Shadow of a Doubt 1800859317, 9781800859319

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Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was British-born Alfred Hitchcock’s sixth American film and the one that he at various times identified as his favourite and his best. In this path-breaking book, Diane Negra redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. Analysing the film’s narrative system, issues of genre, authorship, social history, homesickness and ‘family values’, she shows how the film’s impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content, linking the film’s terrors to the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. This book understands Shadow as an unconventionally female-centred Hitchcock text and a milestone film that marks the director’s emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life.

“In a dazzling close reading of the film, Diane Negra peels off [its] Rockwellian veneer layer by layer. In the process, she makes a compelling case for moving Shadow of a Doubt closer to the heart of the Hitchcock canon.” – Milette Shamir, Tel Aviv University “Negra persuasively shows how Uncle Charlie’s symptomatic monstrosity and Young Charlie’s complex victimization are intimately related to institutionalized patriarchy and misogyny, stifling family structures, and a culture of smiling evasiveness in the world that they live in: one that is recognizably America in the early 1940s – and beyond.” – Sidney Gottlieb, Sacred Heart University Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. She is the author, editor or co-editor of twelve books, including Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (2001), The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (2016) and Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I:’ Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (2021). She serves as Co-Editor-inChief of Television and New Media and as Chair of the Irish Fulbright Commission.

www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/imprints/Auteur/ Auteur Publishing

AuteurPub

ISBN: 978-1-800-85931-9 Cover photograph: © Universal Pictures

Diane Negra

“Diane Negra’s nifty gem of a book is jam-packed with insights into one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most underrated (yet among his favorite) movies. She demonstrates how close reading, archival research and wide-ranging scholarly sources contribute to surprising feminist interpretations of a film that still resonates.” – Paula Rabinowitz, University of Minnesota

Shadow of a Doubt

Diane Negra

Diane Negra

Shadow of a Doubt

Advance praise for Shadow of a Doubt “Diane Negra’s nifty gem of a book is jam-packed with insights into one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most underrated (yet among his favorite) movies. Lurking amid the oblique and obvious references to Freud, fascism and foreigners, she finds in Shadow of a Doubt a claustrophobic return to America’s foundational fiction—that it remains an innocent city on a hill, rather than the blood-stained remnant of war and plunder. Negra’s book, like a reel of film unspooling on the projection room floor, unravels how Hitchcock’s obsessions with symmetry and pairing leave the viewer, and in this case, the reader at once informed and anxious. She demonstrates how close reading, archival research and wide-ranging scholarly sources contribute to surprising feminist interpretations of a film that still resonates.” – Paula Rabinowitz, University of Minnesota “Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, with its idealized portrayal of the American family and rosy depiction of small-town USA, can be easily mistaken for the British filmmaker’s paean to his adoptive country. In a dazzling close reading of the film, Diane Negra peels off this Rockwellian veneer layer by layer. Her interpretation moves adroitly from Freudian family romance to homefront patriotism, from the female gothic to bourgeois nostalgia, to expose the film’s dark and intense ambivalences over American consensus culture and family values. In the process, she makes a compelling case for moving Shadow of a Doubt closer to the heart of the Hitchcock canon.” – Milette Shamir, Tel Aviv University “Diane Negra recognizes and insightfully attends to the characteristically Hitchcockian substrata of metaphysical and existential anxiety and horror in Shadow of a Doubt, and his subtle dramatization of a chaos world without borders. But one of the real contributions of her detailed and finely researched study is her insistence that this dark masterpiece is a harrowing fable of specifically how, to use William Carlos Williams’s memorable words, ‘The pure products of America go crazy,’ directed and overwhelmed by socio-political conditions of our own making. Negra persuasively shows how Uncle Charlie’s symptomatic monstrosity and Young Charlie’s complex victimization are intimately related to institutionalized patriarchy and misogyny, stifling family structures, and a culture of smiling evasiveness in the world that they live in: one that is recognizably America in the early 1940s – and beyond.” – Sidney Gottlieb, Sacred Heart University

Shadow of a Doubt Diane Negra

First published in 2021 by Auteur, an imprint of Liverpool University Press, 4 Cambridge Street, Liverpool L69 7ZU Series design: Nikki Hamlett at Cassels Design Set by Cassels Design, UK Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY All stills from Shadow of a Doubt © Universal Pictures. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the permission of the copyright owner. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN paperback: 978-1-80085-931-9 ISBN hardback: 978-1-80085-930-2 ISBN epub: 978-1-80085-810-7 ISBN PDF: 978-1-80085-850-3

Contents

Synopsis................................................................................................................................7 Analysis...............................................................................................................................17 Conclusion...................................................................................................................... 103 Acknowledgements........................................................................................................ 109 Notes................................................................................................................................ 111 Bibliography.................................................................................................................... 125

