Shadow of a Doubt

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) 

Notable cast/crew: Teresa Wright as Charlie.  Joseph Cotten as Uncle Charlie.  Henry Travers as Joseph Newton.  Patricia Collinge as Emma Newton.  Hume Cronyn as Herbie Hawkins.  He also appeared in Lifeboat and would help write Rope and Under Capricorn.  Wallace Ford as Fred Saunders.  Thornton Wilder contributed as a writer.  Dmitri Tiomkin scored the film, the first of four he would score for Hitchcock.

Running time: 108 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Plot: Charlie Oakley is on the run from unnamed pursuers.  He's flush with cash and decides to head to the small town of Santa Rosa to lie low.  His namesake, his niece Charlie Newton, gets the idea at the same time, that she's bored with life in Santa Rosa and would like to see her uncle.  She's elated to find out via a telegraph he'd already sent that he's soon to arrive.  The family picks him up at the train station, and it's clear he has a close connection with Charlie.

Pardon me; I have a train to catch

He gives his niece a ring which she notices has an inscription in it.  He claims the jeweler rooked him and sold him a used piece, but it clearly upsets him more than it should.  Niece Charlie gets the "Merry Wives of Windsor" waltz stuck in her head which again unnerves her uncle.  Family friend Herbie Hawkins arrives to discuss his hobby, the perfect murder, with Charlie's father, Joseph.  While they're outside, Uncle Charlie sees something in the paper that disturbs him, and he takes the page out so no one sees it.

Charlie notices the page and playfully teases her uncle that she knows his secret: that there's something in the paper about him that he didn't want anyone to see.  He again reacts strongly but convinces her to drop it.  The next morning his sister, Charlie's mother, tells him there are men taking a government survey who want to interview them and take their picture for a program they're doing.  Uncle Charlie wants no part of it.

Charlie figures out the men are really detectives.  She confronts one of them, and he explains they're looking for a killer on the loose who may be her uncle.  There's a second suspect back East, but they aren't certain which of them is the killer so both men are being tracked.  Charlie begins to suspect her uncle given all of his suspicious behavior so she goes to the library to look up the newspaper from the day prior to see what it was her uncle was hiding from them.

The article is a notice of a manhunt for the Merry Widow Murderer, a man who had strangled three rich widows and taken their money.  The latest victim's initials match the inscription inside Charlie's ring.  At dinner that night, Uncle Charlie makes a blatant diatribe against old, rich women even questioning their humanity.  Herbie arrives to talk to Joseph, and their discussion of murder disturbs Charlie enough that she runs out on dinner.  Uncle Charlie goes after her to talk to her.  He gives her a lecture on his view of the world: it's a sty, and the people in it are swine.

He all but confesses to her, and he resolves to leave if she will just give him a few days' head start before she tells the detectives.  In the interim, the other suspect was killed and dismembered in an airplane accident, and the authorities have assumed he was the killer.  Uncle Charlie is delighted he's off the hook, but Charlie knows better.  She tells him to leave, but he's decided to settle down there in town.  She threatens to kill him herself if he doesn't leave.  He tries to kill her by locking her in the garage with the car running, but Herbie notices the exhaust and alerts the family.  Uncle Charlie decides to leave town.

He has Charlie accompany him onto the train to see him off.  Uncle Charlie detains her until the train starts to depart.  He attempts to kill her by throwing her from the train, but in the struggle she pushes him from the train.  He falls onto the tracks as another train approaches from the other direction and is killed.

MacGuffin: None

Hitchcock cameo: Playing cards on the train to Santa Rosa

Hitchcock themes: 

• Identity
• Murder
• Suave villain

Verdict: This was Hitchcock's favorite film.  He loved the thought of bringing menace into a small town according to his daughter, Pat Hitchcock.  In the score, Dmitri Tiomkin quotes the famous "Merry Widow Waltz" of Franz Lehár as a leitmotif for Uncle Charlie and his serial murders.  During the opening credits, the waltz theme is heard along with a prolonged shot of couples dancing and is referenced several times throughout the film, ultimately at his death.

There is an overhead shot early in the film when Uncle Charlie is being chased that became a staple of Hitchcock films.  The camera is high above the action giving almost a God's eye view.  He'd use this again all the way up to his last movie, Family Plot.

The rest of the film is more of a character study, and Joseph Cotten is riveting as Uncle Charlie.  His two monologues late in the film take what had been a charming, affable character and pulls down the mask to reveal a man who hates the world and despises the people in it.  Cotten was a close friend of Hitchcock's, and he does an excellent job in the role playing against type.  The rest of the cast works well enough, but are mostly serviceable playing people from a small town.  Hume Cronyn stands out in his film debut as a nebbishy man obsessed with a murder he'd never be capable of committing.  There is an interesting contrast there between him and Cotten who actually is a murderer but never speaks of it.

The film is solid enough, but feels a bit too slowly paced at times.  It doesn't hold up under repeated viewings like Vertigo or Psycho do, largely because we don't get more than a glimpse of the real Uncle Charlie.  Worth a watch for Cotten's performance, though.

Out of five bananas, I give it:

Next review: Lifeboat