Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 19-September-04
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

When I was thirteen years old, two sixth-grade girls from my school were raped, stabbed, and left for dead as they cut through a park on the way home. This was in a quiet, suburban Vermont community, and of course the cry that immediately went up was "How could this happen here?" The collision of small-town innocence and worldly evil is an actual occurrence that fascinates just about everyone (which the media knew then, as now), but rarely have I seen it so eloquently explored as in Alfred Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt." Little wonder that the great director cited this as his favorite personal film: it's a masterfully conceived story of great depth, tension, and hope.

In a superb performance, Teresa Wright stars as Charlie Newton, a young woman floundering between childhood and adulthood in a quaint California town. Charlie's unease with the flatness of ordinary life expresses itself as a concern that her family is "in a rut," including everyone from her banker father (Henry Travers) and homemaker mother (Patricia Collinge), to her bookworm little sister (Edna May Wonacott) and playful baby brother. She decides to shake things up by inviting her Uncle Charlie (after whom she was named) to come and visit, but in the first of several psychic communications between them, her uncle beats her to the punch by announcing his imminent arrival.

As revealed in the opening scene, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) isn't quite the knight in shining armor that his niece imagines him to be. He is running away from something or somebody, appears to be morbidly detached, and evinces a practiced talent for lying. But in the eyes of young Charlie and her mother he's a superstar, a handsome, successful man of the world whose willingness to stop a while in their home amounts to charity. Charlie is beside herself with glee at his appearance in their lives, and the two of them quickly renew their sense of extraordinary connection.

This connection lies at the heart of the heroine, but also at the core of "Shadow of a Doubt." The nearly perfect script (by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville) envisions the protagonists as two possible outcomes of the same person, one fatally cynical and one courageously innocent. Both hail from traditional families and all-American towns, but somewhere along the way to maturity each chose or was forced onto a different path. (Interestingly, we're given a glimpse of the exact moment when that happened for Uncle Charlie; the events in the movie represent his niece's fork in the road.) Their psychic incidents show that they remain on a shared wavelength, but he views the world as hostile, shallow, and worthless, while she views it, almost unwillingly at first, as friendly, simple, and unromantically good. This is the one thing that separates them, just as it separates big-city and small-town atmospheres and the criminal mind from the moral one.

The suspense builds as Charlie begins to notice her uncle's strange behavior and then has her worst fears confirmed by a pair of detectives who arrive in his wake, one of whom (Macdonald Carey) takes her into his confidence after starting to fall in love with her. As in a nightmare, the movie eventually isolates Charlie within her own home, pitting her alone against the man she once adored and thought of as her "twin." It might be argued (indeed, it often has been argued) that the end result is bitter or at best bittersweet, illustrating the evil that nestles in the bosom of the most ordinary families and respectable neighborhoods. Yet I think the accurate reading is more positive. "Shadow of a Doubt" consistently portrays Uncle Charlie as an aberrant outsider whose prolonged absence from the context of his youth coincides with his diminished humanity. The outcome of the Charlies' battle of wills doesn't so much disparage small-town mores as suggest why they should and do elicit admiration. The movie acknowledges that people get lost in the world and commit horrible acts, but it shows that others who are stronger or more fortunate build homes and communities in which decency really does hold sway, in which life might feel boring until contrasted with a violence that appears, rightly, like a discordant shadow on the bright light of the sun.

Copyright © 2004 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.