Synopsis

Shadow of a Doubt Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) opens in a bleak and unsettled landscape; after a brief glimpse of turn-of-the-century waltzing couples the camera pans across present-day scenes of urban poverty including a post-industrial riverside. The nihilist ethos that we will come to associate with the film’s protagonist Charles Oakley is evoked by the rusted car frames junked in front of a “No Dumping” sign beside the Pulaski Skyway bridge in Newark, New Jersey.1 Traveling in through a window of a rooming house whose street number is 13, the camera then finds Charles lying on a bed in daytime smoking a cigar, cash scattered on the nightstand and floor beside him. When the landlady enters to tell him that two men called looking for him, he remains impassive and she draws the shade casting the room in darkness before exiting. Charles rises and throws a glass across the room shattering it and signaling to the viewer that the film will engage with Hitchcock’s characteristic economy of male anger. Verifying that there are indeed two men on the street outside, Charles exits the rooming house to the strains of melodramatic music but though the pair follow him closely he mysteriously evades them and is next seen peering down at them on the street from a high building. (This is the first surveillant position he takes in the film and he will repeatedly do so again.) In the next scene Charles goes to a telegraph office dictating a communication that reads in part “Will arrive Thursday and try and stop me.” We then cut to a low angle shot of a crossing guard and a scene of a pleasant middle-class street in Santa Rosa, California before Hitchcock’s camera travels in through a second-floor window of a house on the street to discover a young woman also lying on a bed in daytime. Where we might have expected a contrasting tone the mood here is also dolorous and unsettled; Charlie Newton, a recent high school graduate, speaks bitterly to her father Joe and mother Emma about the dull repetition and meaninglessness of their lives.2 She is particularly concerned with the limits of Emma’s life and the colorlessness she associates with it. It becomes clear even in these early minutes of the film how instrumental Emma is underscoring how her daughter’s value in the patriarchal order is contingent on her youth and beauty. As the Newton family re-gather at the end of the day with parents and Charlie’s young siblings returning home, we glimpse a household in which all members seem to occupy their separate worlds. Importantly, these scenes constitute an early 8

Shadow of a Doubt indication of what Paul Gordon characterizes as “the love/hate relations which exist within this family.”3 Inspired by the need to redress the torpor and meaninglessness of the family’s existence Charlie has a sudden idea that what they need is a visit from her uncle, telling Emma “All the time there’s been one right person to save us.” Although Emma refuses to tell her daughter Charles’ address, Charlie suddenly recalls it. She then heads to the telegraph office only to discover Charles’ telegram and walks home in a reverie saying to herself “He heard me, he heard me.” Charles meanwhile makes the transcontinental journey in a closed train compartment feigning illness. A group of card players is seated just beside the compartment; among them is Alfred Hitchcock making his signature cameo appearance.4 Upon Charles’ arrival, the Newton family (save Emma) collect him at the station and when they return home, Charles and his sister have a strikingly emotional reunion with him telling her she looks just like she once did, “the prettiest girl on the block.” Here the film sets in place a scenario common in Hitchcock’s films in which “a young woman has to live under the same roof as a man who falls under suspicion of being a murderer or even a serial killer.”5 Even as it does so, Shadow here emphasizes Charlie’s pride and pleasure in having “authored” this scene of reunion; she stands back beaming as the siblings embrace. Joe shows his brother-in-law to his daughter’s bedroom (we learn that Charlie had overruled her mother in placing him there) and in a moment of apt wordplay typical of Hitchcock’s body of work, tells Charles when he tosses his hat on the bed that he “doesn’t believe in inviting trouble,” as he ushers a man we will come to learn is a serial killer into his home. Charles peers at Charlie’s high school graduation photo, plucks a rose from a bouquet he finds and uses it as a boutonniere, then tosses his hat jauntily onto the bed. For critics including Gilberto Perez this is a suggestive sequence in a film that is “suffused with sexuality.”6 With regard to the bond between uncle and niece, Perez writes “The liberties he takes in her room smack of sexual liberties with her.”7 In the next sequence the Newton family and their guest gather for dinner in the dining room. Charles is holding forth in detail about a yacht he once visited but suddenly interrupts his story to distribute gifts to the group, notably a mink stole for Emma and pictures of their parents that she didn’t know he’d had, pictures that 9

Shadow of a Doubt he tells her he’d safeguarded “in a deposit box no matter where I was.” As the family admire them Charles speaks of the “wonderful world” of the past in contrast to “the world today.” Striking a moderate note of disagreement, Charlie’s effort to argue for the present is belied not only by her characterization of the family’s position at the start of the film but also by the particular phrasing of her claim that “for once, we’re all happy at the same time.” When Charles prepares to give Charlie her present she demurs and leaves the room. As the action shifts to the kitchen in a private encounter between uncle and niece, Charles presses Charlie to accept the gift, and she continues to resist. Initially posed at opposite corners of the room Charlie tells her uncle of her belief in their deep affinity saying “We’re sort of like twins, don’t you see?” and conveys her sense that he has a secret no one knows but that she will find out. As the two draw closer together and Charles ceremoniously takes her hand, the scene remains charged with a particular intimacy that is only heightened when we discover that the gift Charles has for Charlie is a valuable emerald ring. Examining it closely Charlie notes that the ring has initials inscribed on it but when Charles offers to return it to the jeweler who he says “rooked” him Charlie says she likes the ring the way it is. The group re-gathers in the dining room and Charles tells Joe of his intention to transfer a large sum of money to the bank he works in. Charlie hums the “Merry Widow Waltz” and says she can’t get the tune out of her head but can’t remember its name.8 Just as she suddenly recalls it and is about to identify it, Charles knocks over a water glass as a distraction and the dinner abruptly ends. Emma suggests Charles make himself comfortable in the living room with Joe’s newspaper and Joe’s friend and neighbor Herbie Hawkins arrives. We understand that Herb makes frequent visits to converse with Joe about murder scenarios as the two men share an affinity for true crime stories. The introduction foregrounds Herb’s nervous mien and socially maladroit style – when introduced to Charles, he responds to his suave “Nice to know you,” with “Fine, thank you.” Charles notes an article in the newspaper referring to the case of the Merry Widow Murderer and seeking to ensure no one else reads it, he tears it out and makes a paper house with the newspaper. The maneuver fails to impress Charlie’s younger sister Ann but draws Charlie’s notice and when she brings Charles some water later 10

