Hitchcocks selfappraisal was always precise rational deceptively unanswerable he was a man of reason and a craftsman of genius who liked to hear an audience scream He didnt deal in speculation abstraction or intellectual allusion and his assessment of his own screen characters was not exploratory He set his sights on film pure film and the most dispassionate mathematically calculable beauty of what a strip of film can be made to do to an audience 