The prevalence of the motif of threatened or actual falling from a height in Hitchcock's films is well known, but I am unaware of any attempt to analyse it. At a relatively basic level it refers to a fear of the abyss: another metaphor for the chaos world. Noting that we are never told how Scottie in VERTIGO is rescued from his predicament at the beginning – suspended from a roof gutter over a terrifying drop to the ground – Robin Wood suggests that: ‘The effect is of having him, throughout the film, metaphorically suspended over a great abyss’ (Wood 1989: 111). Although VERTIGO is perhaps the only Hitchcock film in which the Falling motif (as I’ll abbreviate it) may be seen as operating throughout in such a metaphorical sense, there are plenty of moments when characters find themselves suspended over dangerous falls, and several villains – and, indeed, one heroine – die in falls. I would like to start with the villains.

One feature of the motif is the number of films in which it is Hitchcock's preferred method of ‘dealing with’ the double, or – whether or not he/she is a double – the person who carried out the crime blamed on the hero. Although Hitchcock said to Truffaut that it was a ‘serious error’ having the villain rather than the hero hanging from the torch of the Statue of Liberty in SABOTEUR (Truffaut 1968: 122), the outcome – in which the villain falls to his death – is typical. Fry's fall here is echoed in Valerian's off Mount Rushmore in NORTH BY NORTHWEST: in each case the hero witnesses the death fall of the figure whose crime (the opening act of sabotage; the murder of Townsend) has been blamed on him. This pattern may also be seen in TO CATCH A THIEF. Foussard, who planned the crimes (the cat burglaries), is killed in a similar manner; his daughter Danielle, who executed them, is caught by Robie as she slips from a roof gutter, and is held by him over the drop to the ground until she confesses. Likewise in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN: in the climactic fight on the runaway merry-goround, Bruno tries violently to force Guy off, but is then himself killed in the ensuing crash.