Shadow of a Doubt in the evening, she spots the removed pages and tells her uncle she noticed he was trying to conceal them. Charles violently seizes her by the wrist in wrenching the pages away from her but quickly apologizes and she seems to forget the incident, falling asleep that night while humming the Merry Widow Waltz. The next morning Charles is served a late breakfast in bed by Emma who tells him that the family has been contacted by two men from the “National Public Survey” who intend to produce a magazine profile of them as a representative American family. Deducing (correctly) that the men are actually investigating him Charles violently tears a piece of toast and tells his sister vehemently, “Emmy, women are fools.” He urges her not to take part, but she tells him it’s “our duty as citizens.” Charlie joins them and Emma relates the story of a mysterious childhood accident Charles suffered after which “he was never the same.” Though Charles claims that he’s never been photographed Emma produces a boyhood picture of him (it is actually of the film’s star Joseph Cotten as a child) and the women admire it.9 Charles and Charlie walk through town eliciting envious gazes from Charlie’s friends and then visit the bank where Joe works so that Charles can make the deposit. Charles’ sudden alternations of mood and affect continue in the sequence in which he speaks loudly and bitterly about banks as corrupt institutions, mortifying Joe. Charles is shown to the private office of bank manager Mr. Green, who takes note of the large amount of money Charles has on hand, and the visit is briefly interrupted by Mrs. Green and her friend the widowed Mrs. Potter who assesses Charles with interest. Charles and Charlie return to the Newton home laden with parcels from shopping. The “questionnaire men” Jack Graham and Fred Saunders have arrived, and Charles says he won’t take part in their profile. Emma closely controls the men’s movements and actions in the kitchen and Charlie and the men go upstairs where they seek to take some pictures of her bedroom. Saunders is able to start searching the room on the pretense of photographing it for the magazine profile while Graham and Charlie discuss her ambivalence about being considered a member of an “average” family. As they are doing so, Charles suddenly appears from the back staircase and Saunders snaps his photo. Charles extends his hand, demanding the return of the film and Charlie appears transfixed by it. As they leave the house Graham asks 11

Shadow of a Doubt Emma if he can “borrow her daughter” that evening for a look around the town. Charlie and Jack are seen smiling and laughing as they exit Gunner’s Grill and then sit talking in the center of town under a prominent Bank of America sign. In a flash of intuition that appears all the more spontaneous because of the purposefully jagged editing used, Charlie suddenly expresses her belief that Jack is a detective (the moment is comparable to the earlier one where she instantaneously recalled her uncle’s address). We might observe also that the scene is marked by a bit of rhetorical misdirection: though everything she says to Jack is accurate, it is also what she should be saying to Charles: ”I know what you are, really. . .You lied to us. You lied to Mother. You just wanted to get in our home. . .What do you want with us? What are you doing around here lying to us?” Jack confirms that he is not who he presented himself to be but seeks to enlist Charlie’s help because “There’s a man loose in this country.” He says that if Charles is that man, he can apprehend him quietly outside of Santa Rosa. Charlie returns home, glimpses Charles and Emma in the living room (where he’s talking at length and his sister seems enraptured) and chooses to use the back staircase. Surreptitiously retrieving the crumpled newspaper pages from Charles’ room, she goes through them and sees there is an article missing. Having spoken with Ann, who mentions the value of libraries when looking for lost newspaper items, Charlie descends the back staircase of the Newton house and hastens toward the library. After a tense walk through town during which she is briefly accosted by the crossing guard and admonished for jaywalking, she arrives at the library and persuades the severe librarian to let her in past closing time (In part because she addresses Santa Rose crossing guard Mr. Newton and librarian Mrs. Cochran by name these scenes have the effect of underscoring how embedded Charlie is in her community.) As the music swells and the camera takes up a high angle position, Charlie finds the newspaper clipping about the “Merry Widow murderer” who has strangled three women. Because the article names one of the killer’s victims, Charlie connects it to the inscribed initials on the ring (“to TS from BM”) Charles has given her and understands that her uncle is indeed guilty. This revelation raises the dramatic stakes and marks Charlie’s acquisition of knowledge as a loss in ways that are integral to the film’s ideological operations. The revelation scene also secures a connection between Shadow and a broader pattern 12

Shadow of a Doubt of Hitchcock’s penchant for strangulation. A partial list of the director’s films which depict the act include: The Lodger (1926), Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951), Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954) and Frenzy (1972). Shadow of a Doubt is replete with small symmetries that evoke an alignment between its protagonist pair and one such moment is to be found as we open on a new scene to find Charles striding across the lawn reading a newspaper immediately after the library revelation scene where Charlie discovers the truth about her uncle by finding a copy of the newspaper article he had sought to conceal. Charlie sleeps (or wants to be seen as sleeping) until dinnertime and Emma reports that her daughter “doesn’t look quite herself.” Surreptitiously using the backstairs again to avoid her uncle, Charlie enters the kitchen where her mother is humming the Merry Widow Waltz and Charlie urgently asks her to stop. Ann asks Emma if she can sit further away from her uncle at dinner and as the family gathers Charles and Charlie conduct a coded conversation in which she alludes to having nightmares about him but being happy when she dreamt she saw him leaving on a train. As a bottle of wine from Charles is brought out, Emma turns merry and she and her brother indulge in reminiscences of the past. The conversation moves to the question of what Charles will speak on when he addresses Emma’s Women’s Club and Charles delivers a remarkable monologue (filmed by Hitchcock in a dramatically tightening close-up) delineating his murderous pathology and rationale for exterminating wealthy mid-life women. When Charlie protests that the women he’s speaking of are human beings, he questions if they really are. Herb arrives having brought a few poisonous mushrooms to show Joe and the men’s banter about murder scenarios is too much for Charlie who bursts from her seat crying “Can’t we have a little peace and quiet around here without dragging in poisons all the time?” She runs out of the house and Charles follows her. Catching up with his niece on the street is made easier for Charles when Charlie is apprehended by crossing guard Mr. Norton who reproaches her for “always running around the street at night.” Charles strong-arms Charlie into the seedy ‘Til-Two bar, disregarding her objection that she has “never been in a place like this.” The worldweary waitress who serves them, Louise Finch, was once Charlie’s classmate and 13

