structural:scholar_edition, information:highlighting
North by Northwest and Psycho

After Vertigo, the rest of 1958 was a difficult year for Hitchcock. During pre-production of North by Northwest (1959), which was a "slow" and "agonising" process, his wife Alma was diagnosed with cancer. While she was in hospital, Hitchcock kept himself occupied with his television work and would visit her every day. Alma underwent surgery and made a full recovery, but it caused Hitchcock to imagine, for the first time, life without her.

Hitchcock followed up with three more successful films, which are also recognised as among his best: North by Northwest, Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). In North by Northwest, Cary Grant portrays Roger Thornhill, a Madison Avenue advertising executive who is mistaken for a government secret agent. He is pursued across the United States by enemy agents, including Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). At first, Thornhill believes Kendall is helping him, but then realises that she is an enemy agent; he later learns that she is working undercover for the CIA. During its opening two-week run at Radio City Music Hall, the film grossed $404,056 (equivalent to $ 4.2 million in 2023), setting a non-holiday gross record for that theatre. Time magazine called the film "smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining".

Psycho (1960) is arguably Hitchcock's best-known film. Based on Robert Bloch 's 1959 novel Psycho, which was inspired by the case of Ed Gein, the film was produced on a tight budget of $800,000 (equivalent to $ 8.2 million in 2023) and shot in black-and-white on a spare set using crew members from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The unprecedented violence of the shower scene, the early death of the heroine, and the innocent lives extinguished by a disturbed murderer became the hallmarks of a new horror-film genre. The film proved popular with audiences, with lines stretching outside theatres as viewers waited for the next showing. It broke box-office records in the United Kingdom, France, South America, the United States and Canada, and was a moderate success in Australia for a brief period.

Psycho was the most profitable of Hitchcock's career, and he personally earned in excess of $15 million (equivalent to $ 150 million in 2023). He subsequently swapped his rights to Psycho and his TV anthology for 150,000 shares of MCA, making him the third largest shareholder and his own boss at Universal, in theory at least, although that did not stop studio interference. Following the first film, Psycho became an American horror franchise: Psycho II, Psycho III, Bates Motel, Psycho IV: The Beginning and a colour 1998 remake of the original.