I suppose it could have been revolutionary at the time but what's keeping it on the top 250? Yes I agree that there is nothing wrong with treasuring a classic but to me, this movie had average writing, average suspense, and a sudden convoluted ending. A fair escapist thriller but not much more.
shareI suppose it could have been revolutionary at the time but what's keeping it on the top 250?
No, most viewers didn't appreciate it any more than you do. Like you, they were gulled into thinking that it's an "average thriller" when it's actually a horror/thriller masquerading as an average thriller. The Shadow of a Doubt has a double meaning (just as the movie itself is riddled with doubles). In addition to the obvious reference to doubt about whether Uncle Charlie murdered someone or not, the title points to young Charlie's doubts about her own goodness as she endeavors to destroy the one she loves most and who is most like herself.
Because the dialogue sparkles with wit and philosophical meaning.
I'm a fountain of bloodshare
In the shape of a girl
Because there's so much going on beneath the surface. It's a tight, neatly-written and very well-paced suspense film, but it wouldn't be much more than that were it not for the script's myriad subtexts--the rather odd bond between the two Charlies being just the most obvious.
I just watched this again last night, and one thing that struck me in a way I hadn't really so much noticed before is a plot point that--to a modern audience anyway--is so obvious it tends not to be given much thought, and yet it's a point that provides a good bit of the underlying crux of the story.
Think about it: just what is it that Uncle Charlie is doing to come by the pretty fabulous amounts of money these middle-aged widows are tossing at him? Clearly it's for more than flattery and some charming words--it's something very primal, very adult and 'bad': he's sleeping with them (a fact that certainly couldn't be stated directly, and couldn't even be too heavily inferred in a 1943 Hays Code mainstream film, and yet is potently there nonetheless); and it's in no small measure this taint of 'abberant' and impure, sterile sexuality that Uncle Charlie brings with him and infects the nice 'normal' family-based world of Santa Rosa with--not that it isn't infected already in some of its darker places, as Hitchcock and Wilder slyly suggest--that helps give the film some of its under-the-radar tensions.
More importantly, it's a taint that threatens to infect young Charlie, a girl on the brink of sexual maturity, and who's most especially vulnerable to her uncle's charms; she's a girl who clearly isn't satisfied with leading a sleepy, mundane small-town existence, and by implication has not much interest in growing up to become the married and over-worked nullity her mother has turned into. Young Charlie loves her mother, but doesn't want to be her, just as Uncle Charlie seems to have had no desire to end up part of quotidian middle-class America either. This forms part of the bond between them, and that bond is further underscored by sexual attraction--only dimly understood by young Charlie, at least initially, but understood all too well by her very wordly uncle. It's part of the function of the character of Jack, that his attraction to Charlie begins to cause her to decipher what some of her feelings for her handsome and virile uncle consist of--feelings that are utterly wrong by the standards of her world, and can't be allowed to be acted on or even continue. It's an illness that has to be fought against, even as her uncle has been incapable of fighting off the illness--mental or spiritual, or both--that's consumed him, and that partly (it's somewhat suggested) comes from a corrupted and unnatural expression of physical love. This, as much as the horrifying discovery that her beloved relative is a cold-blooded murderer, is the impetus that drives young Charlie to the realization that her uncle must go, in one way or another, if she is to grow up into a normal life.
It's a trope in Hitchcock's films that there's usually a male-female pairing that carries a strong undercurrent of eroticism, generally of an implicitly 'perverse' variety. This film is no exception to that, and in fact uses the trope in possibly the most insidious manner it's ever been employed in one of his films.
Add to this the hints--sometimes playful (Herb and Joe's incessant ghoulish murder scenarios), sometimes disturbing (fallen girl Louise, the waitress in the seedy nightspot that exists right in the very heart of town)--of corruption and malice that reside in the midst of a pastoral daydream of small-town life; and the character of Emma Newton, an average mother who momentarily reveals herself as a woman lost and bewildered even to her own understanding, and you wind up with a story that offers up a good deal more than the straightforward thriller that a cursory glance at the film promises. And there are more subtexts to be gleaned even than these in a careful viewing.
