Charles Laughton Wrath" (US title "The Beachcomber") (1938), based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham, in which his wife, Elsa Lanchester, co-starred; "St. Martin's Lane" (US title "Sidewalks of London"), about London street entertainers, which featured Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison; and "Jamaica Inn", with Maureen O'Hara and Robert Newton, about Cornish shipwreckers, based on Daphne du Maurier's novel, and the last film Alfred Hitchcock directed in Britain before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s. The films produced were not commercially successful enough, and the company was saved from bankruptcy only when RKO Pictures offered Laughton the title role (Quasimodo)
Alfred Hitchcock for the CIA. During its opening two-week run at Radio City Music Hall, the film grossed $404,056 (), setting a record in that theatre's non-holiday gross. "Time" magazine called the film "smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining". "Psycho" (1960) is arguably Hitchcock's best-known film. Based on Robert Bloch's novel "Psycho" (1959), which was inspired by the case of Ed Gein, the film was produced on a constrained budget of $800,000 () 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