Alfred Hitchcock

Commonly regarded as the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock is very consistent in how he makes movies. His main concern is to please the audience, and he carries many recognizable characteristics from film to film.
One thing Hitchcock has in a lot of his movies is a blonde leading-lady. In the three movies we watched in class, there was Pamela from "The 39 Steps," Lisa from "Rear Window," and Judy/Madeleine from "Vertigo," all blondes. Not only were they all blondes, but they each had similar relationships to the main male character. In "The 39 Steps," Pamela is very resistant to Hannay at first, and only begins to like him near the end. In "Rear Window," Lisa and Jeff are in a troubled relationship, where she wants to get married but he doesnt. In "Vertigo" John and Judy eventually fall in love, but Judy turns out to be under a false identity in order to involve John in a murder plot. What's more, Judy seems to die twice, once as the copy of Madeleine (where the real Madeleine dies), and again at the end as herself.
Another Hitchcock signature is his use of almost exclusively nondiagetic sound in some parts of his films. He did this to use the full potential of the screen by telling a story purely by what he shows us. The longest of these scenes we watched were in "Vertigo," when we followed John and Madeleine around. Hitchcock showed us clues and key parts to the story without using dialogue to explain their significance. Instead, he showed them to us in context and let us figure out their meaning. In "Rear Window" there are similar scenes when the camera pans between the different apartments. Though here there is diagetic sound, it is muffled and relatively insignificant, so the story is still being told by what we see. We see Ms. Lonelyheart alone in her room, Ms. Torso getting hit on in hers, the pianist struggling in his, and the newlyweds closing the blinds in theirs. Throughout the film their stories develop through the same panning shot, to where they've all changed by the end.