Marnie is the culmination of Hitchcock's concept of cinema as an artificially fabricated construct; it is also among the films in which one senses him most emotionally engaged. The paradox is only apparent: it is in the nature of Hitchcock's art that it is most intense when it leaves daily reality, the "normal," behind to explore unnatural relationships and extreme mental states, especially the obsessive compulsive, in a kind of abstraction only cursorily disguised as naturalism. (p. 48)

The camera, almost invariably objective, moves to exclude some characters from the frame and include others: there is a continual sense of a world out there beyond the confines of the screen, of other lives coexisting simultaneously, a world too vital and complex for the camera to contain. At the same time, although every artist in film guides the spectator's eye (and the mind behind the eye), the objectivity of presentation and the sense of a world rich in varied potentialities allow us a certain freedom of response, leave room for the flexible play of individual moral judgment.

In Hitchcock's films, I have the sense that such tendencies exist only in so far as they can't be suppressed—in so far, that is, as they are inherent in the nature of cinema, and of the camera as a recording instrument. Hitchcock's images contain nothing superfluous, and, for the most part, only the barest minimum of what is necessary: we see what he has decided we must see…. Everything is conceived and executed in accordance with the experience Hitchcock has ordained that we are to receive. It's an extraordinary, audacious concept of cinema, and I don't think Hitchcock has ever entirely realized it. (p. 49)

I would posit two levels on which Hitchcock is involved in his art. The first is very conscious, and is bound up with his preoccupation with audience response and the concept of pure cinema. From the creative viewpoint, it is highly abstract, and closely connected with Hitchcock's practiced showmanship on the one hand and his pride in the technical mastery of his craft on the other. The second level is much more obscure, very private, partly unconscious—and from it derives the genuine power and intensity of Hitchcock's cinema. The two levels are neither separable nor unified, the second frequently masquerades as the first, with Hitchcock converting his thematic obsessions into deliberate attempts to give the audience experiences. (p. 50)

The Birds ought to have been Hitchcock's greatest film. It is seriously flawed—more than any other of his works—by the split between levels. One feels that here Hitchcock came very close to total seriousness, which would involve either the integration of the two levels or the rejection of the first and conscious acceptance of the second. (p. 51)

There seems to me one other major area to which Hitchcock's interest intuitively gravitates, and the pull is very strong. It is an aspect of his art barely hinted at in the British films, and the fact that it only reached free expression in Hollywood accounts for the decisive superiority of the American half of his career…. It can best be suggested by pointing to the most striking and haunting of the man-woman relationships in his films, and pondering their common elements…. All are characterized by some form of romantic passion (in Shadow of a Doubt—the earliest and least fully representative—hero-worship on one side and nostalgia for lost innocence on the other), rather than any realized sense of possible marital stability.

Beyond that there is perhaps no single element common to all, but several that recur and combine in various permutations: (1) the sense of the woman as mysterious, perhaps treacherous, perhaps unreal—the embodiment of a dream or an illusion (in Shadow of a Doubt the roles are partly reversed); (2) extreme distrust, arising from a variety of causes but usually closely related to (1); (3) a strong sense of instability and precariousness, arising from inner tensions, outside dangers, or both; (4) attempts on the part of the man to dominate or control the woman; (5) the emotional coloring, if not the fact evoked by the Oscar Wilde phrase of which Hitchcock is so fond: "Each man kills the thing he loves." (p. 52)

It seems as if the very precariousness of these relationships is indispensable to the maintaining of Hitchcock's interest…. [The] reason why Vertigo is so decisively Hitchcock's masterpiece is surely that there, and there alone, he pursues the tragic implications of this very romantic and inherently pessimistic view of life to their logical conclusion.

This theme—or complex of elements—is altogether lacking from Frenzy. If one places that film beside Vertigo, the limitedness of Hitchcock's response to life and to human relationships is strikingly illuminated in Vertigo he allows free rein to the tragic-romantic side of his vision, the yearning after a higher reality that may be illusory and is almost certainly unattainable in life: in Frenzy he looks at things as (from his viewpoint) they are. (p. 52)

[The cynicism in Frenzy] is expressed in the whole treatment of human relationships and human potentialities. The marriage bureau (its achievements typified by the couple we see leaving it) emerges as a central image…. No-one in the film is allowed much stature, or even dignity, except in the most superficial "British" sense….

If one searches for some kind of affirmation, the best one can come up with is the relationship between Inspector Oxford and his wife. One can certainly agree with Hermie Wallack that Hitchcock treats this with "great affection"; the two gourmet dinner scenes are the most endearing in the film. But when that emerges as a human norm, is one not forced to reflect that something, somewhere, has gone seriously wrong? The Oxfords would seem to represent, for Hitchcock, the workable alternative to those disturbing romantic relationships best summed up by Vertigo a relationship built on the negative virtues of patience and forbearance, and the suppression of everything else….

In Frenzy Hitchcock tries to go one better than Psycho: this time two successive heroines-apparent get horridly murdered just as our sympathies (in so far as they are aroused at all) are gravitating towards them, leaving us with a problem of re-adjustment. Psycho survives in the murder of Marion Crane because of our interest in and concern for Norman Bates; but when the Anna Massey character disappears from Frenzy there isn't much left, unless we are satisfied by a somewhat arid recapitulation of Hitchcockian themes….

Anna Massey seems to me clearly the most attractive character of Frenzy—plucky, loyal, forthright. I know that a dead body is just so much useless matter and it's no use getting sentimental about it; nonetheless, my sensibility revolts violently against Frenzy's already-celebrated potatosack scene. It sums up for me everything in Hitchcock that is morally most suspect. It's not just the callousness with which he treats the character, but the callousness with which he treats his audience, by cynically violating our sensibilities….

The dangers of pure cinema and its techniques of audience manipulation have never been more apparent. And don't tell me, oh brother and sister critics, that I shouldn't confuse cinema and life, and write about characters as though they were real people—because when you ceased to engage with movies at this old-fashioned human level, at that same moment you lost all touch with the way in which the audiences for whom the films were made experience them. You invalidated your critical position at the very moment when you thought you had purged it of impurities.

Doubtless this overstates the case against Frenzy, by isolating certain aspects at the expense of others. It has the distinction of which even the worst works of a great artist are likely to partake. For Hitchcock is, at his best, a great artist…. [However, his] work is too far removed from any healthy concept of normality, or from any sense of potential norms, to have the kind of Shakespearean centrality [Robin] Wood suggests. Marnie is not, even remotely, The Winter's Tale; leave that to late Mizoguchi. The profoundly disturbing intensity of Hitchcock at his best—though remarkable in its way—is of another, and lesser, order. (p. 53)