Shadow of a Doubt when Charlie puts the ring Charles had given her on the table, recognizing it now as a sign of his guilt, Louise is transfixed by it, saying she “would just about die for a ring like that.” (Charles pockets the ring before they leave the bar.) In a conversation replete with repetitions and doubling, Charles first attempts to flatter Charlie and win her over then savagely attacks her as complacent and ignorant. As his rhetoric escalates and he relates his belief that “the world is a foul sty,” a jaunty tune strikes up and a group of uniformed soldiers surges into the bar. Charlie pushes past them and exits, Charles closely following. After these two critical sequences, there is a third, equally critical but often overlooked, section in which Charles extracts a promise from Charlie. The two stand in front of the Newton home (a key site of action throughout the film) and he implores her to give him a few days to get out of town, fervently telling her that he counts on her and strongly intimating that before getting the idea to come to Santa Rosa he had been planning suicide. As Charles re-enters the house and gives bland reassurances to Emma, Charlie stands in the entrance and turns away from the fraudulent domestic tableau in tears. The next day the family is departing church services (Charles does not attend) and Graham and Saunders arrive to speak with Charlie. Saunders tells her that they in fact retained a photo of Charles and have wired it East and asks her to get Charles to leave town and keep them apprised of his movements. Arriving home Charles delivers some mocking commentary about religious observance from the porch and, as he and Charlie are speaking, Joe and Herb round the corner of the house as Herb relates that the Merry Widow murderer has been identified and killed in Maine while in the process of trying to escape. Delighted by the news of his exoneration Charles re-enters the house and springs up the stairs before pausing to look back at Charlie framed in the house’s sunlit doorway in a cryptic moment that is pictured on this book’s cover and whose significance I will explore later. Pacing in Charlie’s bedroom, Charles sees Graham arrive outside and his hands form a strangulation gesture. The young couple go into the garage where Graham tells Charlie he loves her and proposes marriage though Charlie’s answer is indecisive. Nevertheless, Graham fervently tells Charlie “This is a swell place. I’m gonna put a bronze plaque right up there,” but as he does so the door to the garage 14

Shadow of a Doubt suddenly bangs shut, something Charlie says it has a habit of doing. The two meet Charles on the lawn, who tells Graham intently that Charlie is “the thing I love most in the world” while forcefully grasping his niece’s face.10 Graham drives away reminding Charlie that she has all his forwarding details and Charles takes up a position in the doorway while Charlie skirts around him to the back staircase. Shortly after, Charlie is heading down the backstairs on her way to run errands in town, and falls on a broken step. While she’s not hurt, Emma’s disproportionate level of concern – she tells Charlie, “darling, you might have been killed” – is indicative of her intuitive and growing sense of the threat to her daughter. Charles’ appearance in the foreground just as Charlie prepares to descend the stairs reveals that he has sabotaged them, and Charlie returns later with a flashlight ascertaining this. That evening on the back porch above the stairs she and Charles speak in (conventionally romantic) silhouette with him denying that he has the ring she returned to him at the ‘Til-Two Bar, and telling her he won’t leave now. Charlie vows to kill him if he doesn’t. In the next scene the family prepare to depart for Charles’ talk at the Women’s Club. Persuading the group that everyone but he and Charlie should travel to the club by taxi, Charles sends his niece to the garage where he has rigged the car so that it’s running but the key has been removed from the ignition. Charlie struggles to find it and then discovers the door has been blocked shut. Charles meanwhile does all he can to ensure that no one will hear any calls for help by raising the volume of the radio. His plan is foiled by the sudden arrival of Herb announcing, “Somebody’s caught in the garage!” Charles enters the garage, steps over Charlie’s body, and puts the key in the ignition. Herb and Joe struggle to carry Charlie to the lawn but Charles capably takes over from the two and sets her down. Though when regaining consciousness, she looks into his face and tells him to “go away” the figure positioning here places Charles at Charlie’s side suggesting a false scene of couple intimacy, a tactic the film employs several times. Since the garage has been the site of Jack Graham’s profession of love to Charlie, Charles’ attack on her also reads as a manifestation of jealousy. His wish to check her mobility is signaled by the locations of his attacks on her: the first on the back staircase and the second in the garage where he weaponizes the family car for which she is the only driver. 15

