One of the best scenes in the film is when Uncle Charlie takes Charlotte out to a bar, and they’re sitting across from each other at the table. One could write an entire book on the style and technique of Hitchcock, so a single piece couldn’t do justice to it, but in this film, he has some of the best designed shots of his career.
I think part of this would come from the fact that Hitchcock himself was an immigrant, similar to Billy Wilder who viewed America as an observer. In the years following World War II, and particularly in the 50s, is when American movies would do this form of unmasking, whether it was Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, or Anthony Mann, the country didn’t have the same innocent look it once had. That would be the Norman Rockwell style Americana of a small town, but the darkness and perversity that lies beneath it, and that’s also represented through the character of Uncle Charlie.Īt the time America was coming out of the optimism of the Great Depression, and was two years away from the end of WWII. What Hitchcock explores in this film is something David Lynch would later explore in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. While others in the family and the town are taken in by the charms of uncle Charlie, Charlotte begins to suspect something in him. When arriving there, he finds a strange connection with his teenage niece Charlotte (Teresa Wright) who also goes by Charlie. When escaping some suspicious men for unknown reasons for the audience at that point, he goes to stay with his sister’s family in the small wholesome town of Santa Rosa, California. The film stars Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley, a handsome all American looking bachelor who resides in New Jersey. But one of his very best films that often gets overlooked in his expansive body of work is his 1943 thriller Shadow of a Doubt, which turns 80 this month. When people mention their favorite movies from Alfred Hitchcock, they normally mention some of the greatest and most iconic movies of all time such as Rear Window, Vertigo, North By Northwest, and Psycho.
0 kommentar(er)