Shadow of a Doubt is complex and rich in its themes, and gives much more for the imagination to feed on than a mere mystery film could ever provide; and it's a major reason why the film continues to hold such a powerful attraction for many even today.
After pages of posts from the bewildered, at last three that begin to approach and unravel the layers of fascinating mystery in this film!
shareI love this film. In some ways it's one of the least 'Hitchcockian' of his films, in that it carries little of the visual tics associated with his work; and yet, in terms of the psycho-sexual tensions it generates, it is quite possibly the most purely reflective of its director's personal obsessions.
Hitchcock and Thornton Wilder seem to have worked together hand-in-glove beautifully in creating this film, and it's a bit of a shame they never worked on another project together.
Yes, it is noticeable, as you say, how few of Hitchcock’s recurrent visual and thematic motifs we see here.
There are little things like the handsome and charming villain arriving by train in disguise under a plume of black smoke, his previous address having been Number 13. More seriously, we see weak men and one strong (brunette) woman in an old house that becomes a place of menace, charged with incestuous passion, where food and death coincide. We get blackmail, guilt, confession and retribution.
That may sound a lot, and is quite enough to make a powerful film, but it still leaves out a great deal of what the world expects from Hitchcock. No blonde in her undies? No chase?
PS And yes, Uncle Charlie is one of the most sexually tortured of Hitchcock’s villains. Being fatally drawn both to rich widows and to the virgin daughter of your beloved elder sister is a heavy cross to bear. Heavier perhaps than the simpler and more showy compulsions of Norman Bates in “Psycho” or Bob Rusk in “Frenzy”?
That may sound a lot, and is quite enough to make a powerful film, but it still leaves out a great deal of what the world expects from Hitchcock. No blonde in her undies? No chase?
Yes, much of the force in this film comes from its shrewd exploration of the evil lurking in the human psyche. And yes, to do so both Wilder and Hitchcock, consciously or not, had only to look within.
Subtly, we are shown some of the roots of Charles Oakley’s pitiable but lethal urges, without the plonkingly dull pseudo-scientific “explanations” that mar such works as “Spellbound”, “Psycho” and “Marnie”.
The youngest child, physically attractive with winning ways, who soon becomes aware of his ability to manipulate. The pretty but not so bright elder sister who dotes on him, quite unaware of the incestuous subtext. The family myth, that they were all so happy together in idyllic Burnham Street, St Paul, Minnesota. The family falsification, that his personality changed after a bump on the head as a kid.
Of course these four known factors will not on their own make you a serial killer and would-be niece ravisher. There is more amiss in hapless Uncle Charlie’s head.
PS One thing I have not puzzled out is his attitude to money. Apart from presents for the family and good clothes and cigars for himself, essential props for his line of work, he seems to have no use for the stuff. In fact he scorns it, being happy to stick it uselessly in the bank and to give some away to a cause he does not believe in (the Santa Rosa hospital). Considering the source of his funds, there’s some wicked irony there, which is then multiplied to a painful level at his funeral when the minister eulogises his benefaction.
The money angle is worth noting. As you say, Charles is well aware he needs to spend relatively lavishly on himself to look the part, and be able to continue in his 'career'. I'm not sure his benefaction to the hospital is entirely cynical, though. As what might be guessed a broken and damaged child himself, the idea of other broken children might carry some emotional weight for him. And of course, he's not above combining his self-centered motives with sentimentalism when it pays to do so. He obviously has a genuine, if probably unrealistically gilded, fondness for the past--that the gilding might be serving to cover over something more profoundly disturbing seems possible enough. And he uses that sentimentality over a probably largely idealized past to manipulate his sister and her family.
