June's Screening: Shadow of a Doubt

As skeptical as my outlook is on collaboration in service of The Dark Crystal sequel, cooperation doesn’t always have to result in robbing a movie of its vitality. Alfred Hitchcock was a frequent collaborator, employing graphic designer Saul Bass on innovative credit sequences, working closely with composer Bernard Hermann to revolutionize movie scoring. On this month’s movie, Shadow of a Doubt (1943, 108min), Hitchcock worked with playwright Thornton Wilder (most famously author of quintessential high school theater production, Our Town) on the film’s screenplay. Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut, Thornton Wilder was memorable as the first American writer who agreed to work together to pen a film after Hitch’s move to direct films in America. In Hollywood, he said “I was turned down by many stars and writers who looked down their noses at the genre I worked in. That’s why it was so gratifying to for me to find out that one of America’s most eminent playwrights was willing to work with me and, indeed, he took the whole thing quite seriously.” No doubt Wilder’s willingness to collaborate with Hitchcock on the film lent credibility that would open doors for the director with future creative partners.

Throughout his films Hitchcock frequently enlists many thematic devices, and most the kind that lend themselves very easily to psychoanalytic interpretations for those of us with less even than an armchair analysts knowledge of Freud. Doubling and Doppelgangers abound in Hitch’s films, from the two title characters in Strangers on a Train whose paths intersect and then become mortally involved in the lives of the other, to Madeline and Judy, two women who seem to be separate but uncannily similar in the eyes of Scottie in Vertigo. Shadow of a Doubt is one of the most literal representations of Hitchcock’s frequent theme of doubling with two main characters sharing the name Charlie. One Charlie, played by Teresa Wright embodies the milkfed ideal small town American teenage girl, the other Charlie her middle aged uncle played by Joseph Cotton, a vagabond bachelor with a mysterious past. For a more thorough analysis of thematic dualities in Hitchcock’s films, see Mladen Dolar’s essay “Hitchcock’s Objects,” but here, briefly, “Some interpreters… have suggested that the duality is nothing but the dichotomy of good and evil, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ side, which makes it possible to get rid of the bad side to wind up with a traditional Hollywood happy ending…[In this interpretation] the link between good and evil remains an external one, the idyllic small town life has no connection with the ‘dark side’, the nightmare comes from some other place.” Dolar goes on to break down this analysis to reveal what he believes to be the truest sinister force that joins the good and the bad together in small town America: money.

Finally, watching Shadow of a Doubt one can easily see Hitchcock’s influence on David Lynch’s films. Much like most of Lynch’s work, which also frequently utilizes doubles and doppelgangers, the most sinister forces find their way to work their depravity on the pastoral setting of small town America. Its hard for me to give too much of a summary of Shadow of a Doubt without giving away too much of the fun, but by now you’ve probably figured out, in movies a visiting favorite uncle is not always what he appears to be.