During a career that spanned five decades, Hitchcock directed fifty-three feature films. He has been both hailed as a master technician and lambasted for caring too much about technique and not enough about the characters in his film. Despite the praise and many awards he has received, Hitchcock, for some critics, falls short of being "an artist." As William S. Pechter averred in his Twenty-four Times a Second, "[Hitchock's] films veer schizophrenically toward empty entertainment on the one hand, and something like art on the other." Other critics, however, have looked more deeply into the director's films to find a unifying and fascinating preoccupation. Robin Wood, writing in the International Directory of Films and Filmmakers, asserted that in Hitchcock there is "so much more than the skillful entertainer and master-craftsman he was once taken for. His films overall represent an incomparable exposure of the sexual tensions and anxieties (especially male anxieties) that characterize a culture built upon repression, sexual inequality, and the drive to domination." In addition to the sexual tones in many of his films, however, are the distinctive preoccupations with feelings of guilt and fear.
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