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How conscious all this was it is impossible to say. What is clear, looking back over the 53 films Hitchcock made, is that central to his accomplishment was his utterly unforgettable imagery. The boy unknowingly carrying a bomb on the bus in Sabotage; the chases that bring pursuer and pursued to final grips in such unlikely places as the British Museum (Blackmail), the Statue of Liberty (Saboteur), Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest) and on a runaway carrousel (Strangers on a Train). Recall the crows gathering menacingly in a playground behind the unseeing Tippi Hedren in The Birds, or Jimmy Stewart wrestling with his fear in a church steeple in order to rescue his lost love at the end of Vertigo. There is Cary Grant climbing the stairs to bring Joan Fontaine a glass of milk?or is it poison??in Suspicion. There is sweet Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt musing about women in a small town kitchen as Hitchcock deftly uses light and a simple camera move to bring out the evil implications of his seemingly innocent speech.
These enduring vignettes all reflect Hitchcock's central preoccupation: the intrusion of the anarchical, the evil, on great symbols of order (such as a society's revered monuments) or on the pleasantly quotidian (amusment park, playground, church, home). Born the son of a lower-middle-class London shopkeeper and reared as a Catholic, Hitchcock discovered early on that original sin was very likely an immutable concept, that bourgeois security was perhaps all too mutable. He never quite got over the shock.
The convenient anecdotes he liked to relate ? being locked in a jail cell for five minutes, so he would know what happened to bad little boys, his fear of canings at his Jesuit preparatory school ? may not have shaped him totally. But surely he sensed, as he studied commercial art in his young manhood, that through art, it was possible to order things more agreeably than reality does.
This probably explains the routines he insisted upon in daily life (when traveling, he always stayed in the same rooms in the same hotels) and his methodical working style (he worked from outlines that would run to 100 pages and have every cut and angle planned). His subject might be the desperate improvisations of people whose world had collapsed, but there would be no improvisations on his sets. Surely the director's reverence for order explains the great sighing relief that attended the ending of every Hitchcock film. In his art, at least, he would resolve all ambiguity, banish the encircling darkness.
His idea of happiness, Hitchcock once said, was "a clear horizon, no clouds, no shadows. Nothing." Given a choice, it seems possible that he would have cho sen to live in a blank world rather than a chance universe, where the evil and the unexpected? perhaps they were the same thing to him ? could suddenly crowd in upon one, where everyone knew he was guilty of something, if not necessarily what he was being punished for. It is a measure of his achievement that he lit erally made light of these dark feelings, miraculously transforming them into deft and graceful popular art that permitted the world to laugh, however nervously, at the demons that pursue every feeling man and woman.