What Hitchcock has done in Topaz is exciting to anyone who believes that an artist's work has coherence, a progression, and a deepening of fundamental themes. (p. 17)

In Hitchcock's curious and largely unsuccessful Torn Curtain, a statement of some kind about modern political morality seemed to be competing with the personal story for significance. Hitchcock is not a socially-oriented director, though certain social motifs (especially fear of the police) trace back to the beginnings of his career. His movies almost invariably center around a man-woman relationship; whatever outward plot there is usually is no more than a counterpoint or a poetic extension of the basic theme.

Spies are a graphic metaphor for anarchy, for the underworld of organized society in which conventional morality becomes chaotic. Hitchcock's dread of psycho-sexual anarchy is always held in check by the highly schematized logic of his visual style—by his sense of irony. Spies and more individual voyeurs are a predominant impulse in his work because voyeurism, with its connotations of impotence and its threat to sexual and emotional trust, undermines the stability of a heterosexual relationship. (pp. 18-19)

Fear of impotence and fear of authority go hand-in-glove throughout Hitchcock's films; the fact that he gives many of his heroes dominating mothers confirms the relation. In Notorious, Hitchcock centers on a destructive voyeurism ordered by the father-land in opposition to the universal Nazi chaos. It is significant of earlier Hitchcock, however, that the social background is merely a pretext for the hero's actions and is ignored when the personal problems reach a crisis. (p. 19)

In Topaz, Hitchcock reflects the freezing inhumanity of abstract power systems as well as an old man's sad regrets about romanticism. He extends the idea of voyeurism from the hero vs. spies pattern into a dizzying web of cross-references among the acts of a complex of people and governments. (pp. 19-20)

Though Hitchcock's vital concern is with the love relationships, the social background is given unusual, though not totally unprecedented, prominence. What emerges in the way of committed political statement, however, is very simple, and typical of Hitchcock throughout his career—anti-Fascism. Hitchcock has no sympathy for mass action beyond that of a man and woman: in fact he fears it. The thin line between Communism and Fascism is broken immediately, in the frightening images of tanks and artillery intercut with marching Russian masses under the credits. The French Communist's invoking "the final solution" confirms the paradox. (pp. 21-2)

Finally, a crucial point, the nature of the new Hitchcock hero. There is his insistence on social responsibility…. Patriotism gets short shrift in all of his films, especially in Topaz, because it … places its characters on the brink of world annihilation. In The Birds, the menace is totally irrational, a whim of nature. But the nihilistic political machinations in Topaz, which amount in the end to a monumental, unresolved, impotent truce with oblivion, are humanly-inspired.

In his last few films, Hitchcock seems to have been making a deliberate attempt to come to terms with the particular horror of modern society, with the banality of evil, not its romanticism. (p. 22)

Though the undercurrent of chaos in his films would seem to suggest it, Hitchcock is not precisely a determinist. The Jesuitical lucidity of his style is his defense against an irrationality he can never hope to resolve. His feelings are expressed not through the hazardous fluidity of an actor's presence, but through the orderly schematization of cause and effect. Hitchcock motivates his characters in his editing. And if, like the Jesuits, he is accused of casuistry, he will make no further argument. Hitchcock has never pretended that people can explain their suffering. (p. 23)