#hitchock

The story  takes place in Santa Rosa, California, it’s the kind of  town that looks eerily like Main Street in  Disneyland - houses with white fences around them, with nice, of course white nuclear families in them. The Newton family might be the whitest most representative family of all: father Joseph (Henry Travers) works in a bank, mother Emma (Patricia Collinge) stays at home, daughter Charlie (Teresa Wright) has hit puberty and regularly grumbles about the banality of her life, while the two younger children, Ann and Roger, are just kind of there. 

That boringness comes to an end when Emma's brother, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton), comes to visit. He remains vague about his activities and the reason for his sudden visit. He often makes cynical remarks that they don't often hear at the Newton's and when a local newspaper wants to take a picture of him he must make a visible effort to keep from hitting the photographer in the face. Young Charlie initially finds it all very exciting that her uncle is coming to mess up the status quo in the house, but comes to suspect that uncle Charlie might be a murderer on the run. 

The contrast between the innocence of small-town America (that’s  probably laid on a bit too thick here with a few very naive ones opening scenes) and the corruption lurking in the form of Uncle Charlie, is the main theme of Shadow of a Doubt The Newtons live in a bright, innocent world, guided by blind faith in authority (“God bless the President of the United States ”, youngest daughter Ann prays at one point) and believe in the values of a simple life. Uncle Charlie on the other hand, makes uncomfortable comments about fraud at his brother in law’s bank (“We don’t joke about that here,” Joseph weakly protests), Goes on monologues about “greedy, fat women ”who live on their husbands' money and in general wants nothing to do with that normal, banal life.  

The interesting thing lies in the mentality Hitchcock assumes against this contradiction between innocence and nihilism. The Newtons are, of course, the nominal heroes of the story in the end, Hitchcock neatly extends a happy ending to his film and pays lip service to the conventions (the bad guys must of course be punished in the end). But in the meantime, Uncle Charlie is by far the most interesting character in the whole movie, that’s initially welcomed by his niece as a welcome change from the normally boring life in Santa Rosa, and he is also the only one in the film that appears to be completely living and willing and to live in reality. 

Everyone else shields themselves from reality: father Joseph fantasises about murder scenarios, mother Emma stares blindly at the past and seems to live more in her youth then in the here and now, and even youngest daughter Ann is constantly buried with her nose between the books. Everyone in Newton family actually seems to prefer to be somewhere else, somewhere in a less annoying version of reality, with the exception of daughter Charlie, who rebels, and youngest son Roger, who is hardly elaborated as a character. Uncle Charlie, on the other hand, is a smooth, charming guy who seems to know perfectly how the world works and doesn’t need fantasies to make his life bearable. 

He might be a murderer but damn it, he’s not boring. Hitchcock could - certainly not in 1943 - let the final victory be for anyone but the Newtons, but it’s clear that he finds Uncle Charlie endlessly more fascinating and amusing. The fact that the Uncle Charlie's nihilism manifests itself during a key monologue as misogyny (with “useless women proud of their money but nothing else ”), gave rise once again to the usual allegations of misogyny against the director, but that doesn't really seem to fit with the nuanced, ambiguous way in which Teresa Wright plays Charlie.

After all, the two Charlies are played out during the whole movie as two contrasting, aspects of the same character. Uncle Charlie is the darkness, young Charlie is the light, but they form a part of the same whole. Hitchcock is constantly playing with a twin theme in Shadow of a Doubt emphasising the similarities between them.

Beyond the fact that they have the same name, they are also both introduced in the same way in the story (we see them lying in bed in similar poses) an allusion to a psychic connection between them (“you believe in telepathy? ”) and Hitchcock constantly insists on their similar character (“I know you don't like people much says Uncle Charlie, but I sense somewhere deep inside you have a secret - just like me ”). 

The tension between them is almost sexual - the connection they feel at the beginning of the movie often looks like flirtation - and when Charlie finds out what her uncle really does for a living, she decides to keep quiet. With that decision to choose her uncle instead of law and order, she becomes an ambiguous character, whom we sense could maybe (just maybe) be able to  transition to what you would call in Star Wars terms the dark side just like her uncle. Charlie is one of Hitchcock's most interesting female characters, and one that you would probably never find in the film of a true misogynist. 

The film by today's standards, takes too much time to really get going and also suffers from an inconclusive romance between Charlie and the horribly boring cop Jack Graham (McDonald Carey) - It's vaguely interesting to imagine what kind of married life the two would have, probably one filled with long, boring evenings in separate twin beds. On the other hand is Hitchcock's distinctive visual style (note how Uncle Charlie is constantly associated with smoke) and excellent acting. Teresa Wright is one of Hitch's most captivating heroines, and Joseph Cotton plays against his sympathetic image with apparent gusto. 

As is often the case, the villain in Shadow of a Doubt is much more interesting than the good guys - this is a thriller about a disturbance in the tedious life of awfully normal people which doesn’t dare to openly say it, but does dare to suggest, that such interference isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To commit murder is perhaps not a nice thing, but it does wake one up.