Raymond Durgnat delineates the many facets of Alfred Hitchcock's prolific career and the controversies that these have aroused among the critics -- critics who have seen Hitchcock as master of the aesthetic "touch" and who prefer his English to his American period, or those for whom Hitchcock is a dark Roman Catholic moralist.Durgnat's Hitchcock is a fascinating mixture of contrarieties. He tends to admire Hitchcock for his ability to tell a story and to control and manipulate order so that he can play his audience with suspence, for his "rare sense of how far dramatic conflicts can be...