Was Alfred Hitchcock a sexual monster? Or was he, as the French film makers Rohmer and Chabrol once claimed, a moralist whose films are steeped in Roman Catholic themes?

Whatever his achievement as an artist, the personal reputation of Alfred Hitchcock remains the subject of heated dispute. Glance at biographies of the British director and two wildly differing Hitchcocks emerge. Donald Spoto's highly readable The Dark Side of Genius: the Life of Alfred Hitchcock portrays a frustrated lecher who delights in torturing his leading blondes. Yet in Patrick McGilligan's later, authoritative, 818-page Alfred Hitchcock: a Life in Darkness and Light, Hitchcock appears as an iconoclastic if ultimately devout Roman Catholic whose entire oeuvre is "suffused" with a profound Catholicism.

"His Catholicism is overt on a superficial and a profund level" McGilligan claims. "On a superficial level, he is irreverent: think, for example, of the false nun with high heels in The Lady Vanishes. On a profound level, the Catholicism is conscious. A constant theme in the Hitchcock film is the wrong person being caught by the police, and convicted. The police in his movies are often stupid, and Hitchcock was not prepared – with the exception of The Paradine Case (1947) - to let his villains go to court. Often they precipitate their own demise. Hitchcock was strongly opposed to capital punishment and his films question the infallibility of earthly justice as opposed to God's justice"

I Confess, Hitchcock's one explicitly Catholic film pivots on the question of the limits of earthly justice. Released in 1953, and sometimes dubbed the "forgotten" Hitchcock, it is the Quebec-set story of a young Catholic priest (played by the dashing Montgomery Clift) who hears a confession of murder in the confessional, and is later framed for the crime. Bound by the confessional seal, he cannot reveal the truth in court.

"This is the most Catholic of Hitchcock's films" says the film critic Father Peter Malone MSC, who deals with Hitchcock's Catholicism in his book Through a Catholic Lens: Religious Perspectives of 19 Film Directors from Around the World. "But there is a lot of Catholicism explicitly and with images in The Wrong Man (1956). Everybody notes Hitchcock’s strong sense of sin and guilt (and some kind of expiation) which also influenced the films of Claude Chabrol considerably. This may be due to his Jesuit education and their strong use of casuistic moral theology (case studies and focus on individual situations as well as general principles). I am wary of all the talk about "Catholic guilt" these days but if someone did seem to have this sense (but with forgiveness) it is Hitchcock."

The Jesuit film expert, Father Dermot Preston, argues that this nuanced view of the human condition is highly Catholic: "In a Hitchcock film, personalities are always cast as various shades on the middle part of the spectrum, avoiding the plastercast saint and the personification of evil: clean-cut James Stewart in Rear Window (1954) starts out as a rather uncommitted and morally neutral observer of life and learns in a hard way that he cannot be so.”

"In a secular world, his characters are very Catholic," agrees Father Richard Blake SJ, author of Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers. “They actively pursue their own “salvation” in trying circumstances. They get into a pickle and depend on themselves to get out of it. There is no Protestant “by faith alone” at work here. When most threatened, the character is alone; salvation is assured when he works his way back into a community, for instance in Rear Window or North By Northwest (1959)."

Born into a devoutly Roman Catholic family in the East End of London in 1899, Alfred Hitchcock was the nephew of a priest, and according to McGilligan, continued to go to Mass for most of his adult life. He would invite priest friends onto film sets, gave money to Catholic causes and even donated a vineyard to a community of Californian priests.

"For Hitchcock Catholicism was something he was born with, as others might be born with red hair. It did not phase him" claims John Russell Taylor, Hitchcock's first and only authorised biographer (Hitch: the Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock, 1978). "He was certainly esctatic when his daughter Pat married a nephew of the Catholic archbishop of Boston. I don't know how devout he was, but he certainly remained a Catholic."

Interviewed in 1973 for the magazine of his Jesuit alma mater St Ignatius College, Hitchcock shied from defining his faith explaining: "A claim to be religious rests entirely on your own conscience, whether you believe or not. A Catholic attitude was indoctrinated into me. After all I was born a Catholic. I went to a Catholic School and I now have a conscience with lots of trials over belief," he said. Claiming his Jesuit schooling had developed his "reasoning powers" but also "a sense of fear", Hitchcock would relate a celebrated incident where he had to choose the exact time for a beating, according to the Jesuit system where the master who ordered a punishment was not allowed to personally inflict it. This incident, Hitchcock alleged was "in a minor way" like going through a form of execution.

Father Blake believes Hitchcock exaggerated the impact of his schooling: "His 14 months as a day student at St Ignatius could scarcely have had the formative influence he let others claim for him. I find his Irish Catholicism in London more telling: a bit paranoid, a bit of the outsider."

Whatever its source, and McGilligan has found no evidence that Hitchcock experienced anti-Catholic discrimination, "the secret to Hitchcock is fear" claims Russell Taylor."But he was not interested in analysing the motives for his work on screen." He dismisses the view that Hitchcock enjoyed inflicting torture on his leading actresses: "The characters Hitchcock most identified with in his films were the women not the men. Normally he told me he was able to leave the film behind in the studio and go home, but when he was making The Birds (1963) he started sleeping badly and wanted, for the first time in his life, to change the script. Obviously he was identifying with Tippi Hedren in her situation."

"The violence in Hitchcock was only really in two or three films, and relates to his idee fixe of trying to capture the mind of a psychopath, something I believe was rooted in his fascination with Jack the Ripper who was based in the East End where Hitchcock grew up" argues McGilligan.

"In Frenzy (1972) only the first murder is portrayed graphically, the second merely suggested. This is way that Hitchcock liked to work." Hitchcock himself spoke of the "tremendous amount of trouble" he had taken to avoid "bad taste" in Frenzy, explaining that in a scene which involved removing the body of a naked woman from a truck, he had insisted she be covered by potatos and that her arms should be crossed over her chest to avoid the audience viewing "the full body."

"Hitch had a puritanical side," confirms Russell Taylor. “In Psycho (1960) for example, he used a body double as far as possible for the shower scene on the grounds that you didn't want to show the body of the star more than was necessary.” Alongside this puritanical streak, was humour, and what Russell Taylor describes as a "Victorian" taste for the practical joke.

"He retained a sense of naughtiness right until the end, In his last film Family Plot (1976) he was very excited about the bit where a bishop was kidnapped in the middle of Mass. This appealed to his sense of mischief."