Review of Shadow of a Doubt (1943) by Josepha K — 06 Jan 2009

The distinction of dramatic tension in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt rests in the way he understands distress and darkness as less intruding outside energy than as the subdued underneath of matters. A bored teenager, portrayed in a tender, unabashedly feminine performance by the uniquely sweet and wise Teresa Wright, is bothered because nothing appears to be going on in her life. Then, she gets the most exciting news that her uncle, whom she dearly loves, in Joseph Cotton's inarguably greatest performance is coming to town. The contrasting extremities are each safe and sound in its spot, but are both obliged jointly.

The film's warmth for romanticized American culture is genuine, but, as permeated via the objective Hitchcock, there is an aching curiosity. Is one to simply accept this picturesque environment as is? This is the idealized small town with its family values? This penetrative hankering filtering throughout the sun-spotted squares and courtyards and social gatherings that visibly conjecture Wright's growing consciousness as the film's budding realization. The insular contentment of this quaint community is distrusted by Cotten's arrival, which highlights not how much of an outsider he is but how much a part of it he continues to be since he last left. His portrayal as Wright's beloved uncle appears as nearly a caricature of the clean-shaven, mild-mannered likeness appreciated by conventional public. In the course of one of the swift moments that suggest an unpleasant reality behind his pleasant facade, Hitchcock dollies in tight on him, delicately veering Cotten's mildly agreeable facial appearance into a faint callousness.

Exactly as dark, unsavory truths and images are shown to have a face, so does the benevolent surface of morality comes apart to let ominous gravity slip. Wright's mother is crazy about her baby brother to a curiously overstepping degree, the father plays morose games with the neighbor, Hume Cronyn, always a delightful surprise, who is obsessed with murder mysteries, and the air of security is merely a threadbare film taut over the world. The underpinnings of darkness may have just a footstep to go, and at the heart of it all is Teresa Wright, finding her way through troubled waters of her own into adulthood. Her angelic purity is stained in the course of her tribulation, but Hitchcock realizes the course as obligatory, her idyllic life cruelly forced open, and her responsibility to face life's capability of wickedness and malevolence, in addition to her inevitable link with it.

Shadow of a Doubt is about the insulated opening their eyes to the macrocosm of existence, the concurrent shadowing and broadening of the perception of the world. And conversely, Wright's protagonist has to silence her revelation as to not unsettle the harmony of her family and her environment. This masterpiece of suspense is one of Hitchcock's most ruthless portrayals of an outrageous certainty divulged no more than to be renounced.