Well, some of your points might seem indeed implausible but are necessary for the movie. If you only want to watch movies which are "realistic" and where everything is plausible, I think you'll have a hard time finding any.
1. It is never said that he'd married any of these widows!
2., 3. & 7. are there to establish the character and show the audience that there's something not quite right about him and the money. Like in "Psycho" when Janet Leigh's character changes her clothes we can see the money lying on her bed and she's changing her underwear from white to black.
If Charlie would have just arrived as a wealthy man or would have hidden the money and the audience wouldn't have seen it, he wouldn't have appeared as such a suspicious character right from the start.
4. They don't know what the widow killer looks like and they have no photograph of Charlie, who is one of the two suspects. But they have found out where Charlie lived and they have seen him when he left the house (so they know what he looks like, they just don't have a photograph which they could show to witnesses) and followed him.
5. That's a stupid thing to do, unless there is something in the article which might seem incriminating to him, in that case it is possible he was just panicking and wanted to let the article disappear. But what the storyline about the article does is finally arouse the niece's suspicion and when she goes to the library we too finally find out what the crime is the uncle might have done.
6. Again, something which would be a very stupid and unlikely thing to do but essential to the plot as this is the only real evidence which connects him to the murders (the money alone wouldn't be enough, as there could be other explanations for it, like he could have stolen it somewhere else).
8. Well, she liked and idolized her uncle and therefore didn't want to believe the accusations at first. Plus if she would have gone to the police straight away this would have been a very short movie (like many other movies would be too). And by confronting him she wanted him to go (so he wouldn't be arrested in this town) and it also helps to create more tension in the movie and leads to the attempts to murder the girl.
9. That isn't that implausible, if you think of all those actual cases where some gullible people let people into their house because they say they are coming from x or working for x, or give them their money because they claim to be their nephew of whom they've never heard before. And if it's someone "important" or if it seems to be an honour to be picked, e.g. if they say they come from the government or the TV, many people are just too willing to open up their doors. So, even if it's a stupid thing to do, I'm sure there are plenty of people who would fall for this trick.
10. I don't know whether they meant it that literally, that she's got such a weak heart that she would die. I thought it was meant more metaphorically (but I could be wrong), and she wants to spare her mother the grief and the hurt it would cause if she would find out that her beloved younger brother is a murderer.
11. She didn't look as she stepped on the stairs, but if I remember it correctly she did examine it at night.
12. As a rather petite woman, I doubt I would be able to kick open a slammed garage door and I'm not sure whether a woman back then would have even thought of it. Nowadays you always see women kicking, fighting and jumping around in films, but back then it wasn't considered a very feminine thing to do, so I don't think Hitchcock would ever show a woman kicking a door open.
I agree with you, I thought she could have used the car but Hitchcock needed her trapped in the garage with seemingly no way to get out, to increase the tension and the drama, while we see the uncle deliberately trying to drown out any noise and telling everyone that there's no need to hurry.
13. I don't think they've just concluded that the other guy is the guilty party because he fled and was killed but didn't they find something incriminating (I can't remember that scene in detail right now)?
14. That part of the plot seemed pretty silly, but it was necessary that she couldn't reach him.
15. She noticed the departure of the train as soon as it started to move but couldn't get off as he was holding her back. I don't know whether you've ever been grasped by a bigger and much stronger man, but it is absolutely plausible that she wasn't able to extricate herself from his grasp.
16. Well, the guy who promised not to arrest him in this town is supposed to be in love with the girl and that's the reason why he does it in this movie (actual police procedure is another thing, but it's just a fictional movie or otherwise you must hate many other crime movies and thrillers too, like "Silence of the Lambs" which is just ridiculous if you compare it to reality).
17. Just another part of the story which makes him look even more guilty and sheds light on his personality and enlightens the audience as to what is going on in his mind and why he killed those widows.
18. He didn't throw himself off the train, he fell as he tried to throw her off the train (at least that's the impression I got) - that was just bad luck for him, grasping a woman is one thing (which you seemingly found so hard to believe) but throwing her off a train is certainly more difficult.
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rsgre
9 years ago
Good original post and good responses everyone ! Yes, I had a lot of problems with the plot the first time I saw it, but over time and multiple viewings, I forgot about them and just enjoyed the story. The plot is definitely a stretch....!!
RSGRE
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Prismark10
8 years ago
I also think the OP made good points and there are good responses.
The story did veer on being melodramatic and pants at times.
It's that man again!!
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gosh717
8 years ago
That was an absolutely brilliant analysis/explanation of the "suspend disbelief" points. Excellent piece of writing!
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Well, some of your points might seem indeed implausible but are necessary for the movie. If you only want to watch movies which are "realistic" and where everything is plausible, I think you'll have a hard time finding any.
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This entire thread, about the "plausibility" of many plot points in Shadow of a Doubt, if rife with irony if one has read some interviews with Hitchcock about Shadow of a Doubt(particularly with Francois Truffaut), and about his films in general. I mean, get THIS:
Hitchcock told Truffaut and others that his main adversaries in critical circles were people he called "the plausibilists" --people who wanted to take apart every plot point for believability when Hitchcock himself felt that his movies were designed to THRIVE on certain fantastic coincidences and "what ifs."
But he told Truffaut(and Dick Cavett on TV, and others) that Shadow of a Doubt was his personal favorite of his films and he told Truffaut (get THIS):
"If I've given the impression that Shadow of a Doubt is my personal favorite, its probably because here, for once, is a movie that the plausibilists can't complain about."
Ha. Hitchcock never lived to see Moviechat. More to the point - and this intrigues me ABOUT Moviechat -- Hitchcock perhaps never anticipated that movie chat would often (perhaps almost always) center on plot discussion and plausibility.