Shadow of a Doubt Charlie seizes the opportunity to stay at home after this episode and while she frantically dials the various numbers for the hotels where Graham said he would be she cannot locate him. She obtains the engraved ring from the bedroom Charles is staying in and as a group comprising the family as well as the Greens, the minister and his wife, Mrs. Potter and Herb return from the lecture and settle in the living room, she slowly descends the staircase conspicuously displaying it on her hand as she grips the bannister. Upon seeing the ring, Charles announces he will leave Santa Rosa the next day and Emma breaks down in tears in front of the assembled group, telling Charles “I can’t bear it if you go,” a reaction that is cinematically punctuated by a close-up of a devastated Charlie and a fade-out to close the scene. The next morning Charles is seen off at the train station and he persuades Charlie and her siblings to board before the train departs. (Unbeknownst to the others Mrs. Potter is on the train as well expecting a rendezvous with Charles.) Once the children have left, Charles retains a strong grip on Charlie to prevent her from leaving and maneuvers her toward a doorway where it becomes clear he intends to murder her by throwing her off the train as soon as it attains sufficient speed. Defying logic, Charlie is able to get the upper hand and it is she who pushes her uncle off the train to his death, a moment that is punctuated with a final insert of the merry widows waltzing. In the final scene Charles’ funeral cortege moves through Santa Rosa, whose citizens have turned out in droves to memorialize him. Graham and Charlie are positioned outside the church and while we hear Charles being celebrated by the minister inside, Graham offers some tepid words of reassurance to her and Charlie reflects on Charles’ misanthropy. While Charlie observes “he said people like us had no idea what the world was really like,” Graham’s mild, vague statements effectively leave Charles’ views unrebutted while music rises to close the film.

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Analysis

Shadow of a Doubt

Figure 1: Shadow of a Doubt was released at a time when its director was building his authorial clout and brand name recognition.

Hitchcock in America: Shadow of A Doubt’s Family Values Shadow of a Doubt was British-born Alfred Hitchcock’s sixth American film and the one that at various times he identified as his favorite and his best. Paradoxically, scholarly analysis of the film has been scant and a core motivation for this book is the desire to redress the deficit of critical attention paid to it.11 Based on a screenplay collaboratively generated by Sally Benson, Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville and Our Town playwright Thornton Wilder, Shadow conjoins elements of the crime narrative and the horror/thriller.12 The film typifies Hitchcock’s body of work in some ways (for instance in its deployment of the characteristic theme of mistaken identity) but it is anomalous in others (such as in its centralization of a young, non-blonde female protagonist).13 William Rothman points out that “The extent to which Shadow of a Doubt constitutes a study of the family – the family it studies is posited (ironically but, as is Hitchcock’s wont, not simply ironically) as ‘the typical American family’—makes this film an exceptional one in Hitchcock’s oeuvre.”14

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Shadow of a Doubt The psychological realism of Shadow may have been heightened by the fact (as JeanPierre Dufreigne has noted) that Hitchcock’s mother, who was seriously ill in 1942, would die in England while he was shooting. She shared a first name, Emma, with the mother in the Newton household and Hitchcock was father to an adolescent daughter at the same time.15 Still a relative newcomer to the United States at the time of the film’s production, Hitchcock generates a diagnostic of the institutions of American life that may be classed within a set of expatriate fictions marked by comparative clarity. The film’s discerning assessments can be understood as in some ways a product of the director’s own insider/outsider status (which, as we shall see, is also the condition of protagonist Uncle Charlie). Following Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington (among others) we can “place Hitchcock in the long and distinguished tradition of responses to a relentlessly self-defining nation by travelers to its shores.”16 Considerations of filmmakers working outside of their original national location have been relatively infrequent in Film Studies scholarship, yet this sort of expatriate cinema has been a vitally important form of Hollywood creative practice throughout the industry’s history (associated with a range of directors from Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg to Milos Forman and Roland Emmerich). In a behind-the-scenes DVD “extra” entitled “Beyond Doubt: The Making of Hitchcock’s Favorite Film” director Peter Bogdanovich assesses Shadow of a Doubt as “really the first American Hitchcock” given that Suspicion (1941) and Rebecca (1940) were not set in the US. Although it is not one of the primary lenses through which I read Shadow it is worth noting the body of critical work that might facilitate an understanding of the film as connected to the travails of the exilic imagination. During the period of the film’s production, Hitchcock and Alma Reville would have been unable to return to England given the outbreak of war. Susan Straumann’s scholarship is particularly useful in understanding this context for the film as she offers a formulation of the exilic imaginary that lends itself well to Shadow’s domestic thematics and staging of the family romance. She writes, “In exile the home and the self are split and reduplicated by their exilic doubles. In their ambivalent oscillation between past and present, the familiar and the unfamiliar can no longer be located. Yet even more importantly, exile in its continual uncannily redoubled return ‘home’ highlights that the home may have been unfamiliar from the very beginning.”17 19

Shadow of a Doubt Given Hitchcock’s predilection for obsessive details, it seems likely that one of the reasons he favored Shadow is that it is an extraordinarily well-ordered narrative system. The film exhibits a meticulous consistency as a cause-and-effect chain allowing its various scenes and sequences to come together to form a unified narrative that is highly effective in building suspense and cultivating identification with characters.18 This scrupulously organized film operates as a “master class” on principles of narrative design while generating resonant commentary on the nature of family life. With exquisite visual composition, it is also a highly spatially expressive film in which disproportionate figure positioning, canted angles and verticality work to signify character concerns and dilemmas and the film’s broad moral complexity in general. In these and other ways Shadow exhibits a debt to the representational repertoire of German Expressionism which Hitchcock had imbibed directly during his time at UFA Babelsberg Studios in Berlin in the 1920s.19 The lighting, camerawork and elements of the mise-en-scène in and around the second story of the Newton home in particular are consistently Expressionist in character. Such stylistic protocols are consistent with the film’s broader depiction of the unexplained since German Expressionist films are, of course, also associated with the supernatural; as Renee Tobe writes they “offer an excellent means to evince the uncanny.”20 Shadow of a Doubt is marked by a high level of compositional integrity. A close reading of the film elicits understanding of the ways that cohesiveness is achieved by strategies such as foreshadowing and payoff, recurring motifs (particularly rings, hands and staircases), repetition and contrast.21 The use of motifs is never incidental – the emphasis on staircases, for instance, helps to activate an important visual economy of height and the fear of falling that characterizes Hitchcock’s films overall.22 As Steven Jacobs has observed in a study of the architectural imagery of Hitchcock’s films, the staircase is “a central spine of domestic space,” which “presents itself as an arena for psychological tension.”23 In Shadow Charlie never takes the front staircase of the Newton home from the time she learns her uncle may be a serial murderer until she puts the ring he gave her back on her finger and descends the staircase to compel him to leave. Another motif, that of dreams and dreaming, also recurs through the film as Charles tells his sister “Emmy, you’re a dream,” while bitterly informing her daughter in the ‘Til-Two bar that she “lives in a 20

