Shadow of a Doubt

Well, since I can't get to sleep, I'll get Easter off to an early start by writing a comment on Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943). I watched this film for the third time on TCM, and it just gets better with each viewing. Of the 26 Hitchcocks I've seen to date, it may very well be my favorite, or at least in the top five. I already did a bit of a discussion of this film in my roasting of The Stepfather, a low-rent '80s remake/rip-off, so forgive me if I have nothing new or insightful to say on the film. Certainly it's been analyzed and reviewed to death already, but in my insomniac state I might as well give it a go.

Young Charlie Newton (Theresa Wright) is a teenaged girl in the small-town of Santa Rosa, California, bored with her staid small-town life. As if by a "miracle", the family receives a visit from Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), young Charlie's namesake and the charming, successful brother of her mother Emma (Patricia Collinge). The family and community give Charlie a warm welcome, but the arrival of a pair of detectives posing as surveymen (Macdonald Carey and Wallace Ford) and some decidedly strange behavior by Uncle Charlie make young Charlie suspicious. It turns out that Uncle Charlie is a serial killer, the "Merry Widow Murderer", and Charlie is torn towards her affection for one of the detectives and love of her Uncle. Pretty soon, however, Uncle Charlie's psychosis boils to the surface, and his niece must find a way to drive him out of town - and keep herself alive in the process.

Shadow of a Doubt is among the first films to really explore the underbelly of small-town America. As cliched and overexposed an idea this is nowadays, it was certainly novel and shocking at the time. With the help of playwright Thornton Wilder (Our Town), Hitchcock constructs a dark, gothic film that defies categorization - horror film? family melodrama? film noir? thriller? satire? - showing the horrors and dirt lurking in the corners of the most sterile American household.

The character of Uncle Charlie is one of Hitchcock's greatest creations. He is, as others have commented, an evil, ominous, even vampiric figure: earning his lifeblood of women, hiding in the shadows (with his private compartment on the lengthy train journey), his charm and influence over his sister and others in the small town, refusing to be photographed - he's an evil presence who has slipped into an idyllic small town without them noticing, and now that he's here there's little chance of him leaving. Through the course of the film, cracks in his charming facade gradually emerge, most notably in several misogynist and nihilistic rants worthy of August Strindberg, raging against the evil of a world he sees as "a foul sty... a hell" - but it seems only Charlie (and perhaps her brainy little sister Ann (Edna May Winnacot)) has a true understanding of his nature. The relationship between the two Charlies is decidedly uncomfortable, bordering on the incestuous, giving an even more repulsive and disturbing undertone to the storyline. The film implies that an accident as a child unhinged him, but as the film presents him, Uncle Charlie - charming, handsome, successful, but also a cold-blooded killer keeping his hatreds and neuroses close to his chest - is Evil Incarnate.

The film also functions as a satire of small-town, middle-class American values - an odd choice of target for the British Hitchcock, but one he succeeds with completely. Charlie's inert and boring father (Henry Travers) endlessly talks about murders with his bothersome friend Herbie (Hume Cronyn), completely unaware of the successful murderer in their very midst - Hitchcockian black humor at its finest. Charlie's mother Emma is an almost tragic figure: Enraptured by the return of her beloved brother, seemingly not all there mentally, she clings onto an illusory happiness. The nuclear family is revealed as being a simmering , and Charlie only helps to bring these to the surface. Emma is more than a bit facetious when she tells the detectives that "We're not a normal American family"; it's hard to argue against the assertion. Long before David Lynch's Blue Velvet and Desperate Housewives, Hitchcock shows us that beneath even the most idyllic small town lurk hidden desires, repressions, and dangers.

Hitchcock is at his best directorially. It's not his most flashy film but he certainly adapts well to the material. He gives Charlie a clear aura of evil throughout with his shadowy cinematography, and manages to make the most "normal" of American households look menacing. Dimitri Tiomkin creates a moody, effective score that enhances the movie's atmosphere immeasuribly.

The cast is generally solid. Joseph Cotten is not an actor I'm inordinately fond of, but cast very much against type as Charlie, he gives by far his best performance. He is subtle and restrained to the extreme, making Charlie's slow unravelling all the more unsettling. Theresa Wright gives a lovely performance as the younger Charlie, in an intelligent, loving and restless girl caught in an impossible situation. The supporting cast varies in quality: Hume Cronyn and Henry Travers provide some great moments of comedy, and Patricia Collinge is effective as Charlie's confused Mother, but Macdonald Carey and Wallace Ford as the two detectives are stiff, and the romance subplot between Carey and Wright seems awkward and only detracts from the main story.

Shadow of a Doubt is simply one of the greats. I hesitate at listing it as my favorite Hitchcock film (though it's up there with Strangers on a Train, Rope, and Frenzy), but it's definitely on the short list. A film that gets better with each successive viewing is certainly a worthy contender for such a title.

Rating: 9/10 - Highest Recommendation (awful close to a 10)