Concentrate on the 40s and 50s, especially the 50s.
Shadow of a Doubt with Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten is great. Dial M for Murder, The Man Who Knew Too Much but qué sera, sera.
A weird, ‘what movie is that?’ question for our more experienced posters.
My memory may not be entirely reliable.
It’s black and white.
It seems to be about two couples alone at a sort of hotel/holiday house. It may be on an island?
Unbeknownst to…everyone else involved…both couples are either having or plotting an affair with each other. If you know what I mean, I know I haven’t phrased that perfectly.
It seems a little risque for its time.
It finishes with a genuinely surreal…like a musical number but not quite…
Everything before that point had been straight and realistic, but now they’re jumping in and out of oversized storybooks…
Doesn’t spring out at me.
That’s okay.
It may possibly have been a fever dream.
Key Largo and To Have and Have Not, both Bogart/Bacall movies, are vague possibilities, but one of them at least involves a storm and a crime boss.
They’re both pretty good fits, but I’m sure it’s more Wildean farce than noir.
English or American?
It’s difficult to say around that era.
Possibly English?
Edit: I’m guessing 40s 50s?
I’m watching The Deer Hunter for the first time since shortly after it was released in the late 70s.
In Oscar season, Foxtel showed a swag of Best Movie winners, and I remember this one for its reputation and it being the early stages of careers of De Niro, Streep and Walken. Details of the film I don’t remember.
Closed captions (subtitles) are in English so that’s a bit disconcerting.
Interesting that they filmed all John Cazale’s scenes first because he had terminal lung cancer (and looked it). The studio wanted to sack him but Streep (his partner at the time) and Cimino resisted. He died after filming wrapped and never saw the film.
Tippi Hedren is Melanie Griffin’s mother and Dakota Johnson’s grandmother.
She was also in Hitchcock’s Marnie, with Sean Connery.
There were two movies about Hitchcock’s obsessions with his leading ladies, Hitchcock starring Anthony Hopkins about Psycho, and The Girl starring Toby Jones about Tippi Hedren and The Birds.
He was well-known for how he mistreated his female stars…as far as I know, not in the #MeToo way but in a dominating, humiliating way…going all the way back to Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps.
Concur about Vertigo. Rear Window, again with James Stewart, but Grace Kelly this time, is A+ too.
I like a lot of his 40s movies too…In addition to Rebecca and Shadow of a Doubt, I also recommend Suspicion and Notorious. Spellbound with sequences by Salvador Dali is worth a squiz.
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OK…maybe I’m wrong…but…
The funniest black and white film I’ve ever seen is called “On Approval”. I caught it completely by chance one night, on ABC, probably twenty years ago, and was blown away by how smart and cutting the dialogue was.
I think it could be the film you describe. I just tracked it down online to check, and the very last scene shows them swinging from one page of an oversized storybook to the other.
The full film appears to be viewable online here:
https://m.ok.ru/video/314605046414
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Lol.
There is no way there can be two films that end like that…
Thanks, I’ll check it out!
Edit: It is. Thank you for getting the right answer from such a poor description. What a bizarre and funny film it is. Can’t wait to watch it properly.
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Someone at www right told me Hitchcock made a film that is set entirely on a life raft? Is it any good? I love movies where it’s all pretty much in one small space
Lifeboat, after the ship is torpedoed during the war
Hitchcock always made a point of appearing in a 2-second cameo in each film, usually just walking past the main players in the street. With this just having a limited cast in a very limited setting, try to see how he appears in this one.
As with nearly all Hitchcock films, it’s pure suspense, not the gratuitous violence of Psycho that so many regard (wrongly in my opinion and you know my opinion isn’t humble) as his masterpiece. In a large number of his films, no-one of the main players even die.
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In that case you should watch Spencer Tracy in Hemingways Old Man & The Sea, … You’d love it.
“Come on Fish!” lol.
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Funnier than Schindler’s List?
I kid…
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I wouldn’t know, I was too busy making out during Schindler’s List 
If you ever get bored, click on the link, give “On Approval” a watch, and share your thoughts. I’ve only ever watched it once or twice, so I won’t be offended if you don’t like it.
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That film had me transfixed when I was a child. I had read it earlier.
My mum’s family were fishermen.
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