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More Hitchcock For Halloween!

31.12.69

As I mentioned last week, Alfred Hitchcock has been in the media quite a bit lately, mostly due to the unbelievable find in New Zealand (of all places) of his earliest surviving silent movie from 1924, The White Shadow .  With that, and being the Halloween season, my thoughts are the more Hitchcock, the better (well, that is my philosophy any time of the year, but especially in October).  Last week, I looked at Rear Window and Vertigo …two classics Hitchcock directed starring James Stewart.  This week, it’s two of his lesser known but still just-as-“horrific” titles.   

Idyllic small-town America turns ugly in the Hitchcock masterpiece Shadow of a Doubt , the film which the director himself even considered his favorite. The film begins with Joseph Cotten’s character Uncle Charlie, one of the most devious and sinister characters in cinematic history, heading from the East Coast to stay with his sister in Santa Rosa, California. Teresa Wright plays his niece and namesake, who at first is excited about her uncle’s appearance but soon discovers that evilness hides under the surface of his kind persona. In the beginning, there is doubt in the minds of the audience about the accusations against Uncle Charlie. But, as the audience grows more and more suspicious, so does Wright’s character. Santa Rosa becomes a character itself by lending a “perfect” atmosphere around the town while something purely devilish is brooding within. This is one of the darkest Hitchcock films, mostly because of the way Cotten portrays Uncle Charlie with cool, calculated depravity. 

Source: Patch.com