Although Alfred Hitchcock is the most primitive of major directors, he belongs in their company. Those who emphasize his primitivism also dismiss his achievement, but his achievement is fundamental to the art of cinema—more specifically, to the art of using cinematic means for audience manipulation. (p. 295)

Most of Hitchcock's ideas about the real world are indistinguishable from the commonest pieties—which, of course, helps to explain his unique popular appeal. To begin with, he is discomforted by intellectuals. (pp. 295-96)

Occasionally in all of his films and always in the best of them, Hitchcock is the master of evocation. Intellectual emptiness and spurious realism are preconditions for his effects. Since Hitchcock depicts a world in which anything can happen, and therefore everything is a threat, distinctions and priorities are forbidden.

Like Poe, the writer he most resembles, Hitchcock is obsessed by a small stock of situations which we can mistake for themes; but, as in Poe's case, these "themes" are only emotional stimuli born from the primitive stage of indiscriminate terror. Both men are sensationalists, but Hitchcock has the advantage of working in a medium that thrives on sensations which it can transmit with irresistible completeness. Sometimes Poe appears to be unveiling a metaphysical terror behind a physical threat, but since words can only point, and since Poe wielded one of the clumsiest pointers in English literature, he had to fall back on insinuation, validated by an aesthetic that argued for vagueness. Hitchcock's vocabulary is the very world from which he wants us to shrink, its items an inexhaustible stock of palpable terrors.

Yet Hitchcock never merely exhibits the sources of dread. As countless horror films and Hitchcock imitations prove, the naked ugliness is likely to excite only laughter. Not by accident do Hitchcock's excursions into direct brutality—Psycho and The Birds—contain his most elaborate contrivances, his most artful examples of aesthetic distance.

The secret of Hitchcock's terror lies not in the objects he employs but in the timing with which he presents them. He understands, as Poe understood, that emotion, which, imperious when it peaks, cannot be long sustained but may be extended through counterpoint. Like other romantics harassed by the essentially cognitive nature of language, Poe always yearned to transform himself into a musician—which, with a tin ear, he eventually became. For Hitchcock, no such transformation is required, since inherent resemblances between music and film have only to be exploited…. [By] choosing precisely what we may see and hear at any given moment, by altering the amount of information and by varying the tempo at which it is conveyed, Hitchcock can play upon each spectator's emotions in much the same way that a piece of music plays upon his hands and feet. (p. 297)

The key to Psycho is less Sigmund Freud than Richard Strauss. That is why most of Hitchcock's best films are devoid of meaning, peopled by mere containers of stress, and set against backgrounds chosen simply because their innocuousness counterpoints terror. Primitive in insight, Hitchcock is a sophisticated man revelling in pure form, whose films are ends in themselves and so can please both the plebes who want thrills and the cognoscenti thrilled by such an arrogant display of craftsmanship. That is why, like music, Hitchcock films are always most striking at the beginning and the end (introduction and coda), and why he sustains interest only when there are enough crescendos to provide rhythm, paralyzing reason and achieving kinesthesia. (p. 298)

North by Northwest is a prime example of contentless virtuosity. It is also notable for showing, with peculiar clarity, the function of Hitchcock's cynicism. Matching his display that no object is innocent is his belief that no person is. The ubiquity of guilt and of corruption in Hitchcock's world, however, contrary to the view of solemn critics, are rarely moral observations but usually emotional cues. Since no one is very good in the typical Hitchcock movie, we needn't take sides and can root for naked skill. (p. 301)

Hitchcock's cynicism makes an advantage of his moral indifference by freeing him and his audience to admire pure aggression, including the aggression of film form. But his fear that nothing is what it seems (of which the skepticism about moral distinctions is only one consequence) sometimes approaches the status of serious belief, and then we see, most dramatically, the special underpinnings of his work…. (p. 302)

Shadow of a Doubt is erratically written (its collaborators running from Sally Benson to Thornton Wilder), but it almost succeeds in making a serious comment. Thus we get the first important example in Hitchcock of visual symbolism…. But Hitchcock ruins this subtle equation, not only through blatant details in the script (uncle and niece share first names and telepathic powers), but by his final submission to conventions of melodrama. Since these necessitate someone to root for, Hitchcock must ultimately dissolve the equation whose irony sustains the film. In totally amoral movies like North by Northwest rooting for the hero implies no disruptive judgment; in Shadow of a Doubt it is profoundly illogical.

Nevertheless, Shadow of a Doubt helps us measure the extent to which Hitchcock's art is based on his assumption that normality is merely a thin veneer covering a lust for thrills. Like the niece, we tolerate thrills just until they threaten permanently to taint our self-image, so Hitchcock obligingly neutralizes the threat with last-minute melodrama. But his concern for us is specious, only a reflection of his concern for the box office. (pp. 302-03)

Strangers on a Train is a happy instance of an impulse suddenly finding its proper form. Throughout his work, Hitchcock had used, strictly for emotive purposes, the device of one character's being accused of another's crime. Patricia Highsmith's novel, while itself a pretentious, even brazen affair, has the virtue of making this device accord perfectly with Hitchcock's most fundamental attitude: that everyone is latently a killer. (p. 303)

For sheer invention, unfailing pertinence of every frame, and occasional suggestions of deeper purpose, Strangers on a Train is Hitchcock's masterpiece….

As a craftsman, Hitchcock ranks with the best. He has taught essential lessons to directors with greater aspirations because he has realized one of the potentials of film form…. What Hitchcock has supremely understood is that the line between perception and feeling can be manipulated by the director, can be sustained or broken, quickened or retarded so that the spectator feels only what the filmmaker intends. Moreover, he has understood that no other medium can simulate action with most of life's reality but none of its limitations. As a result, Hitchcock has produced a new experience, a new kind of art. It is low but powerful; it does not exploit the full range of his medium, but it takes to the limit one of the things that film can do more fully than any other art. In Robert Warshow's phrase, film is the "immediate experience." No director knows that better than Hitchcock. (p. 304)