The Historic Elsinore Theater in Salem, Oregon hosts an annual Wednesday Evening Film Series. It’s a nice boon to the community, giving folks an opportunity to watch some classic movies in an honest-to-goodness movie palace instead of a cookie-cutter movie stadium. (Silent films are even accompanied live by a vintage Wulitzer!) This series focuse last year on the often deliciously dark cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, arguably the greatest auteur of film history. Its opening salvo was 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt, Hitch’s personal favorite.
Thornton Wilder of Our Town fame contributed to the bleakly funny script, a suspenseful yarn about a serial killer (the “Merry Widow Murderer,” played by the incomparable Joseph Cotten) who disrupts life in sleepy Santa Rosa, CA, when he visits his sister and her family—a conspicuously timed visit considering the massive manhunt for him on the east coast.
Charlie’s niece and namesake, "Little Charlie" (Teresa Wright), is a bright young thing whose hero worship of her uncle quickly turns to growing suspicion and mounting horror. Hitch cleverly plays off the element of kinship between them, a connection that borders on identical twin-ship. Uncle Charlie’s face is spookily reflected in Little Charlie’s graduation photo at one point, and they are both given the same introduction: lying corpse-like on their respective beds, at their wit’s end, tired of life. Little Charlie is also convinced that she and her uncle can communicate telepathically, and that he cannot keep any secrets from her—a prophecy she’d rather have not self-fulfilled.
In light of events happening concomitant to the release of the film—world war and genocide—Hitchock took a risk exposing evil at its most mundane and everyday, smack-dab in the heart of a seemingly wholesome all-American family. Joseph Cotten gives a bone-chilling performance as Uncle Charlie, a worldly and world-weary man whose ingratiating charm is a sociopath’s thin disguise. But cracks start to show on his too-perfect surface, as when he delivers this memorable dinner table monologue (bearing in mind, of course, that he kills rich widows as a pastime): “The cities are full of women, middle-aged widows, husbands, dead, husbands who’ve spent their lives making fortunes, working and working. And then they die and leave their money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the wives do, these useless women? You see them in the hotels, the best hotels, every day by the thousands, drinking the money, eating the money, losing the money at bridge, playing all day and all night, smelling of money, proud of their jewelry but of nothing else, horrible, faded, fat, greedy women… Are they human or are they fat, wheezing animals, hmm? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?”
Shadow of a Doubt remains as bracing, suspenseful and witty as ever. I’m primed for the next round in the Hitchcock series.