I daresay if Hitchcock were working when Moviechat were invented -- he'd quit the business.
CONT
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Another quote from Hitchcock about his plots: "I practice absurdity quite religiously."
Example: North by Northwest. Cary Grant being lured by the bad guys to a desolate location so as to be murdered ...from the air by a crop duster? Why not just shoot him anywhere? Because Hitchcock wanted to develop a "fantastical scene" in which the danger arrives "in broad daylight" from a "benign" source.
But a modern Moviechat poster saw the crop duster scene as more plausible than that: "Its the first drone attack." Ha..
it IS plausible.
Also: the Commie villain Phillip Vandamm(James Mason) has a house on Mount Rushmore, right behind the heads. HOW did he put a house up there? WHY is he in that house? Because Hitchcock wanted his climax on Mount Rushmore. And AUDIENCES wanted to see a climax on Mount Rushmore. The plausibility is in making that all seem believable -- the chase around Mount Rushmore is very plausible, when it comes.
But this: you could attribute both the crop duster attack and Mount Rushmore to the sensibility of the villain himself. Vandamm is a gamesman, a sport with wit. So Hitchcock is standing in for VANDAMM's wit: let's kill him with a crop duster. I think I'll rent a house near Mount Rushmore to stick it to those American capitalists...
Example 2: Vertigo. The greatest movie ever made, says Sight and Sound . But the PLOT? Its about a murder plot that is patently ridiculous, depends on everything happening just right and people BEHAVING just right. (I was challenged on this point right here at Moviechat once -- somebody said the murder plot was QUITE plausible.) Fair enough. But this: Vertigo isn't really about the PLOT (take that, plausibilists) ...its about obsession. Romantic obsession. Sexual obsession. Obsession with the past. And its about how men worship women "from a distance" and put them on a pedestal ...and then start to dominate and belittle them once "they get them."
CONT
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Example 3: In the middle of all the bird attacks in Bodega Bay in The Birds, a woman wanders into the Tides diner who happens to be...a bird expert. Hitchcock told Truffaut -- I could have had written a long scene to explain where she came from , but why bore the audience? I think she's almost self-explanatory: an old woman, likely unmarried, who has a hobby(birds) and who likely undertakes that hobby in the wide open, ocean-view spaces of Bodega Bay. Sometime, you can INFER the plausibility.
So keep in mind, Hitchcock evidently found Shadow of a Doubt to be his MOST plausible movie because it was based on character development, a small town realistic setting(no Mounr Rushmore, no psycho birds) and the issue of an evil person invading small town family life.
I've read the "implausible" attacks up top and I feel many can be refuted:
Uncle Charlie makes those terrible speeches at the dinner table and at the Til Two Bar because he is INSANE -- the first full-fledged Hitchcock psycho, as one critic wrote -- and part of that insanity is that he can't keep his raging feelings hidden. A childhood brain injury is given as the reason for Charlie's madness -- the injury evidently cut off his ability to override the desire to kill and to keep bad feelings inside.
The family rather puts up with Charlie's madness because his sister and eldest niece love him (and hey, maybe lust after him, too) and the dad is always talking murder with his pal anyway -- this is a STRANGE family Uncle Charlie is visiting, really.
CONT
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Later Hitchcock psychos would generally "give themselves away" just like Uncle Charlie. Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train clearly strikes the hero Guy as nutty on first meeting -- and wherever Bruno goes, his wacky discussion points cause people to move away from him. Norman Bates -- such a nice young man -- in Psycho, during that parlor chat with Marion slowly gives away HIS madness but -- like the Newton family in Shadow of a Doubt -- Marion just can't see clearly enough into how dangerous Norman really is.
The sex killer Bob Rusk in Frenzy has evidently "gone public" to the female owner of a marriage agency by filling out an application seeking "women who like to be hurt." The woman tries to eject Rusk from the agency's clientele so he rapes and kills HER. But he had openly warned of his sexual proclivities early on. The agency owner took him to be an S/M guy(rather accepted these days, yes?) not a rapist. Not a strangler.
Anyway, Uncle Charlie's actions presage all of these psychopaths, and his paranoia(ripping the article out of the paper, trying to avoid photos) is based in his madness.
Meanwhile, his sister and niece simply can't/won't see him as "evil": the sister -- never. The niece. Slowly.
CONT
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
About that fight/struggle between the two Charlies at the climax:
This was an early example of Hitchcock's delight in "fast edit montage" to suggest a violent struggle without filming it realistically. As a matter of "plausibility," well, Young Charlie IS young , and women CAN be strong, and she's fighting for her life, and almost as a matter of "ju-jitsu", she allows Uncle Charlie to defeat himself by throwing his weight into the fight and falling off the train.
But there is another explanation that folks of today may not like, but that was there in 1943:
Divine intervention.
Consider another Hitchcock climax. Strangers on a Train. The berserk carousel. When it finally snaps loose of its moorings and collapses, it appears that the carousel kills only ONE person -- the villain of the piece, psycho Bruno Anthony. Hitchcock leaves alone whether or not any children were killed or maimed in that crash(seems to me, they had to be) but we can also infer that God decided to drop that merry go round right on the bad guy.
And God might have given Young Charlie a hand, too.
Lest you think this too ridiculous, consider the climax of The Bad Seed(1957) in which a psycho little girl who has gotten away with several murders is -- in the very last moments of the film --literally struck down by a bolt of lighting and killed. The Big Guy, again.
OK...I'll leave that explanation alone at this point but I'll note -- Uncle Charlie doesn't join the family at church and makes a nasty comment about how God is finding it hard to fill pews these days. Payback can be a bitch. And is not the final scene at a church?
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