Shadow of a Doubt dream.” Charlie, of course, indirectly communicates her knowledge of his criminal status to Charles by saying she dreamt he was leaving town. Given their association with repressed knowledge and desire, dreams have often proved a serviceable narrative element in the female gothic, a form whose relatedness to Shadow I explore later in this book. In a foundational study of sound in Hitchcock’s films Elisabeth Weis argued that the director “had an abiding interest in finding ways to incorporate music into the very heart of his plot[s].”24 Shadow of a Doubt employs a musical motif that is carefully threaded through the film: the image of waltzing couples accompanied by the sound of “The Merry Widow Waltz.” This insert, always brief, is expressive of the psychological alignment between Charles and Charlie and it appears four times: at the start of the film under the opening credits, at the end of the kitchen “betrothal” scene, at the end of the library scene where Charlie discovers her uncle’s true identity and at Charles’ death. Typical of the way that Hitchcock “loves to yoke music with murder,” the insert is part of a repertoire of elements unifying the film’s central relationship; the bond between uncle and niece is “important enough that Hitchcock feels compelled to emphasize it visually and narratively.”25 While associated with the two though, it is not exactly attributed to them. As Patrick Crogan shows in a carefully constructed set of arguments, “the image of the waltzing couples does not seem to be a vision belonging to any character in the film. Its appearance over the credits before the film’s story begins supports this view.”26 Many critics link the insert to Charles’ investment in an idealized past since the costuming of the dancers evokes the sartorial styles of the 1890s. Gilberto Perez, for instance, reads the image in this fashion but dexterously avoids oversimplification, asking “Where does it come from? It seems to come from the past but a past that never was, a fantasy of bygone glamour, an unattainable yet persistent dream.”27 And so the waltzing couples might best be understood as a sign of the desire to retain the image of an idealized past while also expressing the illusory character of such images. Thematically charged parallelism, in which a film cues us to compare two elements highlighting some similarity between them is particularly recurrent in Shadow which is filled with doubled characters, doubled events and doubled philosophies.28 21

Shadow of a Doubt

Figure 2: Throughout Shadow of a Doubt Uncle Charles is associated with verticality and surveillance.

One of the ways in which form and content link up in this film is that everything in this narrative system has a double or might we say a shadow – there is the way things seem and then there is the way things are. This is part of the way the film re-purposes the phrase “beyond a shadow of a doubt” normally associated with a decisive clarity – as a title here it loses positive explicability.29 The film contains for example: • Two characters named Charlie • Two detectives in Newark, then two in Santa Rosa • Two criminals sought (Charles and the unlucky man in Maine who is killed while being pursued as the “Merry Widow Murderer”) • Two girls with glasses who resemble one another (Catherine and Ann) • Two dinner sequences • Two amateur sleuths (Joe and Herb) 22

Shadow of a Doubt • Two young children (Ann and Roger) • Two attempts by Charles to injure Charlie • Two nighttime walks through town by Charlie • Two double brandies served at the ‘Til-Two Bar by a waitress who’s worked there for two weeks (and where the clock on the door reads 2:00).30 In keeping with the film’s commitment to parallelism, doubling and inversion and as Diane Carson observes in a cogent close analysis, in Shadow of a Doubt “Truth is discovered or revealed at night four times.”31 The first instance takes place outside Gunner’s Grill when Charlie has an inexplicable “bolt from the blue” deduction that Graham is a detective, the second when she unearths the newspaper article in the library, the third when she discovers that Charles has booby-trapped a step on the back staircase in hope she will fall and the fourth in the ‘Til-Two Bar. In addition to such structural concerns, questions of genre arise in regard to a film that revises female gothic formulas while also engaging (through its positioning of serial killer Uncle Charles) with the conventions of the vampire film, since as David Sterritt points out, “Shadow of a Doubt refers to the vampire-movie tradition with surprising frequency.”32 Released at a time when Hollywood was particularly conscious of “a female audience thrown into prominence by World War II,” Shadow also manifests important links to melodrama more broadly and in some respects to the homefront war film.33 In one of the most well-known assessments of Shadow, Robin Wood aptly reads it as a fusion of small-town comedy and film noir.34 In my analysis of the film I place particular emphasis on its relation to the ideological systems that organize American life. As I have noted here, Shadow is not infrequently assessed as the first meaningful engagement of a Hitchcock film with a culture that was still new to its expatriate director. In one pithy example of such an assessment a critic writes: “Shadow of a Doubt is the picture where Alfred Hitchcock first discovered America.”35

