The Farmer's Wife (1927)

Hitchcock was worried that the stage roots of The Farmer's Wife (a hugely popular play by Eden Philpotts) might show through in his film adaptation. It was a needless worry. This semi-comic story of a widowed farmer's attempts to find himself a new wife is shot, as Truffaut observed, 'like a thriller'. The camera, on occasion handled by Hitch himself, observes the action cinematically, not from the perspective of a stage audience. Each prospective wife - the horsy one, the hysterical one, the high-spirited one - is presented as a comic stereotype. Rejected by each, the farmer ultimately discovers what has been literally staring him - and the audience - in the face all the time: his young, attractive and devoted housekeeper.