Guillermo del Toro is not just one of our greatest living filmmakers. He is one of our greatest cinephiles, sharing his favorite movies all the time to introduce fans of his work to the larger film history context that inspired many of them. The “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone” filmmaker has previously made his TCM Picks as a filmmaker advisor to Turner Classic Movies. IndieWire praised his selection of Alfred Hitchcock‘s “Suspicion” then, as a film by the Master of Suspense that feels oddly underrated today, despite being as masterful an exploration of subjectivity as anything in Hitchcock’s filmography.
For his March 2025 TCM Picks, del Toro returns to Hitchcock, and this time for a truly “canonical” selection from the Master, and gives some brilliant remarks about why it’s so everlasting — with even a shout-out to Hitchcock’s love of “overbearing mother figures.” It’s “North by Northwest.”
“’North by Northwest,’ 1959 by Alfred Hitchcock, is a perfect perpetual motion machine and is made by one of the greatest clockwork makers in cinema history: A filmmaker that could blend seamlessly comedy, drama, action, and suspense,” del Toro said in his remarks, which you can watch below.
“You can trace some of the roots and tools of Alfred Hitchcock from his English period to his American period. You can see ‘The Lodger’ getting him to ‘Psycho,’ and you can see in the same manner ‘The 39 Steps’ leading to ‘North by Northwest.’ But they are executed very differently, although thematically they both deal with essentially a couple that has to cross a geography, and in the course of their misadventures become unified and learn to love and trust each other,” he said.
“You can also see the overbearing mother figure which is very constant in Hitchcock; the banal hero who learns to value the essence of life as misadventures continue; and the Hitchcock blonde, personified beautifully by Eva Marie Saint; and phenomenal villains, particularly James Mason, who was this upper-class, very articulate villain that Hitchcock tended to favor quite a bit. The thing with ‘North by Northwest’ is that it’s a very modern film, not only in its color and design, and the fact that it’s almost a musical without music, done very pointedly for MGM in VistaVision. But also by the fact that his action is diagrammatic and as crisp and as clean as anything that anyone can direct now or ever. This makes the movie painterly but cinematic. It never stops. And it prefigures a James Bond film before there was a James Bond film. This is one of the canonical films of Alfred Hitchcock. The most perfect action film ever made in my opinion.”
Then, in time for St. Patrick’s Day, del Toro chooses John Ford’s “The Quiet Man” (1952).
“One of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen,” del Toro said. “The end of the ‘40s, beginning of the ‘50s, Technicolor achieves a pinnacle for me, of beauty. Whether it was in England with ‘The Red Shoes’ and ‘Black Narcissus,’ or in this instance ‘The Quiet Man.’ The technique manages to create pictorial images that cannot be reproduced by any other technical method and to me spelled ‘pure cinema.’ In this instance, you have Winton Hoch as the cinematographer for John Ford, and he had been a lab technician at Technicolor. He had developed the technique, and he knew how to push it to make it so beautiful and perfect. But they were also aided by bad weather. They had a veil, a little silk of clouds at all times, and that renders some of the most breathtaking, mythical, primal landscapes that also helped this film in its summation of the mythical land and the role of totemic men and women that may never have existed but live high and powerful in the imagination and soul of John Ford.”
Vivid Technicolor carries over into del Toro’s next pick: Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 Best Picture winner, “An American in Paris.”
“One of my favorite musicals of all time, I’m very attracted to the colors and richness of them, which was in my opinion one of Minnelli’s specialties. He was absolutely a master of color,” del Toro said. “Very, very vivid, very, very overt, but beautiful. And his film language… I think every musical has a style of their director and the point of view of their star and the agility or the nimbleness or, in the case of Gene Kelly, their muscular, Olympic dance energy that he has. Minnelli tries to evoke it by keeping the camera very fluid, very alive, in a very different way than Stanley Donen, and not doing the still contemplation that you get from George Stevens. This is a very beautiful camera energy that Minnelli brought to his cranes, whether it’s ‘Some Came Running’ or ‘The Clock,’ he knew how to make the camera part of the style of the film but part of the energy of the film and a sort of vehicle for the audience to fly with these beautiful musical numbers that culminate in one of the great musical ballets in the history of film.”
And finally, a film that has enduring power to speak to this and any moment like it, Hal Ashby’s “Being There” (1979).
“One of the most perfect political parables of all time, but at the same time also a fable of profound elegance,” del Toro said. “A fable that seems to tell us that stupidity, power, and politics coexist in the same mind, therefore making it a movie not only for the time it was made in, but for all times, including now. At the center of it, there’s Peter Sellars’ performance, channeling Stan Laurel. Sellars admired Laurel, and they both understood how you needed to calibrate a performance like this with minimal gestures, calibrating every single nuance, every silence, every look, every gesture. It’s absolutely, in my opinion, the best performance Sellars ever gave. And he’s aided by Jack Warden, one of Ashby’s favorites; Shirley MacLaine, who brings her power for drama and impeccable comic timing; and Melvyn Douglas, who brings gravity and dignity to the proceedings. It’s based on a Jerzy Kosiński novel, Kosiński himself not alien to political serendipity. And serendipity and chance is exactly what Hal Ashby believes in all his films, and in this one too, plays an enormous role in our lives and in our destiny.”
Watch the entire video of del Toro’s picks below.
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