Quote Originally Posted by Jonathan View Post
It's his characters who are like that. And in my opinion, he does the mystery thing better than most people. His characters ask reasonable questions, and the plots make sense much more than those of lesser directors.
That's the essence of our disagreement. I don't think it's accurate to think of "his" characters at all. He did not write the vast majority of his scripts, and I haven't seen evidence that he cared about character development much. Rather than "his characters", I think it's much more accurate to think of "his scenes". He seemed much more interested - not only in those clips - to discuss how to construct a scene, rather than how to develop a character. Of course, his films are "concrete" in terms of plot rather than "vague" or "abstract" like Fellini's or, say, Godard's, but I think it's just wrong to attribute to Hitchcock's type traits observed in the characters of his movies.