I'm pretty sure the whole 'skull-fracture' story was something of a blind on director and writer's part, a sop thrown out there to those dull elves in the audience who needed a concrete explanation as to just why or how Uncle Charlie was as he was. The real point is more that Charles is a sort of force of nature, one of those for whom there is, in the final summation, no easy explanation. For one thing, we don't know how long Charles has been a murderer. Has he offed other women in the past, and just been lucky enough/wily enough not to bring suspicion on himself? It seems probable that the three widows who've succumbed to his fatal charms must have been done in within a relatively short period of one another, in order for the manhunt to be stepped up to the degree it is, and for the story to become fairly major national news.
His killing of the women doesn't, on one hand, make much sense--they're his 'golden geese' after all, the very providers of his well-heeled existence. Their demises would certainly serve to materially impoverish him rather than lead to gain--after all, they can't have named him in their wills or bequests; three women dying under foul play, all naming one particular man in their legacies would immediately have aroused suspicion, and the police would likely have arrested Charles long before he had any chance to get away. Even if Charles is keeping a stable of wealthy dowagers, he's not helping his outlook any by disposing of several of them.
So we have to look to underlying clues. Charles, while still a young and obviously virile man, is probably in the neighborhood of mid-to-late thirties by the time of his arrival in Santa Rosa (Cotten himself was thirty-eight when the film was made, and it's probable that Uncle Charlie was maybe two to three years younger). He's definitely getting just a little past his optimal date for continuing to be a male escort, and may be getting more than a little desperate. He knows he'll be getting edged out of the gigolo game fairly soon by younger males, and then what? I don't think his remarks to Charlie about settling down and establishing himself in the community are entirely facetious--it's quite possible he's been thinking along exactly those lines. It may also be that he's from time to time contemplated suicide: his remarks to young Charlie in the 'confession' scene may not, again, have been just a cynical attempt to manipulate his niece's pity. He may also be starting to be consumed by rising disgust for his line of work--the 'fat animals' speech is delivered with a venom that reeks of purest nausea for these types of women--almost as if the very smell of them has permeated his flesh, and given rise to such hatred of both them and himself, that something has finally snapped. (Sick little aside, that I would not have put past Hitch to hint at had there been any way possible in a script written at that time period, is the idea I've always had that the women were killed by him either during or just after sex.)
So his disdain for the money may arise from that angle. In purely materialist terms it is something he requires, needs, to function on the level he does. On the other hand, that very function, and the monetary rewards it brings, have come to be the embodiment of what he despises most about both his victims, and himself in his very intimate involvement with them. So while needing the money, he also at the same time distances himself from it by a very elaborate air of indifference. But all of the indifference he displays can't erase the profound self-disgust he feels. Maybe sleeping with a pretty, adoring and virginal sweet young thing would help dispel some of it, and he need look no further than his own family to find a possible candidate. But ultimately there's no time to break down Charlie's well-inculcated inhibitions and moral fencings against the possibility of his seduction of her being successful; and there's also that pesky Jack who won't quit hanging around. So--the psychosis rises to the top again and murder once again becomes the only means Charles has of coping with what he is.
A question I've had concerns his designs on Mrs. Potter: clearly he's staked her out as a likely next 'contributor'. But was his intent murderous, or possibly just hoping to make her his final grand-slam, the payday that will enable him to retire from the game forever? As often is the case with Hitchcock, he might mean the audience to think one thing while actually intending something else. So, if Uncle Charlie had lived, successfully disposed of his interfering relative (or managed to guarantee her continued silence, one way or another), and gone on to woo and win again--just what might Mrs. Potter's fate have been?
We seem to be moving in similar directions!
Just as the film shows us the rise of Young Charlie, forced to grow up fast and become the most mature person in her family, it shows the inescapable descent of Uncle Charlie. He knows he is in a hopeless position, with only a limited number of exits.
The first way out we are shown at the start in his New Jersey lodging house. Surrounded by scattered money that shows his loathing for how it was got, he tells the landlady he will see the detectives if they call again. At that moment he is ready to accept the punishment which he part flees and part welcomes. Since he would be pretty sure to end in the electric chair, one could see giving himself up as a form of suicide.
