Shadow Of A Doubt

(1943)

If OUR TOWN was a validation of the small town way of life, then by the time writer Thornton Wilder got around to penning SHADOW OF A DOUBT, he either had a massive change of heart or simply happened to be working with Alfred Hitchcock, who has made a career out of creating meaning independent of screenplays. The film denotes a fascination with serial killers early for Anglo-American popular culture – if already prevalent in continental Europe – but not for Hitchcock, who had been exploring the concept since cinema was silent. The acting talents of Joseph Cotten are unfairly maligned, but there is no question he carries with him an off-color clunkiness that is either part and parcel of his performance style or simply a by-product of the characters he plays. Like Carol Reed with THE THIRD MAN, Hitchcock exploits this quality to the fullest, not as a likeable dope, but as the disturbed and unbalanced sentimentality that creates a multiple murderer. This is a testament to Hitchcock doing most of his directing of actors in casting. The notion of small towns as holding pens for refugees from normal society is the undercoat of the Norman Rockwell painting that would immediately take hold of cinematic representations of the setting, with Orson Welles’ THE STRANGER and Charles Laughton’s THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER over the next decade harboring Nazis and psychotic holy men in these locales. It is the lynchpin that pinned Lynch’s depiction of small towns and its own modern iconography.