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Shadow of a Doubt A Note on Authorship Even though (and partly for the sake of economy) I sometimes refer to “Hitchcock” in an authorial way when analyzing Shadow of a Doubt I want to make clear that the director cannot be straightforwardly or wholly credited with the film’s achievements (nor blamed for its deficiencies). Despite the fact that Hitchcock was exceptionally meticulous and controlling of the production process, the collaborative nature of that process must be borne in mind as well as the fact that historical records of Hitchcock’s films tend to be shaped to carefully record his creativity though not necessarily that of his collaborators. Notably, as I have intimated, the creative personnel responsible for the film encompassed a number of women in key roles, such as Sally Benson who substantially moved the progress of the script forward, Alma Neville and actress Patricia Collinge who re-wrote some of her dialogue, steering the character of Emma Newton in more complex and sympathetic directions and improving the nuance and depth of scenes such as the one in the garage between Charlie and FBI Agent Jack Graham.36 So I hope it will be apparent that I do not believe the film’s trenchant account of gender, sexuality, intimacy and family can be solely sourced in/attributed to one person and while regularly alluding to directorial authorship throughout this book, I am referring to a qualified authorship. Having said this I do not in any way seek to deny Hitchcock’s strong shaping influence or the relatedness between Shadow and other Hitchcock films that bespeaks a unified set of interests and investments across the body of the director’s work.37 For my purposes it is particularly important that, as Robert J. Corber has observed, “Hitchcock’s authorial system was not monolithic but responded to changes in historical circumstances.”38 Further, I find useful Tania Modleski’s insight that “Hitchcock’s great need (exhibited throughout his life as well as in his death) to insist on and exert authorial control may be related to the fact that his films are always in danger of being subverted by females whose power is both fascinating and seemingly limitless.”39 In this book I seek to contribute to a corpus of “feminist scholarship on Hitchcock [that] has made space for feminist and lesbian interpretations of the films without denying the misogyny and homophobia evident in them.”40 I am particularly keen to avoid celebrating the perspicacity of the film text as a way of doubling down on or refreshing accounts of Hitchcock’s genius. 24

Shadow of a Doubt In the #MeToo era, many readers’ perceptions of Alfred Hitchcock’s extraordinary contributions to cinema will be inseparable from his reputation as a misogynist who harassed the female stars of his films. Teresa Wright received top billing for Shadow of a Doubt and by all accounts the film’s director perceived her to be ideally suited for the part. Small elements across the film heightened the connections between actress and role such as the fact that the graduation photo we glimpse in Charlie’s bedroom was of Wright’s 1938 graduation from Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. Hitchcock lavishly praised Wright’s acting skills but his regard for her didn’t prevent him from engaging in the kind of sexual harassment that he practiced on numerous film sets.41 According to Donald Spoto, in a biography of the actress that relies heavily on extensive interviews with her, the director was in the habit of whispering obscenities to his star just before he called “Action.”42 Shadow of a Doubt’s artistry is superlative and is built on a masterfully crafted screenplay, a proficient and highly skilled cast and a narrative whose thematic resonances are both historically specific and perennial. The film stands out for (among other things) its adept deployment of the full range of enunciative tactics associated with classical Hollywood cinema. I maintain that Shadow is a film whose meticulous craft and ideological richness warrant the placement of it at or near the center of the Hitchcock canon. It is not a showy film and it certainly cuts against a fairly rigid popular definition of what constitutes a Hitchcock film. It has at times been subject to deeply misguided readings such as the one by David Denby who fails to understand how nihilism is rendered attractive in Shadow of a Doubt and thus categorizes the film as “a celebration of innocence and community,” claiming that in it “the town of Santa Rosa, California has no dark side.”43 David Sterritt is more on target when he refers to Santa Rosa’s “ostentatiously (if deceptively) wholesome townspeople” and the film’s “interest in the desolation of bourgeois family, cultural and economic life.”44 Just as aptly, Robin Wood contends that in Shadow of a Doubt “what is in jeopardy is above all the Family – but, given the Family’s central ideological significance, once that is in jeopardy, everything is.”45 Likewise, Ronnie Scheib has argued that “Young Charlie’s dissatisfaction with her family proceeds from a perceptive analysis of its function, misinterpreted as a malfunction.”46 25

Shadow of a Doubt Genre, Violence and Repression in Shadow of a Doubt Shadow of a Doubt operates in at least four fundamental generic registers as: • A Pandora’s Box Narrative (put in the simplest terms “by the end of the movie this woman has come to see more, know more and do more” and yet by the conclusion we understand this to be very much a pyrrhric victory)47 • A romance • A wartime drama • A horror film (in this last regard, it is useful to note that Shadow’s publicity materials consistently misrepresented the film’s style and tone, steering it in a more lurid direction consistent with the codes of a more conventional horror film). Following the norms and protocols of critical and historical studies, my study of Shadow of a Doubt seeks to synthesize prior critical work on the film, its generic status, its commentaries on gender and power and its historical positioning. Although it is not the approach I am taking here another means of understanding the film would be through the lens of industrial history seeking to assess, for instance, its box office performance, Hitchcock’s positioning in the American film industry, the status and significance of the film as a Universal Pictures release, etc. One of my goals in this book is to explore why a critic of the stature of Robin Wood would assert in regard to Hitchcock’s body of work that “Shadow of a Doubt remains the most perennially disturbing of all his films.”48 I hope that this book offers ample justification for Wood’s claim. In seeking to place this under-studied work more fully and definitively within the Hitchcock canon I attach particular importance to its conceptualization of family and home. My sense is that the film constitutes a powerful interrogation of norms of intimacy and kinship that in a later era would be associated with the notion of “family values,” an interrogation that to its credit the conclusion culminates but does not resolve. The concept of “family values” remains politically central to American life but it is strikingly underexamined in scholarship. One exception in this regard is Estella Tincknell’s study of media representations of the familial in which she assesses “the 26

