Shadow Of A Doubt

            
            
             Source: NL Prod Co: Universal Pro: Jack H Skirball Dir: Alfred Hitchcock Scr: Thornton Wilder, Alma Reville, Sally Benson Phot: Joseph Valentine Mus: Dimitri Tiomkin .
             Cast: Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, Patricia Collinge, MacDonald Carey, Henry Travers, Hume Cronyn, Wallace Ford .
             ". if you ripped the front off houses." .
             Shot mostly on location in the small Northern California town of Santa Rosa in the Summer of 1942, Shadow of a Doubt is Hitchcock's mischievious attempt to construct a superficially simple, morally ambiguous narrative around a complex web of genres, narrative templates, tones and styles. It is a film which ingeniously mixes the visual iconography and archetypes of horror, a nascent film noir and a Capraesque domestic comedy, and is widely regarded as Hitchcock's breakthrough Hollywood picture, his first film attempt to fully come to terms with both American culture and Hollywood cinema. As such it is a curious, knowing and prescient film, far from the grand-standing, detached, episodic set-piece spectacle of the North by Northwest-like Saboteur (1942) that immediately preceded it. By enlisting Thornton Wilder, the playwright of the Americana-soaked Our Town, as scriptwriter, Hitchcock was able to infuse what are, in some ways, characteristically dark stylistic and thematic tra!.
             its with effective local colour, to produce an encyclopaedically playful gallop through "genre cinema".(1) In so doing, he achieved one of the most interesting and detailed portraits of a disappearing small-town American milieu. This complex rendering of what might appear to be simple and unpromising material, and its status as a prototype for film noir, are key reasons why this is one of the director's most discussed middle-period films. .
             The film's central premise revolves around the arrival home, to a rather deviant domestic bliss, of favourite uncle, Charlie (Joseph Cotten). Of course not all is what it seems and Charlies' prodigal return, urbane manner, big city sophistication and East Coast ways are but a smokescreen for the film's dark retreat into the incestuous, psychosis-ridden and just plain cuckoo recesses of his sick mind.