why is this seemingly average thriller so special?
-
shandy8 — 16 years ago(April 17, 2009 01:45 PM)
I agree that Thornton Wilder's dialogue was evocative of an era that may or may not have ever existed. His portrayal of small-town America is charming without ever being quaint. The scene in the bank is especially good, as it points out that certain manners of decorum are expected in different situations. I can remember going into the bank with my mother as a boy, and noticing how everyone spoke softly and behaved in a dignified manner.
The dialogue is realistic and clever, and Hitchcock's direction of the ensemble is wonderful. I especially enjoyed the juvinilles.
"I love corn!" -
samusaran88 — 16 years ago(October 21, 2009 01:02 PM)
"I agree that Thornton Wilder's dialogue was evocative of an era that may or may not have ever existed. His portrayal of small-town America is charming without ever being quaint. The scene in the bank is especially good, as it points out that certain manners of decorum are expected in different situations. I can remember going into the bank with my mother as a boy, and noticing how everyone spoke softly and behaved in a dignified manner.
The dialogue is realistic and clever, and Hitchcock's direction of the ensemble is wonderful. I especially enjoyed the juvinilles."
Charming? On a surface level, I would agree with you there. I think every character is selfish on some level though. The father's under the table business at the bank, and his arbitrary rules (think of the newspaper, I'd tell him to get over himself and buy a new one). The mother is absolutely obsessed with having her brother stay at their house. Yes, it can be seen as sentimental but she wants him there for her own personal satisfaction without considering how beneficial his presence there is for himself or anyone else in the family. I call that the Norwegian mother guilt trip when she tells him how hard it will be to see him leave. The two Charlies are the only people who seem to see through the facade of everyone's "niceness." Young Charlie says to her father "We don't even have any real conversations. We just talk." Does that put a different spin on how you see the charming nature of their interactions? There's hidden agendas behind much of the dialog, most obviously is Uncle Charlie's speech at the dinner table about greedy widows. The family doesn't think much of it in the sinister way that Young Charlie sees it. -
samusaran88 — 16 years ago(October 21, 2009 12:44 PM)
"I love the way people spoke to each other then,such class and respect.No slang and people were so much more thoughtful towards each other.The cozy homes,neighborhoods,classy cars,all make me long to have lived then."
More thoughtful? Are you sure? Did you understand the film is trying to say that the materiality and superficiality of that society isn't healthy? -
lcrews — 16 years ago(July 14, 2009 10:29 PM)
Quite simply, it is the psychological aspect of the movie. Hitchcock loved doppelgangers, and this is the ultimate example. The connection between the two Charlies is something unspoken in the film, only something you feel. It lends an air of tension and dread, while being set against the "perfect small town."
My advice when watching this: don't think so much, feel it. Then you will get why this film is stil so special 60-plus years later. -
Marcile — 16 years ago(September 11, 2009 05:05 AM)
I really don't understand why this is in the top 250. The ending ruined the entire film's build-up. Its almost as if Hitchcock just gets bored with his films and tries to wrap them up in the quickest and most illogical way possible. North by Northwest is also similar in this regard. It just seems like a lot of time wasted for a stupid ending. Hitchcock's best films are the ones where he is able to tie in the ending to the rest of the film eg. in Strangers on a Train and Rear Window (Personally my favourite Hitchcock films. Even though he is held in high regard today as one of the "greatest" directors of all time, he definitely had his fair share of beep films.
-
Frequency270 — 16 years ago(October 05, 2009 07:49 AM)
I also don't understand why it is top 250. Other than, obviously, I have a minority opinion about it.
My opinion is that it is a good movie, with excellent direction & acting by all members. It portrays a town as idyllic, but with the rugged broken parts visible beneath the civilized veneer. The entendre and creepiness is cool, but, for me, ultimately not enough to sustain the level of excitment that I feel is achieved in my mind with an excellent or better movie.
Damion Crowley
Furor Scribendi -
oldmotem — 16 years ago(December 31, 2009 11:03 AM)
I often find Hitchcock not to be as wonderful as everyone says he is. Some of his early pictures are very good. And this one is. TCM just aired it. Some of the reasons: It's got that Cotten guy in it. He was in AMBERSONS and 3rd MAN and all that. He's good. Also, the print I saw was cinematically very well done. And in great condition (I'm sure that's due to the Hitchcock name on it). I noticed the film from one of the sarcastic, great lines Cotten had and began watching it from there. A nice period piece of Americana circa 1942.
Noirish. Added all up, these individual things give it more than most Hitchcock films for me. This one's really good.
As I mentioned, others with COTTEN that are great are MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and 3rd MAN. -
Noir-It-All — 16 years ago(January 04, 2010 08:15 PM)
The two Oedipal triangles in this film were shown very well. (Got all this by inputting Shadow of a Doubt into Google.) That is enough to set this film apart.
"Two more swords and I'll be Queen of the Monkey People." Roseanne -
franzkabuki — 14 years ago(March 08, 2012 03:20 AM)
Yes, this clip perfectly demonstrates what SOAD would have badly needed in order to succeed - more of Joseph Cotten and less of the other hokey, annoying caricatures populating the movie. Such a waste, his great performance here.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan -
pantsofdoom — 13 years ago(June 01, 2012 08:57 AM)
Yes, this clip perfectly demonstrates what SOAD would have badly needed in order to succeed - more of Joseph Cotten and less of the other hokey, annoying caricatures populating the movie. Such a waste, his great performance here.
This. I just watched SOAD for the first time last night and this was the main problem I had with the movie. Hitchcock's movies (for me at least) have some really great characters, which I didn't find to be the case for SOAD, with the exception of Uncle Charlie. It wasn't awful, but it's Hitchcock's worst for me. -
Mrs_Bundy — 13 years ago(June 01, 2012 07:47 AM)
I 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. -
amyghost — 11 years ago(May 10, 2014 06:31 AM)
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 subtextsthe 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 thatto a modern audience anywayis 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 wordsit'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 withnot that it isn't infected already in some of its darker places, as Hitchcock and Wilder slyly suggestthat 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 attractiononly 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 offeelings 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 illnessmental or spiritual, or boththat'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 hintssometimes 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. -
amyghost — 11 years ago(May 21, 2014 02:19 PM)
I 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. -
Charlot47 — 11 years ago(May 22, 2014 01:28 AM)
Yes, it is noticeable, as you say, how few of Hitchcocks 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 Hitchcocks 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?