why is this seemingly average thriller so special?
-
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? -
amyghost — 11 years ago(May 22, 2014 06:39 PM)
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?
Exactly sono icy, imperious, platinum-bunned females concealing a smoldering volcano of turbulent sensuality beneath the glittering frosty crust of their sexually frigid demeanorsno swaggering, morally ambiguous heroes exuding virile masculine confidenceno knife wielding maniacs, preserved corpses, sweaty, furtive killers, nor even a house more sinister than the houses Uncle Charlie wants to tear the facades off of.
But, for all of those lacks of signature 'Hitchcock Touches', I contend that this film delves into the theme of tortured and 'forbidden' sexual conduct more profoundly than any he was to make subsequently. And it's all because of Uncle Charlie, whoas you amusingly pointed outcarries quite possibly the greatest burden of misplaced erotic longing of any Hitchcock character ever. Doubly cursed with the onus of being a male prostitutea hustler, albeit one cast in a heterosexual contextand with an obvious lust for the virginal innocence his young niece represents (not to mention the fact that Charlie likely bears a quite striking resemblance to his much-beloved sister when she was a young woman), Charles Oakley is pretty much carrying the psycho-sexual weight of the world on his shoulders.
And, as studies of the man have tended to reveal, so seemingly was Sir Alfred himself. I suspect Hitch was able to identify rather poignantly with the dilemmas of poor Charles, and was able to spin that identification out into a tale that rang the most psychologically true of all of his thrillers.
(And with the invaluable help of Thornton Wildera man who carried some demons of his own also, insofar as he was a gay man in a time when that carried the extreme of social opprobrium, and who was much concerned with keeping his orientation deeply closetedthe perfect author to craft a tale of subterranean erotic behaviours condemned by 'normal' society, and obsessions based around another sort of 'love that dare not speak its name'in this case, incestuous.) -
Charlot47 — 11 years ago(May 23, 2014 02:49 AM)
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 Oakleys 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 Charlies 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, theres some wicked irony there, which is then multiplied to a painful level at his funeral when the minister eulogises his benefaction. -
amyghost — 11 years ago(May 26, 2014 12:58 PM)
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 pastthat 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 sensethey'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 gainafter 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 facetiousit'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 workthe 'fat animals' speech is delivered with a venom that reeks of purest nausea for these types of womenalmost 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. Sothe 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 o -
Charlot47 — 11 years ago(May 31, 2014 08:40 AM)
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 outr 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 Charlies 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. -
amyghost — 11 years ago(May 31, 2014 02:17 PM)
Shall I be Joe or Herb? (My friend and I were discussing the possibility that meek and repressed Herbiewho finds his kicks in plotting out elaborate murder scenariosjust
might
be the prototype for another Hitchcock killer who has a particular derangement concerning motherscould 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 outr 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 Charlies 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?
Oh, absolutely. I think Uncle Charlie may have been an early presagement of Bruno; they seem as if they could share some definite psychological underpinnings in common.
Charles' real problem concerning Young Charlie may be, in part, the method with which he's going to be forced to dispose of her: his standard modus operandistrangulationis off the table where she's concerned. Her death must look accidental, and certainly can't be composed in the manner which might cause him the greatest psycho-sexual release, since to kill her by those means would definitely bring the intrepid detectives down on him post-haste. (Hmmmfalling down the stairs? Falling is of course a classic psychiatric metaphor for a loss of sexual control; might be the next best thing to throttling her, but that attempt fails, and he's left with the clumsy option of asphyxiation via car exhaust. A sort of cousin twice-removed from strangling, but lacking the release mechanism he obviously needs from the physical act.)
It seems probable enough that little Charlie is the incarnation of Emma in her youth; a figure who, as adoring older sister, must have presented him with a powerful embodiment of the dichtomy of loving mother figure and figure of incestuous lust (that most taboo of all sexual transgressions).
Small wonder with an image like that ticking away in his mind, possibly complicated by a latent homosexual subset (which I don't find at all improbable; as I noted before he is, after all, a male hustler, only his customers/victims have, given his particular milieu, to be wealthy women rather than men) that poor Charlie stands to be at substantial risk from her uncleparticularly now that she's passed the threshold into young womanhood, and is about to embark on her entry into the world of adult female existence that pretty clearly is a chief source of his torments. (It doesn't help that she clearly has little desire to become the sort of housewife/mother that he displays admiration for; instead, she longs to grow up into a freedom that will not encompass a husbandthe sort of husband whom the Mrs. Potters of his acquaintance find themselves happily freed from the tyranny of).
She becomes the locus of that homicidal mixture of desire and disgust that has fueled his impulse to killnot yet a 'fat wheezing animal', he may have some deranged romantic notions of saving his adored relative from possible maturing into that awful fate. The betrothal in the family kitchen promises the later consumation of this idea, a
petit morte
that's not to be so
petit
after all.
I don't think that it was at all coincidental that his final attempt on her lifethe struggle aboard the moving trainis powerfully redolent of a violent sexual encounter, i.e. rape. Nor is it coincidence that, in the scene in the Til Two, the seedy bar, he momentarily appears to putting himself forth as a possible candidate for a lover (he says to her, in passing, "I'm not so old" and gives her something of a suggestive smile when he says it). Young Charlie's semi-acceptance of Jack in that role gives a clue that his most concerted efforts to murder her spring form sexual jealousy, a jealousy powerfully compounded and complicated by Oedipal conflict. Charles' mental state by that point is a obviously a toxic witches brew of anger fused together at a number of points of internal conflict, and ready to erupt into another murder, a murder that, as you note, would leave him with an even more horrific mental burden than before.
Perhaps his 'climactic' attempt on her life (climactic in several senses) has to culminate in his death. Alas, he's thwarted and killed before being able to totally realize a release that would also be, figuratively at the very least, the death of himultimate orgasm!as all of those conflicts crescendoed -
Charlot47 — 11 years ago(June 01, 2014 11:35 AM)
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 Emmas 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 Charlottes 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 Charlottes 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. -
TejasTeacher — 11 years ago(June 09, 2014 03:52 PM)
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.