“Hitchcock's camera discovers in Tippi Hedren an exemplar of the difficulty and pain of expressing love. She is quite pretty, but we do not take easy pleasure in viewing her. She does not repel us and we are not unsympathetic to her, but something calls upon us to keep our distance. Indeed, the camera moves us too close and confronts us with our wish to avoid intimacy with her. Hitchcock calls upon us to acknowledge film's ordinary avoidance of intimacy, and our own in our ordinary lives. Is it that we are fearful that our appetite for love is so voracious that we do not dare give in to it at all? The Birds and Marnie, his two last masterpieces, are infused with a deep sense of loss, an urgency, and an emotional directness that set them apart from all other Hitchcock films. They declare something about the human need for love that was always implicit in his work. Hitchcock's subsequent films-- Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1968), Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976)--make no further declarations of such an order.” --William Rothman