Hitchcock's career to date falls neatly into four phases: the silent period (nine films); the 1930s in Britain (fourteen films); the 1940s in America and Britain (thirteen features and two shorts); and the period since then, beginning with Strangers on a Train (twelve films). To indulge in drastic oversimplification, these phases represent respectively: apprenticeship; the perfection of a style; appreciation of the limitations of that style and an erratic quest for a new style; and final maturity. (p. 171)

Even for The Lodger allowances have to be made; to enjoy it fully requires an exercise of deliberate 'thinking-back', to see it in the context of the British cinema of the time…. In itself the film is clearly something of a declaration of independence: deliberately showy in style, it leaves no one in any doubt that its maker is a director to reckon with, even to the extent of being over-rich and weighed down with set-pieces of technical bravura…. (p. 172)

For all that the film has perhaps, retrospectively, been overrated; it is all rather too self-conscious, too determined to impress, and therefore finally less fresh and appealing than The Ring, arguably Hitchcock's best silent film, since there at least the technique is all properly functional and the aim unpretentious. (p. 173)

[By] the time we get to his third sound film, Murder … he is completely in control of the medium. Murder, in fact, is his first fully mature and characteristic film, full of little tricks and ingenuities, of disturbing overtones of all sorts; of the mixture of cheerful brutality, sexual innuendo, and black humour which makes up so much of 'characteristic Hitchcock'…. Already, too, the subject-matter, starting from a basically banal story-line, is developed to imply much that is normally far outside the range of the thriller (even now, and much more so then); the implications of homosexuality in the case of the real murderer are carefully placed for anyone with an eye to see…. (pp. 173-74)

It is difficult to go all the way with those critics—Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, for instance—who regard [Rich and Strange] as one of Hitchcock's masterpieces: it is too muddled in execution, too extreme in its fluctuations of tone, for that. But it is interesting as one of his most immediately personal, 'felt' films; one suspects that in it, unselfconsciously and even perhaps a trifle naïvely, the young Hitchcock was wearing his heart on his sleeve, and when the reaction of critics and public was thoroughly unfavourable he decided to set up securer defences the next time. Hence, perhaps, his decision to throw himself instead into the series of thrillers which are the chief glory of his period in the early British sound cinema—films in which ideas close to his heart could be touched on more safely, under the guise of popular entertainment, than when left to speak out for themselves in films like Rich and Strange. (p. 175)

In making the six great thrillers [The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Secret Agent, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, and The Lady Vanishes] Hitchcock had achieved perfection in the genre and had become typed to it. Everyone knew what to expect from him and tended to resent it if they got anything else. But the genre is limited and the dangers of self-repetition or falling back on an increasingly sterile search for new ways of extracting thrills and surprises from the same small round of basic situations are all too clear. Evidently they were clear to Hitchcock and he did what he had to: he got away to entirely new surroundings and started again. The next ten years or so, despite regular (though not quite invariable) commercial successes and some outstanding individual films, among them one (Shadow of a Doubt) which Hitchcock still names as his favourite of all his films, is mainly, on the artistic level, a record of trials, false starts, and disappointments, but from the experience he emerged with a new maturity and a new vitality which have made him, and kept him, one of the most dynamic forces in the cinema today. (pp. 181-82)

[Shadow of a Doubt] is a very curious, complex film, on the one hand in many ways Hitchcock's most scrupulously realistic, almost documentary in the care and precision with which its small town background is established …, and on the other in construction it is one of his most intricate and artificial, with shot answering shot and idea answering idea down to the smallest detail (what François Truffaut analysed as a regular principle of duplication and reflection; what Chabrol and Rohmer call visual rhymes). (p. 184)

It gains particularly over the other films of this period in two respects. The first is the extreme neatness and ruthless logic of the script's development, with everything in its place in a perfectly ordered, morally ambivalent world where everything goes by twos—Chabrol and Rohmer detail two scenes in a church, two scenes in a garage, two visits of the police to the house, two meals, two attempted murders, and a number of identical shots of the two Charlies, uncle and niece: two close-ups of the back, two travelling shots from in front, two shots from below, and so on. The second is in the use of locations, which lets air into the airless world of Hollywood studio realism, where all too often in other films Hitchcock's special talents seem to suffocate and droop. (pp. 184-85)

Stunningly proficient, [Spellbound and Notorious] are both very fair entertainments and if, to my mind, the better of them, Notorious, still fails to reach the highest class of Hitchcock, it is only by a certain deadness in the execution, a fatal heaviness which makes it, for all its brilliance, just a tiny bit boring. (p. 185)

