When it came to the mechanics of suspense, there was perhaps no better technician than Mr. Alfred Hitchcock. The central figures in Hitchcock's cinematic canon each have everyday, ordinary occupations - from Farley Granger's tennis professional in 1951's Strangers on a Train to man-of-the-cloth Montgomery Clift in I Confess (1952), a crippled photographic journalist (James Stewart) in Rear Window (1954), an advertising man ( Cary Grant) in North by Northwest (1959), a spoiled society gal (Tippi Hedren) in The Birds (1963) - which all collapse under their feet as they descend into the most nightmarish scenarios.
The nightmares in a Hitchcock production have no social basis ; they are never concerned with the characters' relations with the material world. Rather, they are concerned with the fragility of the characters' own personality and identity and with the horrors that are deep-seated in their own psyches. Thus the priest of I Confess, the tennis player of Strangers on a Train and the ad-man of North by Northwest effectively take on the appearance of guilty men. The girl in the The Birds is accused of being a witch and responsible for the deadly plague of attacking birds. The temporary invalid of Rear Window becomes a voyeur, while the policeman (James Stewart) of Vertigo is a seeming necrophiliac as he morbidly tries to remake a shop-girl he picks up (Kim Novak) into the image of his (as he supposes) dead love. In Marnie (1964) the hero (Sean Connery perversely attempts to rape an inveterate liar and thief ,Tippi Hedren) into normality. In Hitchcock's bleakest film, The Wrong Man (1957), an unassuming bass player (Henry Fonda ) is falsely identified as an armed robber; slowly and deliberately the judicial process locks him into this role, his family disintegrates under the experience and his wife (Vera Miles) retreats into madness. Most famously and stirring of all, in Psycho (1960), a girl (Janet Leigh) who steals for love - is hacked to her death by a knife-wielding maniac (Anthony Perkins) who finally assumed the catatonic role of his mummified mother. Hitchcock the jocose master of suspense, bores deep into anxieties and fantasies no more remote than a newspaper's headlines.