Instead he flees across the continent to the only sort of home he has, his sister and his favourite niece. Here he airs the fantasy of settling down, which part of him may want to do but another part knows to be unrealistic. For it to work, he would have to go to a place with no rich widows, nubile nieces or prying police. (In 1942, travel options were getting limited.)
Effectively trapped in Santa Rosa, to put off the inevitable he is ready to destroy the person closest to him. If you already are a strangler of women, one more is not going to alter your fate. While killing Young Charlie might gain him some time, it would not cure his compulsion but complicate it. And the manhunt would go on.
As for Mrs Potter, I think her flirting brought the waltzing couples into his head again. Her fluttering drew him back into familiar mental territory, where the cat would once again pounce and the canary would stop squawking.
PS You raise the theory that his stranglings take place in the beds of his victims and this may well be psychologically authentic. An eruption of his self-disgust at an Oedipus-like coupling with a mother who is behaving as a whore? Can I suggest an even more outré possibility, later enacted with Bruno in “Strangers on a Train”? In that film a flamboyant gay man, who wants his father dead but is all lovey-dovey with his mother, strangles one woman and nearly kills another in highly dramatic circumstances. Could Charlie’s disdain for mature women spring from an unacknowledged homosexual orientation? A bachelor, fussy about his appearance, who knows how to please mothers once the father is away? When they require sexual satisfaction, like Casey in the song “The Band Played On”, his head explodes?
PPS Uncle Charlie praises the virtues of work on the part of the husbands who made his victims rich, but is there any evidence that he has had any worthwhile job? Or does he scorn such unimaginative drudgery?
PPPS Before anybody says it, I do realise this discussion is getting rather like Joe and Herb chewing over their murders.
Shall I be Joe or Herb? (My friend and I were discussing the possibility that meek and repressed Herbie--who finds his kicks in plotting out elaborate murder scenarios--just might be the prototype for another Hitchcock killer who has a particular derangement concerning mothers--could it be Mrs. Hawkins is reposing in a spare room in the family manse, filled with sawdust? 'Just middling' indeed.)
PS You raise the theory that his stranglings take place in the beds of his victims and this may well be psychologically authentic. An eruption of his self-disgust at an Oedipus-like coupling with a mother who is behaving as a whore? Can I suggest an even more outré possibility, later enacted with Bruno in “Strangers on a Train”? In that film a flamboyant gay man, who wants his father dead but is all lovey-dovey with his mother, strangles one woman and nearly kills another in highly dramatic circumstances. Could Charlie’s disdain for mature women spring from an unacknowledged homosexual orientation? A bachelor, fussy about his appearance, who knows how to please mothers once the father is away? When they require sexual satisfaction, like Casey in the song “The Band Played On”, his head explodes?
I agree that older sister Emma was almost certainly the focus for Charles’ first sexual desires, yet he does not seem to resent the fact that she married Joe. Could it be because plodding Joe is no competition for dashing Charles, whose place in Emma’s heart is undiminished?
Nor does Charles seem put out that his first love has produced three kids. I suppose getting and rearing children forms no part of his mental landscape, so is it something that just passes him by?
Yet, as you say, in the eldest child Charlotte he sees his lovely sister reborn and flowering into womanhood. Properly virginal in her behaviour, she is not forward with men, as we see in her conversations with the detective Jack. Alone with her beloved uncle, however, she is warm and intimate. Physically and emotionally close to her, sleeping in the bed she has vacated, his lust awakens. With the hormone surge comes the parallel urge to kill the object which incited it.
When the two enter the sordid bar, where Hitchcock briefly lowers a bucket beneath the placid surface of small-town America (as Lynch later did in more detail with “Blue Velvet”), other worlds intrude into Charlotte’s sheltered life. Hints of transient sexual joys and lasting sorrows are seen in the defeated waitress, the soldiers, and the women they consort with. Is this a visual warning to Charlotte that the world of adult relationships has dark recesses? The audience knows that the man opposite her is in one of the darkest of all.
