At heart, [Alfred Hitchcock is] a practical joker, a cunning and sophisticated cynic amused at the French critical vogue for his work, contemptuous of the audience which he treats as the collective victim of a Pavlovian experiment, perennially fascinated by his own ability to exploit the cinema's resources. His narcissism and its concomitant coldness have damaged those films whose themes have called for warmly sympathetic treatment: The Ring, I Confess, and The Wrong Man are obvious examples of stories which, demanding humanism, have been treated with a heartless artificiality.

The mechanics of creating terror and amusement in an audience are all Hitchcock properly understands. The portrayal of physical or intellectual passion is beyond him, and he has never directed a sexual encounter with the slightest perceptiveness. (pp. 3-4)

I believe that an understanding of Hitchcock's oeuvre can only be reached when it is seen in the hard, unwavering light of … commercial-minded philistinism. He remains at heart a cheerful London showman with a tough contempt for the world he has made his oyster…. He has simply taken the most dynamic popular art form of the twentieth century, toyed with it, and dared to explode some of the central myths it has established.

Where he has been most skilful of all is in his grasp of what can move the masses without fail. His pitiless mockery of human susceptibilities springs from a belief in the essential absurdity of those susceptibilities. (p. 4)

[In] Psycho … the plunging of a knife blade into a woman's nude body in a shower is deliberately made to represent the thrustings of the sexual act, so as to unleash the repressed libidinous sadism of large numbers of spectators. In nearly every case, the effect has come off so strikingly that even the most detached critic is bound to be engaged. Hitchcock's mastery of the medium is never more sharply expressed than in those sequences where he wants to make us release our repressions vicariously as he has released his cinematically.

The skill with which he has engineered the mechanism of his films has varied sharply from work to work, but in those films dominated by morbidity, physical disgust, and terror his gifts have usually been in striking display….

The love scenes Hitchcock so elaborately shoots, usually set in "high life" for the hicks to goggle at, are invariably sexless, antiseptic, and rather nauseatingly cold…. He is more at home with people who show no visible evidence of sexuality at all: notably an array of dead, middle-aged Englishmen and Americans who come on and off the chalk-line in successive films to commit murders or shudder obediently in moments of disaster. And the perverted also fascinate him: one recalls the Lesbian housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, caressing the transparent nightdresses of her dead mistress…. (p. 5)

The numb hero and heroine, the sexless but useful character players, and the parade of sexually twisted oddballs in Hitchcock's films are, more often than not, engaged in a chase, and it is in the chase that he has found his central dynamic. To ensure universality, he has seized on monuments everyone can recognize and to set his characters in motion across them…. (pp. 5-6)

Sometimes the chase is the director's own: he is trying to discover the way people die, or the way they react to danger. The observation, the degree of understanding, is adolescent, but the chasing after facts about modes of behavior is adult, similar to a novelist's insatiable curiousity. (p. 6)

Sometimes [Hitchcock's silent style] is so elaborate, so exhibitionistic, that it destroys, rather than enhances, the dramatic content. In The Ring …, a story about the infidelity of a boxer's wife, the theme would have excited another writer-director to provide a moving study of human fallibility. Hitchcock simply used the plot-line to excuse a stunning display of technical virtuosity. The technique is the opposite of, say, Pabst's: the camera is used to play with, not explore in depth, the characters and their relationships. The whole film is a heartless jeu d'esprit…. (pp. 6-7)

The Lodger … remains the best of Hitchcock's silent films. Its reputation, thoroughly deserved, has remained intact because in it the soulless mechanism works perfectly, the detachment and coldness suit the subject—a straight murder story—and the setting, London, lends itself perfectly to bizarre stylization. (p. 7)

What Hitchcock manages [in Vertigo] (as often before) is a total suspension of disbelief in the impossible goings-on before one's eyes. Surrendered to, the film invades one's consciousness with rules of its own: this is one of those films … which completely creates a decadent, artificial world unrelated in any way to the real one. It has taken the French, not bound by the rule of thumb that judges a film by its verisimilitude, to see that the unreality of Vertigo, its free play with time and space, makes it a genuinely experimental film…. Vertigo is one of the peaks of Hitchcock's career, a film in which his coldness, his detachment, have found their perfect subject. (pp. 14-15)

He has now, after almost 40 years in cinema, got the power to do almost exactly what he likes, to scrawl his signature on the world's lavatory walls without restraint. He's still a child, pulling wings off flies, playing with the cinema like a toy. But there is no other director whose jeux d'esprit can be shared with equal pleasure by the masses and specialists alike. (p. 16)