No other director so peerlessly combined craftsmanship and personality, popularity and genius. No one has touched the cool perfection of his best work. Naysayers dismiss Hitchcock for both his lurid subject matter and the technocratic assurance of his craftsmanship. They miss both the wit and the emotional complexity of his work. His films are always as funny as they are unnerving, and he rarely settled for a thrill ride or an easy shock.
Identification is always a vexing issue in Hitchcock.
Long after the shock of the shower scene has worn off, Psycho remains haunting, in part because Anthony Perkins is so disarming, so flustered and charming, in his conversations with Janet Leigh. Our sympathies shift from her to this puzzling, lonely man, until, of course, we realize what he really is. Hitchcock follows with a typically perverse joke at our expense, killing off every interesting character but this psychopath, so that by film's end Norman Bates is the only person we can side with. Hitchcock's morbid interest in drawing us into morally untenable positions reaches its zenith in Vertigo , among the greatest of all films. James Stewart's Scotty is both our point of identification and a profoundly disturbed man, a manipulative stalker who works out his own sexual obsessions on the person of a woman who is helplessly drawn to his machinations.