Notorious, though usually bracketed with Spellbound …, is a far better and very different film. It is the film, in fact, which comes nearest to justifying the wilder claims of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics, especially when we remember that Hitchcock himself, exceptionally, takes responsibility for the original story. It is an intricate and subtle love story set in the familiar surroundings of spy adventure but showing just how far Hitchcock has travelled since The Lady Vanishes. This time the spy intrigue counts for little, the relationship between the principal characters for almost everything. (pp. 185-86)

The whole story, in fact, is whichever way you look at it based on the importance of an explicit avowal, a confession if you like, as liberating factor: the action turns entirely on the unwillingness of either party to say the necessary word. Moreover, the theme is developed with extraordinary concentration; there are no irrelevant extravagances of any sort (even the famous travelling shot which sweeps down from the top of the grand staircase and finally comes to rest in a close-up of a key in the heroine's hand can hardly be described as irrelevant, though in its context undeniably a little showy) and the big scenes—the bravura display of physical passion near the beginning, the scene in which the heroine realizes that she is being poisoned—are all managed with the utmost directness and simplicity. Notorious is also perhaps the most visually ravishing of all Hitchcock's films, certainly of all those in black-and-white…. In fact, virtually the only thing to be urged against the film is its ponderousness and claustrophobia—a quality often justified by the story but sometimes, as in the scenes on the hotel balcony against a very hazy back-projection of Rio de Janeiro, certainly not. (p. 187)

Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Notorious, Rope, Under Capricorn: these are the characteristic Hitchcock films of the 1940s, and there is no escaping the fact that they suggest a spectacular decline in his talents as a director. The increasing heaviness of the direction, the general humourlessness, the pretentiousness of many of the subjects, the tendency of glossy impersonality to take the place of individual invention, the evident loss of the zest and gusto which used to characterize even Hitchcock's feeblest works before: these damage all of them, including the best (Notorious), and give rise to the gravest doubts about Hitchcock's future. Admittedly to set against them there is one unexpected, idiosyncratic masterpiece, Shadows of a Doubt, which is exempt from all these criticisms and at the same time quite different from the pre-war British Hitchcock, but in 1950 that was seven years and seven films away, and Hitchcock's latest, an attempt to return to the straightforward thriller entertainment in Stage Fright, was hardly more encouraging than his preceding heavyweight flops.

Then suddenly and quite unexpectedly, another masterpiece, Strangers on a Train, and the new, dazzling, mature Hitchcock of the 1950s was upon us before we knew it. (pp. 189-90)

In Strangers on a Train at last we are back in the open air. With a story after his own heart …, Hitchcock makes full use of outdoor locations … and succeeds in making his interiors and studio scenes match them closely in life and verisimilitude. The effect is instantaneous: the mise en scène loses the ponderousness of the last few years and becomes light and adventurous, full of little inventions … and elaborate set-pieces…. Seldom if ever had Hitchcock's sheer technique been more dazzling, but, significantly, this time it was not technique in a void, as in suspense-machines like Saboteur and Stage Fright, but technique used to create an atmosphere, advance a coherent narrative and put before us believable characters…. (p. 191)

Since Strangers on a Train Hitchcock's unmatched expertise has never deserted him (even the despised remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much is unshakeably adroit), and in his full maturity and confidence he has been ready to tackle almost anything. The sheer variety of his films in this period is staggering: from the macabre comedy of The Trouble With Harry and the romantic comedy of To Catch a Thief, through the light-hearted thriller-entertainment of North by Northwest and the neat mechanics of Dial M for Murder to the unsettling ambiguities of Rear Window and Strangers on a Train and the rigours of The Wrong Man, all are encompassed with equal ease and success. And, more astonishing still, they all come out unmistakably as 'Hitchcock films'; one is never tempted even for a moment to wonder if they could be the work of a technically brilliant but quite impersonally eclectic talent…. Themes and attitudes recur constantly in his films, tying them into a web of references and reflecting, evidently, Hitchcock's own interests and preoccupations, though not, I think, anything like a coherent personal philosophy. It is rather a question of mental furniture, 'keepings', to use Hopkins's word for it, which somehow crops up in everything that passes through Hitchcock's hands. If Hitchcock does not have 'a style', in the way that, say, Ophuls or Minelli does, so that a few feet extracted from any film would be constantly recognizable by a certain way of moving the camera, of lighting, of composition, he has nevertheless something much less self-conscious: a personal écriture which comes, like Buñuel's, simply from trusting to his personality to colour all his work (or, perhaps, from not considering such matters at all, but just unselfconsciously following his own bent wherever it may take him). Like Buñuel, Hitchcock achieves his style by an inspired absence of style; of him perhaps more unarguably than of anyone else in the cinema can it be said quite simply 'le style, c'est l'homme'. (pp. 198-99)