![]() ![]() Shadow of a Doubt is the tale of a young woman and her beloved “Uncle Charlie,” whom she discovers is not as he seems. My favorite film by Hitchcock, however, is lesser known than his more famous works, but I would argue the best of all. Hitchcock through his vast body of work pulls nerves as taut as the strings on a fiddle, bowing us into fear and exhilaration in classics like Psycho and The Birds. Sardonic details bubble up through the town’s veneer of brisk cheer to suggest the roiling passions it represses in Hitchcock’s ironic vision, marriage is a haven from the mortal power of lust, and Santa Rosa is just one misstep away from Pottersville.Though I’d never claim to be a film buff, I’ve watched quite a few film noir movies in my time, and no one quite does noir like Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Spade and the Maltese Falcon be damned. Hitchcock approaches the richly nuanced story with an economy of inflection the script, co-written by his wife, Alma Reville, is populated by a colorful array of characters, including Charlotte’s easygoing bank-teller father (Henry Travers) and his friend and neighbor Herbert (Hume Cronyn), a pair of true-crime connoisseurs who are oblivious of the presence of true crime in their midst. ![]() He arrives like a breath of fresh air at the home of his sister and her family-which includes his niece, Charlotte (Teresa Wright), also nicknamed Charlie, a whip-smart recent high-school graduate who falls in love with him even as her own suspicions are raised. ![]() Joseph Cotten stars as Uncle Charlie, a suave and sophisticated young man who is also a suspect in the murder of rich widows. Alfred Hitchcock’s folksy 1943 drama, shot largely on location in Santa Rosa, California, peels back the welcoming warmth and sincere innocence of small-town life to reveal the gullibility and the naïveté underneath it’s a fiction about the perpetuation of fictions. ![]()
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