Hollywood has always done a terrible job of depicting real women in film, and although his work has a somewhat misogynistic reputation, Alfred Hitchcock has done so much involving the progression of female roles in Hollywood cinema. Although many of his female victims wind up dead, the survivors have lots of power – and without reliance on their male counterparts. Women remain the central focus in many of Hitchcock’s films, not just because of their beauty, but because the narrative is dependent on them.
When you look at his work in the context of this specific Hollywood era, Hitchcock’s female characters are very much out of the ordinary. Looking past the obvious presence of gender roles (male and female) that just so happened to be a part of the social norm during that time, Hitchcock sought to represent women with having more depth, realism, and independence than ever before in women in Hollywood. Contrary to the common expectation for the female characters to be somewhat complimentary to the male lead in films, Hitchcock established characters who were a complete deviation from those standards.
In The Man Who Knew Too Much, Josephine McKenna; a singer, mother, and wife, plays a huge role in the film as she and her husband search for clues leading to the retrieval of their kidnapped son. Although our first impression of Josephine is nothing more
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Janet Walker -- a charming, witty, and strong-minded journalist, as well as the fiancée of the recently murdered victim. Janet's involvement with the plot is very limited, but with her clever intellect, she manages to grab our attention whenever she speaks. This appears to be a very rare case, where a woman in a supporting role earns positive recognition through her personality and intelligence rather than looks. In this case, her relation to the victim seems like a small detail hidden in light of her