This is a wonderful Hitchcock film. You can instantly see that with the current desire of 1930's audiences for escapism and tabloidesque stories that Hitchcock would succeed in his industry. He’s capitalizing on the criminal stories frenzy and his camera techniques innovate the genre from mere shock and awe to actual suspense. He creates tension in his scenes through giving you most of the bits of information you need to know about a scenario thus causing you to clench up when the villains arrive because you know what could happen and may happen and he lets the scenes play out in this state of constant suspense rather than having things suddenly happen without your prior knowledge.
I will say though that the women in his films are treated like objects. And he definitely does not help their cause in this cultural battle of the time to define the role of women in pop culture. Hitchcock's female characters are weak, subservient and pretty piss poor. He was not on the revolutionary side of film as were the French filmmakers of the 1930’s. Hitchcock was 100 percent committed to the entrenchment of the Hollywood system in terms of their storylines and conventions on how characters should behave morally. However, he was highly innovative in the use of his camera and honestly helped develop the rules of filmmaking in creating tension and just proper editing in general. Hitchcock is kind of like Griffith in the sense that he helped create the rules for the artifice of filmmaking and storytelling through film.