds if it means we have to sit with a jungle gym behind us.
bdcosgrove
## The Killing of Gromek in 'Torn Curtain'
For most film buffs, Paul Newman's enormous appeal as an actor can be summed up in a slew of often-contradictory words and phrases: wry (Cool Hand Luke) and earnest (The Verdict); comical (Slap-Shot) and arrogant (Hud); fiery (Sometimes a Great Notion) and quietly sinister (Road to Perdition). Few of us ever think of him as downright feral — a quality that makes the most memorable scene in the (sadly, rather lame) espionage thriller Torn Curtain so hard to shake. Here, Newman's character — an American spy named Armstrong — and a farmer's wife kill an East German security agent, Gromek, in the kitchen of a farmhouse outside of Berlin. What's shocking about the scene is not only how long it takes — Gronek is stabbed, battered with a shovel and eventually gassed in an oven — but that we're made to feel somehow complicit in the carnage. In nightmarish "real time," with barely a word spoken by those struggling to the death before us, we watch a life slowly, brutally extinguished. bdcosgrove
## Joseph Cotten's Dinner Monologue in 'Shadow of a Doubt'
Most actors would be thrilled to have appeared in any one of the classic films on Joseph Cotten's resume: Citizen Kane, Gaslight—Carol Reed's perfect high-brow noir—The Third Man and more. But of all the roles he played, Cotten's Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt remains his most enduring. In the film — reportedly Hitchcock's personal favorite of all his own movies — Charlie is a smooth, charming serial killer, "The Merry Widow Murderer," whose adoring niece, Charlotte (Teresa Wright), gradually comes to realize that her namesake is a sociopath. The famous "faded, fat, greedy women" monologue that Cotten icily delivers at dinner one night — finishing with a gaze straight into the camera that's both knowing and vaguely reptilian — is still deeply chilling all these years later, and has informed countless similar fourth-wall-busting scenes in the seven decades since it first stunned moviegoers in 1943.
bdcosgrove
## Raymond Burr Looks Into James Stewart's Camera in 'Rear Window'
Here, in a few taut moments, Hitchcock pulls off the neat trick of making the tacit voyeurism at the heart of a great film suddenly, frighteningly explicit. James Stewart's wheelchair-bound character watches helplessly as his girlfriend (Grace Kelly) is attacked by Raymond Burr's Lars Thorwald — and then saved by cops — in Thorwald's apartment, clearly visible across a courtyard. Through his ever-present camera with its telephoto lens, Stewart sees Kelly give him a secret sign that Thorwald is, as they both suspected, likely guilty of killing and dismembering his wife. When Thorwald slowly looks up and gazes directly into Stewart's camera — and into the eyes of the viewer — the sense of the watcher becoming the watched is like a punch in the gut. That the gaze belongs to a man with a discomfiting silver mane atop his head — a hairdo that would not look out of place on a schoolmarm, stalking the rows of a classroom, slapping her palm with a ruler — only makes the moment that much more disturbing. bdcosgrove
## Grace Kelly Attacked in 'Dial M for Murder'
It's a commonplace of detective work, in fiction and in life: when a married person is murdered the authorities should look first, and hard, at the spouse. In Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, the fact that the intended victim is played by the gorgeous Grace Kelly, while the hubby who sets up her (attempted) murder is the silky Ray Milland, reminds us that in Hitchcock's universe — as in ours — "nice" people are just as capable of planning and succumbing to appalling crimes as far nastier folks. The critical scene, meanwhile, where Tony's old classmate, Swann (the wonderful, cadaverous character actor, Anthony Dawson) tries to strangle Kelly's Margot to death with a scarf — while Tony listens in on the phone — is especially powerful because we not only know it's coming, but we watch it unfold in Hitchcock's signature, torturous, suspenseful style. As the tousled, nightgown-clad Kelly fights for her life, the musty old conflation of sex and death feels vital and, shockingly, new. bdcosgrove
## The Wine Cellar in 'Notorious'
Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kissing in a wine cellar. Even if Hitchcock didn't direct this scene (which, incidentally, is almost stolen by the great Claude Rains, playing Bergman's husband), it would still be worth watching for the simple reason that Bergman and Grant are both so absurdly beautiful. But because Hitchcock did direct this little masterpiece of sublimated sexual attraction, what might have been a mere diversion becomes one of the film's pivotal scenes — and its most memorable. In it, Bergman and Grant are trying to find evidence to use against Rains' character, Alexander Sebastian, a prominent Nazi who fled to Brazil after the Second World War. When Sebastian surprises them while they're searching the cellar, Bergman and Grant cover their real purpose by hastily engaging in a pseudo-clandestine kiss in plain sight of her husband. The unspoken but obvious irony, of course, is that Bergman and Grant are passionately attracted to one another — but feel they have to feign passion in front of Sebastian to hide their real motives for being in the cellar in the first place. It's all very twisted, erotic and nerve-wracking. In other words, it's Hitchcock. bdcosgrove
## The Shower Scene in 'Psycho'
Watch it as many times as you like. Study it. Analyze it. Dissect it. However many ways one approaches this scene — arguably the single most famous in cinema history — something about it defies explanation. Something about it, more than 50 years after it was shot, invests this awful scenario with a power out of all proportion to its constituent parts. Any discussion, meanwhile, has to start with the myriad elements that Hitchcock employed in order to depict what is, in the end, a drawn-out act of savagery — the murder of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh). Consider the suddenness of the attack; composer Bernard Herrmann's violins and cellos screeching along with Marion's shrieks of shock and fear; the seemingly manic — but, in fact, meticulously plotted — editing; Marion's literally naked, and thus profoundly unnerving, vulnerability. Everything in this scene, which took seven days and more than 70 individual shots to complete, has been added to the mix with a single purpose in mind: to terrify. And it does. If one scene can be said to have changed the movies forever, the shower scene in Psycho is it. bdcosgrove
Alfred Hitchcock's 10 Most Memorable Movie Scenes
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