MUBI

The very first Alfred Hitchcock movie I saw when I was young was The Birds. It sucked, and it put me off of his movies for a very long time. It’s only been since a few months ago that I’ve started combing through his back catalog and began understanding what a master of the art of cinema he really was. And of the movies I’ve seen of his since that time, I think that Shadow of a Doubt might just be my favorite.

The basic premise is this: A man who is on the run for strangling wealthy widows and taking their jewelry decides to dodge the heat by staying with his dopey suburban sister and her husband and kids for a while. As the movie wears on, the oldest child, Charlie, begins to suspect that uncle Charlie(who she is named after) might not be the wholesome, worldly man that he presents himself as, and her suspicions eventually escalate into bringing down a full-fledged campaign of terror from her murderous uncle.

There’s more to it than that, though. Charlie and Charlie are two sides of the same coin. In the very beginning, girl Charlie is morose, thinking of how much better her family would be if her uncle came to visit. She hears that she has a letter from him down at the post-office and frantically asks the postmaster if she’s heard of something called telepathy, since that seems like the only way her uncle would know she wanted him there. Direct communication from soul to soul, mind to mind.

For these two characters are connected intimately. They are a literal representation of yin and yang, darkness and light; young Charlie boundlessly compassionate and optimistic, old Charlie existing in a perpetual state of wrathful ennui. Either could have gone on existing in their respective universes without meeting each other-old Charlie is smart enough to avoid the police without needing to hide out at his sister’s-but once these ways of being clash it is impossible for both of them to exist in the same periphery.

Someone is going to have to die.

Hitchcock does an amazing job exploring the nature of evil in this film. There’s a subplot with young Charlie’s father constantly discussing with his weird little friend the ways in which they might murder each other, as a recreational activity. Ugliness is so far from their lives that they consider the whole idea of killing to be not only absurd, but rather a fun, abstract thought exercise. They haven’t the faintest idea that an evil presence has been summoned into their lives, one for whom their idle ramblings are very much important considerations.

And make no mistake, Charlie the older is summoned. He is the shadow cast by younger Charlie’s shining light, an answered cry for understanding that speaks its language in a dazed and wretched tongue. “We’re more than just an ordinary niece and uncle,” Charlie the younger says early on. “We’re almost like twins!” And though they start at opposite poles, they find that the only way their opposite can be destroyed is through assuming their traits. For one this is common knowledge used incorrectly; for another it is learned, and learned brutally. There is no victory when it comes to evil as pure as this, for even when it is exposed and scrubbed away it leaves eternal scars on something. Your relationships, or your body, or your state of mind.

Some things, once known, cannot be unknown, cannot have their significance removed. It takes an evil person to manipulate that knowledge; it takes a virtuous one to render it null.

Despite a stellar performance by Joseph Cotton and the solid (albeit not great) direction of Hitchcock, I found this film slightly underwhelming. It is more of a character study than a film which depends on a story and as such I just found that it had not enough going for it. It was pretty obvious from the get go that Cotton is the suspect and it would have been great if Hitchcock chose to toy with out expectations and ‘doubts’ a little bit more, making it harder to tell what is the truth and what just the hysteria of young Charlie. Also, I think that Teresa Wright did not carry her role sufficiently enough. Having a murderous Uncle in your house would usually cause unbearable levels of distress and trauma but she underplays it and seems only slightly alienated and uncomfortable. Imagine a young Vivien Leigh or Bette Davis in the same role, that would have been a fantastic psychological thriller.

Kudos to Hitch for the non-Hollywood ending and many modern movies could help themselves taking some inspiration from that style instead of dragging on into oblivious happy endings.

All in all, still a Hitchcock, still a Cotton, still a very good movie but no the masterpiece I expected it to be.

Alfred Hitchcock’s first real American film is also one of the best American films ever made—it’s certainly a film that couldn’t have been set anywhere else in the world. Not because of the quaint small town images such as a pie cooling on a windowsill, but because Hitchcock knew that behind every picture-perfect community lay a vulnerability to evil, that behind every dream was a reality beckoning to pop it like a lit cigarette to a balloon—and this fragile romanticism is something that exists only in America. The snake in the Garden of Eden comes in the form of the deliciously nasty Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten, proving that when given a great role he can hold a candle or two to his great friend Orson Welles—to hear him spit out the word “peaceful” as if it were sour milk is heaven to my ears), who attempts to educate his beloved niece in the ways of the poisonous world he lives in—and Cotten is so good at playing oily that you almost believe his rants about the world being a “foul sty.” On the outside, the romanticism of SHADOW OF A DOUBT might seem overbearing to a modern audience, but the message is as timely as ever: that there may be a war going on overseas, but the greatest evil starts at home.