A Staircase at the Beginning, a Staircase at the End
Alfred Hitchcock’s first film as a director opens on a staircase. His last film closes on one. Between them lies a career spanning more than 50 years, with the same simple piece of architecture standing guard at both ends.
In 1925, “The Pleasure Garden” opens with a line of chorus girls spiraling down a staircase backstage at a theater, the very first shot Hitchcock ever directed. Jump to 1976, and “Family Plot,” his last film, closes with Barbara Harris sitting on a staircase, turning to the camera, and winking.
Nobody watching either film at the time had reason to connect them. They were made decades apart, in different eras of his style. The pattern only shows up if you watch the entire body of work and notice what keeps repeating, something most viewers never do. That is exactly why it mattered when someone finally did.
Why Would Anyone Film a Staircase on Purpose?
Stairs in movies are usually dead time. A character climbs from the hallway to the bedroom, or down from the office to the lobby, and nothing about the plot moves. Most directors cut around it: the scene ends downstairs, resumes upstairs, and the climb itself hits the cutting room floor.
Hitchcock kept doing the opposite. He held the shot, let the climb or descent play out in real time, and often filmed the stairwell from strange angles, straight up from below or straight down from above, angles with no practical reason to exist if the goal is just to move someone between rooms.
So why keep spending screen time, film after film, on something every other director was trimming away?
39 Films, 39 Staircases, One Supercut
In 2017, film scholar Max Tohline answered that question like a researcher would: by gathering the evidence. He combed through Hitchcock’s filmography and pulled a staircase sequence from each of 39 different films, splicing them into one compilation titled “Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Stairs.”
The title is a pun with a point. It plays on “The 39 Steps,” Hitchcock’s own 1935 thriller, itself one of the 39 films included. The full compilation runs under three minutes, built to loop as a continuous video installation, so the sequence actually plays through twice.
Watched one film at a time across a 50-year career, the staircases are easy to miss. Spliced together, they stop looking like coincidence and start looking like a habit.
So What Was He Doing With All Those Stairs?
Critics have floated a few explanations. One is purely visual: a stairwell lets a director use dramatic, unusual camera angles a flat hallway never would. Another is symbolic: a staircase standing in for a character’s descent into danger or ascent toward a decision, tense simply because you don’t know what waits at the top or bottom. A third ties it to suspense itself, stairs delaying the reveal of whatever comes next.
Then there’s Hitchcock’s own reported answer, which cuts through all that theorizing. Asked about his fondness for staircase shots, he is said to have replied that stairs are “very photogenic.” No metaphor, no descent into the soul. Just: they look good on camera.
What We Actually Know, and What We Don’t
It’s worth being honest about where the evidence ends. The symbolism and suspense readings are interpretation, built by people who’ve watched a lot of Hitchcock closely, not something he confirmed scene by scene. Even the “photogenic” line survives only as a single reported quote, not a documented statement from a verified interview, so treat it as likely rather than certain.
Tohline’s project raises one more question most write-ups skip: which 39 films actually made the cut? That list isn’t spelled out in the usual coverage. It lives on the compilation’s Vimeo page, for anyone curious enough to check it film by film instead of taking the summary on faith, exactly the kind of checking worth doing once you’ve spotted a pattern like this one.