What interests Hitchcock? Not precisely character: he creates it, and his flair for casting sustains it, but it is character directed to the ends of a limited dramatic situation, star personality cut to size, Not, certainly, professional crime, the mechanics of a bank robbery or the operations of a spy ring. Professionalism hints at routine, and Hitchcock's is the art of the unexpected—a celebration of that jarring moment when, walking in the dark down a staircase which you know every foot of the way, you suddenly hit bottom one step too soon. When Hitchcock talks of his own technique, it is often in terms of a deliberate avoidance of cliché. (p. 161)

What does, then, interest this bland, smooth man? The quirkish, English Hitchcock and the American Hitchcock who deals in the twists and turns of the mind are not perhaps as far apart as they seem. Humour at one end, monomania at the other, are alike in disturbing equilibrium and order. Hitchcock is fascinated, one deduces, by the way unreason keeps breaking in, by the ease with which system can be overturned. But it's the dark of the mind rather than of the soul that concerns him: his own position is that of the rational man for whom the world is a place of sublime and alluring unreason. A smashed cup, however, gives him more to work with than a smashed city; and a weakness of The Birds … is that it seems to be reaching out, however half-heartedly, towards some kind of larger significance….

[Two] things become evident. Firstly that the crows and gulls, however well trained, must have been the very devil of a nuisance….

Secondly, the bird—people relationship remains precarious and tenuous. Admirers have made resolute efforts to forge links by pointing out that the mother weakens under fire while the girl stands up to it, and someone has even claimed that Annie, the school-teacher, gets pecked to death because she hasn't been properly attuned to life. (This seems a bit hard on Annie, but no matter.) I would strongly suspect that Hitchcock, a realist in most things, has got precisely the measure of his problem….

A little obscurity, however, does wonders for a contemporary film. If The Birds is really intended as a doomsday fantasy, one can only say that it's a lamentably inadequate one. But why not try the birds as the Bomb; or as creatures from the subconscious; or start from the other end, with Tippi Hedren as a witch? One could work up a pretty theory on any of these lines, if only one could suppress a conviction that Hitchcock's intention was an altogether simpler one…. And a director who has told us so often that his interest lies in the way of doing things, not in the moral of a story, invites us to take him at his own valuation. One stumbling block finally stands in the way of abstractions, metaphysical or otherwise Hitchcock's own intense concern for the concrete, and a sneaking suspicion that the best critic of Hitchcock is Hitch himself. (p. 164)