Shadow of a Doubt

Hi Aki,

Well, You’ve seen that movie, right? All I can say is a couple things struck me as wrong notes. In general the movie is an example of prime Hitchcock in his film noir period of the late 40s.

But there are two lines offscreen in the beginning, that strike me as added by the producer, for added exposition, to make it even clearer where we are and who is who. I don’t think Hitchcock wanted them there, though it is possible.

The other thing was more fundamental. The girl Charlie has a sort of sixth sense, a premonition, a weird way of knowing what her uncle Charlie, the serial killer, is thinking. Now, this plot element is an extravagant one for a realistic filmmaker like Hitchcock. I don’t remember him ever using such a device in any other of his films. He is more likely to be debunking telepaths and psychics. This just isn’t his style.

More: he went to the real Santa Rosa California (Hitchcock loved to drive up and down the California coast on weekends or when he was in between films) and this location shooting gives the film an even firmer basis in realism, and the psychic ability stands out even more.

It would be one thing if the psychic stuff were the center of the film; it can be pretty powerful to make us believe in a realistic location, and then have a monster show up, or something alien or weird against the very-real backdrop. But that’s not how it works here. Instead the psychic angle seems to be thrown in only as a plot crutch: somehow the writers must get the girl to believe her beloved uncle is a murderer, even when the FBI are convinced another suspect, who died running away, was the real killer. And yet the girl has only circumstantial evidence, nothing that would stand up in a court of law. There are other ways they might have done it, but the psychic angle was the one they chose.

I think it could be argued against me that the point really lies in something the killer tells his neice, ‘Tear off the fronts of these houses and you find swine within, the world is ugly, monstrous.’ There is a sort of uneasy undercurrent running beneath this cheerful small town. One of Charlie’s classmates now works in a bar, and seems to be one sigh away from becoming a prostitute. Charlie’s dad and his pal like to read crime novels and invent ways to commit the perfect murder (this is played for laughs).

Young Charlie’s weird psychic attunement to her uncle indicates that perhaps she is not the sweet, bright girl she seems; that she might be just as bad as he is. In fact after he tries to kill her once, to shut her up, she tells him he better leave town, or she will kill him herself. She never does work any evil against him, but in the game of cat and mouse she plays with him, she proves as adept at lies and manipulation as he is.

There is also the image of old timers dancing a waltz, that just appears now and then, sometimes linking Charlie and her uncle. We will see her, dissolve to the image of the dancers, dissolve to uncle. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it.

It might be uncle’s memories from his youth, from the happy time he speaks of once (in the little back story we get of him, we are told he was a quiet, studious child, who crashed his bicycle and hit his head, and after this his personality changed; this also suggests that anyone can turn into a serial killer, as well as providing a very weak explanation for his crimes). it might merely represent a vertiginous state of mind, suggesting something going round and round and round, driving him to madness, to murder. I don’t know. It is another stylistic flourish quite unlike Hitchcock, and perhaps forced on him by skirball, the producer – though I think this is more likely to be from Hitchcock. He was doing some experimenting in this stage of his career – he would go on to do some experiments in extremely long takes in under capricorn and then in rope, a film constructed almost entirely out of camera-magazine-long, 11 minute takes, exhausting for crew and performers, which made for weaker performances. And just after Shadow, I think, Hitchcock did Strangers On a Train at Warner Brothers (Shadow is at Universal) which has a similar musical motif for a madman’s murders, an old music hall song that plays at a carnival while the killer strangles a girl – the killer in Shadow also strangles, and the papers refer to him as the ‘strong-handed strangler.’

Beautiful photography, fine cast, polished filmmaking. Just these things stand out. Three writers get credit, including Thornton Wilder, a famous novelist of the time who also gets a full title credit thanking him for his ‘participation’ in the film – what I guess from that is that it was his story and his idea, but Hitchcock changed the script enormously with the second screenwriter, and then patched it up with #3, Alma Reville, who was a longtime collaborator with Hitchcock (and his wife!). Whereupon mr wilder got angry, and producer skirball, not wishing the famous man to complain about the movie to the press, soothed wilder’s feathers with the big second credit.

But that’s conjecture on my part. I’m sure there are bios that tell the full story.

Oh yes: I looked up the film, and Hitchcock is said to have called this his favorite of all the movies he made in America. And another site tells me that Hitchcock acted as his own producer and got the film done the way he wanted, with no compromises. If true, I am wrong about the odd touched coming from someone else.

(written around 17 February 2009)