Year Released: 1943
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring; Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, Macdonald Carey, Hume Cronyn, Henry Travers, Patricia Collinge
(Not Rated, 109 min.)
Genre: Film-Noir, Mystery and Suspense, Thriller

“We're not just an uncle and a niece. It's something else. I know you. I know you don't tell people a lot of things. I don't either. I have a feeling that inside you there's something nobody knows about... something secret and wonderful. I'll find it out.” Young Charlie to Charlie Oakley

See it again or for the first time to discover why Hitchcock bests them all, especially in what is purportedly his favorite film. Maybe because he embeds evil in such an innocent lair.

Not yet present is the icy blonde, “the beautiful, sophisticated, poised woman with her an air of mystery and indirect sex appeal. She carries the film as an unexpected source of duplicity, and can be a cunning and intelligent adversary” that we get later in Rear Window 1954 , Vertigo 1958 , North by Northwest 1959 , Psycho 1960, Marnie 1964 , or the sophisticated but very non-icy blonde Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

Instead a just-out-of-high-school brunette, Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright), has exactly what the film’s title suggests. And ironically it is her beloved uncle and namesake Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) who inspires it.

Of course, our iconic director gives us the goods on Uncle Charlie right away. Before the film detours to its sunny American hometown of Santa Rosa, California, we get a glimpse of a seedier place, a cheap room for rent in Philadelphia, which here seems far from a city of brotherly love.

Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) lies on his back staring at the ceiling, a bottle and a heap of haphazard cash strewn about. He seems uneasy and restless, and especially so when his land lady tells him that two men have come by asking for him.

Then we see his niece Charlie in the same posture, albeit her bedroom is sunny and ladylike with flowered wallpaper. She is restless just the same. It is the tedium of her idyllic life that troubles young Charlie.

“We just sort of go along and nothing happens,” she tell her father. “We eat and sleep and that’s about all. We don’t even have real conversations.”

Mother is out Charlie tells him, adding as she lies on her bed, her young intellect apparently unaware of any irony:

“Yes, poor mother. She works like a dog. Dinner, then dishes, then bed. I don’t see how she stands it.”

Then she has a brainstorm:

“I know a wonderful person who'll come and stir us up. Just the one to save us.”

And about the time she wishes for her exotic Uncle Charlie to interrupt this ennui, we see him sending a telegram announcing a visit.

He arrives by train, one of Hitchcock’s favorite haunts, and is the charmer everyone remembers, laden with gifts for all that he dispenses at dinnertime, along with tales of “the biggest yacht in the world” with “a fireplace in the library,” and “a bar paneled in bleached mahogany.”

But a few cracks appear in the charming façade. Charlie’s uneasiness with a waltz tune that young Charlie hums, the same one that opens the film. He tries to label it “The Blue Danube,” and then interrupts when the precocious young Ann (Edna May Wonacott) claims, “It’s the Merry…”

Then there’s the daily newspaper that Uncle Charlie suddenly decides to craft into a paper house for Ann, even as she insists she is not a baby anymore, and then scolds him for cutting up Papa’s paper.

Not to mention the emerald ring he gives young Charlie, who discovers initials on it to Charlie’s chagrin.

Nonetheless, Charlie continues to charm his way through almost the whole family, but the darker film noir elements are all there anyway, just hidden more discretely, like Robert Frost’s “dimpled spider, fat and white” an emissary of a “design of darkness,” or the banality of evil personified by Mia Farrow’s nosey neighbor with the mincing walk and headscarf hiding her curlers in 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby.

Rain on a dark street in a big, bad city. A single cigarette ember, glowing in a room lit only by streetlights shining through venetian blinds. A bitter, cynical middle-aged man in a fedora and trench coat.

You won’t find any of these noir staples in Shadow of a Doubt, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 study of menace in a small town. (Except for the bitter, cynical middle-aged man. And he’s the villain.) Instead, the movie is drenched in sunshine, suffused with wholesomeness, and set in a small California town so close-knit that the traffic cop knows everyone’s name. Most of the action is filmed in a comfortable family home that could have been lifted right off the set of Meet Me in St. Louis. In fact, Sally Benson, the author of the original “Meet me In St. Louis” stories, co-wrote the screenplay, along with another great chronicler of small-town American life, Thornton Wilder.

And to top it all off, the heroine and sleuth is a teenaged girl. –Elisabeth Kushner

***

You can’t have shadows without the sunshine, right? We have plenty of it here, too, in the oblivious family and neighbors who see none of Uncle Charlie’s darkness. Ann, the precocious nine-year-old who reads Ivanhoe and is trying to keep her mind free of the “innumerable things that don’t matter,” somehow misses a murderer in her midst.

And everyone except the gradually awakening young Charlie pretends not to notice Charlie’s dinnertime rant, almost as eloquent as Richard Burton’s in The Spy Who came Out of the Cold :

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?