You are doubtful whether Charlotte’s enforced maturation will be satisfied with the first sympathetic and presumably virile outsider she has met, who is the detective Jack. The film leaves it open. While she has no job and no career plans, he seems to be criss-crossing the country on official business and is difficult to get hold of. Only speculation, but I think you may be right that, while he has been an influence in her life, the two may not make a durable couple.
How far she is scarred by her traumatic experiences I wonder, and I am not convinced that the extreme mental aberrations of her uncle Charles will necessarily recur in the next or any generation. The girl has brains and resourcefulness, in a way proving herself the most adult of the Newtons. Though she temporarily breaks both the criminal law and the moral law, in order to shield family members, she knows what she is doing. I would argue that her self-awareness and her innate purity may well enable her to surmount what she has undergone, help her surviving family recover and lead her to a fulfilling future.
Agreed, I just threw the DVD in today, from a Hitchcock collection I bought a while ago and was thoroughly unimpressed.
Some nice Hitch touches, but a plot that is nothing special, no real suspense (wow the stair was loosened....oooh) and the ending on the train comes across as convoluted and silly-looking (a hundred and ten pound girl can fight off a strong man twice her size). As others have pointed out more "active" moves on the part of young Charlie, would have made the film stronger.
Unimpressed.
no real suspense (wow the stair was loosened....oooh)
the ending on the train comes across as convoluted and silly-looking (a hundred and ten pound girl can fight off a strong man twice her size).
I'm 48 and have seen thousands of films.
Please do not put me into the "Gee Transformers was totally awesome with giant robots, just like the Matrix sequels totally ruled and I have the attention span of a gnat" category of movie goer.
Thank you.
I'm 52, and have seen my share of modern day 'golly-gee' movies, as well as classics. The 'golly-gees' have their place in the great scheme of things, so I don't feel the need to be snottishly dismissive of them.
Attention span has naught to do with it. It's simply the capacity for being able to see past the surface of a film (very much so in the case of this particular film), to the subtleties beneath. Which your post indicated you likely hadn't done.
If you didn't care for the film, to each his own, but your criticisms came off as facile, and not well-thought through.
I found it mesmerizing; I was in awe of it the whole time, maybe because I enjoyed the characters.
My only criticism was the very end wasn't choreographed a little longer, but that's 2014 expectations for me (where most final struggle/fight scenes last around 15 minutes it seems).
You've hit on one important aspect in which this film (and most others of earlier eras) differs from contemporary film--storytelling and film technique was much tighter and moved far more swiftly. The lengthy (sometimes laboriously so) manner of telling a cinematic story that we're used to today was largely confined to a handful of so-called 'epic' films in those times. Pacing was everything, and it was fast, much faster than what current audiences are accustomed to. So they look at films from this period and feel let down that there wasn't enough story/suspense/time given to elaborate fight scenes, etc., rather than learn to see and adapt themselves to a different style of pace in telling a story.
shareWell, I would not put too much trust in IMDB top 250 -- the watching of movies and casting votes for them are self-selected actions.
Some possible answers -- Big-city sophisticated psychological viewpoint applied to perfect(-seeming) Smalltown USA. Applied in a very subtle way.
Like a lot of Hitchcock films, it repays repeated viewing, where the viewer can make connections between what is happening and speculate about the meaning of it. For example, both Charlies are first shown as lying in a bed, and at the end Uncle Charlie is again lying in a "bed" -- his coffin! And at the end Young Charlie is definitely headed towards a different sort of bed - a matrimonial one. The two Charlies start as seeming to be closely connected, and at the end they have completely diverged in their fates.
Or watching the husband's face in the later dinner-table scene where Uncle Charlie is talking so gushingly about his sister and what she was like when she was young. Uncle Charlie seems to be strongly implying that his sister married beneath her - that the husband is not good enough for her. And the husband doesn't like it. Not very nice of Uncle Charlie, but is he really at fault for having such a viewpoint and indirectly spreading it around the dinner table?
It's also interesting that it takes a European upper-class horror tale, "Dracula", and re-tells it in a middle-class small-town American setting. Somewhat unsettling.
Enough of that, for now!