Review of Shadow of a Doubt (1943) by Darren P — 24 Mar 2011

The beginning of things to come: Hitchcock was first in true form here. But ultimately for me the movie is shallow. If you take away the technical excellence you've got nothing left. Then again that's true of a large portion of Hitchcock's work; with the exception of a few masterpieces (some that are masterpieces perhaps also only on their technical merit, but that burst at the seams with it), many of his pictures seems to stem from tackling the challenge of taking one suspenseful idea that is probably in no way new and turning into an entertaining low-budget feature-length movie.

The sort of thing Stephen King has done with writing (King once referred to himself as "the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries"). At any rate, this is exactly the sort of movie that backs up my assertion that Charlie Chaplin and Stanley Kubrick are the two smartest people ever to come out of Hollywood; while Shadow of a Doubt is a masterful effort by a consistently strong auteur, the bulk of Hitchcock's work could be obliterated by almost any single randomly selected Chaplin or Kubrick feature.