Pass the potatoes, please, is more or less the response of most of them, except for Charlie, who runs out of the room.

Her father, the banker, Joseph Newton, Henry Travers bringing the same childlike innocence he did to his Clarence, Angel Second class, in It’s a Wonderful Life 3 years later. He loves crime fiction and jousting about ways to murder someone with fellow crime aficionado and neighbor Herbie Hawkins (Hume Cronyn making his film debut), but Mr. Newton sees no suspicion in Uncle Charlie arriving with 4o grand in large bills using them to open an account at his own bank. And neither does the president of the bank.

Joseph’s wife Emma (Patricia Collinge) dotes on her grown up baby brother, only vaguely aware of how he makes his money. “He’s in business” is all she can muster when asked. Another incident that slides by most, even the audience, is when Emma brings out the single photograph of Charlie, the one taken when he was only a boy. She retells the tale of his near death bicycle accident as a child, and the tale passes by so swiftly, we hardly catch what may be the source of Charlie’s troubles:

He fractured his skull, and he was laid up so long. And then, when he was getting well, there was no holding him. And it was just as though all the rest he had was too much for him and he had to get into mischief to blow off steam.

He didn't do much reading after that, let me tell you.
It was taken the very day he had his accident.
A few days later when the pictures came home, how mama cried.
She wondered if he'd ever look the same. She wondered if he'd ever be the same.

In fact, this horror of being photographed links Uncle Charlie to Dracula according to many critics, as well as the first scene where see him woodenly asleep in a darkened room. Not to mention innuendos of incestuous sexual attraction and a few other things from the shadow world.

More trivia to nibble on as well. In addition to Hitchcock’s fondness for trains in his work – he actually has his cameo on Charlie’s train ride from Philadelphia to Rosewood – is his penchant for staircases and all the dramatic symbolism they imply. The late Roger Ebert had a lot of fun with the dual staircases in Shadow of a Doubt:

Not many directors were fonder of staircases than Sir Alfred. They impose a hierarchy of power and weakness. A character at the top of the stairs can seem to loom or be in danger of toppling, depending on whether the POV is high and low. The flow at the house goes up the sidewalk, onto the porch, through the door and directly up the stairs. There are outside stairs in the back, and both staircases are used for tight little sequences of threat and escape. Notice how many variations of camera angles and lighting Hitchcock uses with the stairs. He considered them an ideal device for introducing imbalance into otherwise horizontal interiors. –Roger Ebert

And of course, what a treat to watch Joseph Cotton turn on his sinister qualities like flipping a light switch, as his performance anticipates the charming villain Harry Lime (Orson Wells) with whom Cotton costars six years later in The Third Man.

Not to miss and well worth another look. Like Shakespeare, with Hitchcock each time you discover new depths and insights. Enjoy.

–Kathy Borich
🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

Trailer

Film-Loving Foodie

Uncle Charlie has insinuated himself so much into the family enclave in sunny Santa Rosa, California, that he is asked to make a speech at the local ladies club. And his sister Emma is so proud of her grown up and seemingly successful baby brother that she plans a small reception for him afterward at their house, complete with her homemade canapés.

Of course, by now namesake and niece, young Charlie knows Charlie is more deserving of a hanging than a reception, but she fears to break her mother’s heart and really cannot prove anything.

But after ferreting in her uncle’s room she finds the emerald ring he has secreted away and wears it conspicuously as she comes downs the staircase into the crowded living room.

Charlies’ face shows his evening and plans are ruined, but that should not affect your appetite. After all, you are not the Merry Widow Murderer, so enjoy our easy but elegant tray of canapés.

As beautiful to look at as they are delicious.

Easy and Elegant Canapés

Ingredients

1 Baguette toasting each piece is optional
15 oz whole milk ricotta
2 radishes sliced thin
6 quail eggs hard boiled, or hen's eggs
1 orange premiumed
5 oz smoked salmon
1 cucumber sliced thinly
1/2 cup blueberries halved
1/2 cup strawberries sliced
1/2 cup cherries pitted and halved
1/4 cup honey
2 sprigs mint leaves
2 sprigs fresh dill
2 tbsp fresh chives chopped

Instructions

Cut the bread into half inch slices. I loved the way this tasted with a fresh baguette right out of the oven but you can toast the slices for a little extra crunch or even brush them with some olive oil and then bake on a sheet at 400F for a few minutes.
Spread ricotta on each piece of bread.
.Add toppings. I paired salmon with dill, cucumbers with mint, radishes with dill, hard boiled eggs with chives, and give the fruit a drizzle of honey.

Notes

If you want to make this in advance I recommend toasting the bread in the oven first.
You can sub chicken eggs for quail.
Feel free to use what's in season and add your favorite ingredients.
If you're toasting the bread let it cool before spreading the ricotta on top.

Preppy Kitchen.com