On Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry (1955):
Black comedy in which death is as overbearing as it would be in Vertigo, with Burks' cinematography bringing an autumnal reverence and the dialogue peppered with reference back to the corpse causing problems; the difference is the matter-of-fact way in which everybody here goes about dealing with it. It should have been a lot funnier (especially with Edmund Gwenn, years after Hitchcock's The Skin Game) than it is, but the delivery is awkward for the most part. An interesting departure from material for which he was - and is - better known.

And Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950):
The title credits unfold as a stage curtain raises and reveals London; thereafter, a mastepiece of intricate performances within performances, as acting and theatricality provides the main thematic thread, and a murder mystery providing the adequate stage for it. Every character is hiding under some sort of pretence to someone else - our heroine to everybody else, her mother, father, the villain, the suspect, the detective investigating everything. The twist ending could easily have ruined things, but doesn't, due to the stagebound denoument, the silence before it, the lighting and sweat upon the actors shot in close-up. Alistair Sim steals the show, and his efforts to win a doll by shooting a duck at a fair are hilarious.