Though Hitchcock's work remained out of the reach of fads, except to the extent to which he cast currently popular actors in his films, he absorbed as natural and fitting all of the technical changes of the decades through which he proceeded with his natural caution, like someone crossing a mine field, not because he was afraid of being blown up but because of his aversion to disorder of any sort….

Though Hitchcock pretended to consider himself a prude as movies became increasingly gamey, I suspect that the sex in his films will never look prudish. Hitchcock was a romantic. He loved sexual euphemism—the sudden burst of fireworks in "To Catch a Thief," the train barrelling into a tunnel in "North by Northwest." In the service of lesser filmmakers, such euphemisms look prudish. Not in Hitchcock's movies….

All of his films are sexually aware. That's very different from being sexually explicit, which is often the mask of profound ignorance. (p. 1)

To shock us, Hitchcock devoted himself largely to three kinds of films—the international spy thriller ("Saboteur," "Foreign Correspondent," "Notorious," "North by Northwest," etc.), the film about ordinary, down-home folks suddenly caught in a real horror story ("Shadow of a Doubt," "Strangers on a Train," etc.), and the film about elegant but recognizable people confronting some outrageously anti-social behavior ("Rear Window," "To Catch a Thief," etc.).

No Hitchcock film can be so neatly classified, though. He was always shifting things around….

There are no psychotics in either "Family Plot" or "The Birds." The quality they share with all of his greatest work is the way they manage to implicate everyone who watches them. This, I suppose, is what suspense is….

The difference between a Hitchcock film and a Hitchcockian film is, more often than not, Hitchcock's civilized irony, the courtly, discreet way he persuades us to watch the grisly shower-murder in "Psycho," which prompts us to laugh even as we gasp….

Hitchcock refused to squander his talents on other people's visions. In his old age he continued to make the kind of suspense films he might have made decades earlier, though the style had become simplified, compacted, refined. If he had been a novelist, one would be able to note the almost complete absence of adjectives and adverbs in his later novels. Hitchcock's vocabulary became such that he seldom had to modify anything. The nouns and the verbs he chose said everything.

Irony: To say one thing and mean another. In a Hitchcock film irony is the director's showing us one thing that has, for us in the audience, a dozen meanings not anywhere visible in the film frame. Hitchcock could load the audience with such information that, in "Shadow of a Doubt," a few bars from "The Merry Widow Waltz" become a death knell. We all know too much to be able to watch the film passively. The agony is exquisite….

Like the reading of good prose, the watching of a Hitchcock film has the effect of clearing the cobwebs out of our minds. His films prompt us to see, and to associate what we see with what we've already seen or haven't been allowed to see.

Could it possibly be that one of the reasons for Hitchcock's continued popularity is not that his films are "easy," which is to say obvious and simple-minded, but because they are complex? They require the audience's participation. They make us work, and we like it.

Subversive genius, Hitchcock….

His life—his obsessions, his phobias, his interests, his dreams—was in his films, all right, but it was not his style to call attention to it. His movies say all he has to say. (p. 19)