Shadow of a Doubt powerful mythology of family life, which frequently facilitates a reductively narrow model of ‘normal’ kinship relations.”49 Shadow of a Doubt, in my view, draws its protagonist pair of uncle and niece together in large part because they are outsiders to the family ideal; they hold deep familial attachments but at the same time mistrust and resist the expectations they are expected to play in furthering the family. While I admire Shadow’s balanced composition, its embodiment of Aristotelian principles of narrative cohesion and its rich characterizations I attend most closely here to its epistemological and ontological complexity. One of the film’s key contributions is its recognition that our idealizations of family and community membership often operate as strategic forms of repression. My assessment is in this respect very much indebted to Thomas Hemmeter’s in which he classifies the “film’s narrative as a rhetorical enterprise which analyzes the family roots of misogyny” and locates Charlie Newton’s “position as the intersection of conflicting patriarchal values” that “articulate a feminist objection to the sexual roles created by this system.”50 I concur with Tania Modleski’s characterization of Hitchcock’s films that “the question which continually—if sometimes implicitly—rages around Hitchcock’s work as to whether he is sympathetic toward women or misogynistic is fundamentally unanswerable because he is both. . . the misogyny and the sympathy actually entail one another.”51 In Shadow of a Doubt this context governs the manner in which the female protagonist makes discoveries about the nature and origins of misogyny. It is evident that Shadow marks Hitchcock’s emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life. As I have suggested, Uncle Charles, the serial murderer of wealthy widows he considers morally expendable, is encoded as a vampire and in this sense, he serves as a harbinger of the more openly eroticized vampires of the early twenty-first century, some of whom have been specifically placed to mediate the sexual ambivalence of teenage girls as in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992 in film, 1997-2003 on television), True Blood (2008-2014) and Twilight (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012) multi-media franchises.52 When we first meet him, he is lying fully dressed and perfectly still, waiting it seems for the right moment to re-animate. We perceive that Charles is sinister in some way we don’t yet understand but we absorb that beds are like Charles’ coffins. Shortly he will journey from East to West in the manner of Dracula (the fact that his announced visit is actually a threat is signaled in the faux-cheerful language of his telegram to 27

Shadow of a Doubt the Newton family which includes the line “just try and stop me”). Later in the film we will note his aversion to being photographed which is logical given his status as a fugitive but it also harmonizes with the legend of Dracula as a supernatural being whose image can’t be reproduced. In this sense, Charles’ positioning is indicative of a broader shift underway in the period that relocated the source of horror away from Europe and toward the US. Shadow of a Doubt’s vampiric references range from the direct to the oblique. As Diane Carson notes, when Charlie’s friend Catherine asks Charlie how her throat is when she encounters her out on a date, having cancelled their plan to go to the movies in favor of a date with Jack at Gunner’s Grill, her wording also evokes the role of Dracula’s victim.53 Like Dracula, Charles invades and contaminates his environment, symbolically darkening it as we see in the noxious black smoke emitted from the train against the pristine backdrop of Santa Rosa on his arrival. As in vampire mythology, all women are potentially Charles’ prey, from the widowed Mrs. Potter to even Charlie’s younger sister Ann. Notably Ann seems to uncannily verbalize the threats the film associates with Uncle Charles.54 After the betrothal scene in the kitchen, Charlie begins humming and Ann comments “Sing at the table and you’ll marry a crazy husband.” Without explanation in the second dinner scene the little girl asks her mother if she can change her seat to move away from her uncle. Later, in a bid to keep Ann occupied while Saunders wrests an agreement from Charlie to supply the detectives with information about her uncle, Graham says to Ann “Tell Catherine the story of Dracula.” In Adam Knee’s assessment, “Like Dracula, Uncle Charlie is a master of dissemblance, appearing to be something other than what he really is.”55 At another comparative level, Charles is similar to Dracula in the way he toggles between sophistication and elegance and the realm of odium that he associates with both Merry Widows and middle-class life itself which he characterizes as a façade covering over abjection and filth. In a survey of 1943 film releases Catherine L. Preston pays particular attention to Shadow of a Doubt. In Preston’s estimation key films of that year worked consistently “to illuminate and define the American ‘imagined community’” through formats like the realistic combat film, the personalized combat film, the homefront war film and the morale-boosting service musical.56 In such a context the scope Hitchcock’s film 28

Shadow of a Doubt gives to its protagonist’s charismatic anti-communal views are all the more striking. Charles’ murderous pathologies resonate profoundly in familial and sociohistorical contexts as I will explore; a common response to the remarkable speech justifying his killings (and filmed in intensifying close-up) that he gives during a family dinner is to link the dialogue to the Aryanist extermination rationales of Nazi Germany. In this regard, the question of exactly how to read the cultural and geographic implications of Charles’s sophisticated style has been a pressing one for some critics despite the straightforward way that Joe tells Herbert after introducing the two that his brother-in-law is a “New York man.”57 While earlier versions of the film’s script contained references to Charles’ overseas travel, the excision of such references in the finished film crucially removes the possibility of reading Charles as having become “contaminated” by foreign influence. (Though at least one was not excised – in the ‘Til-Two Bar Charles tells Charlie “I’ve been chasing around the globe since I was 16”.) And while I don’t share his view it is worth noting that for Steffen Hantke there is still some basis for reading Charles in this manner; indeed, Hantke goes so far as to refer to Charles’ “covert European self ”58 in a reading of the film that attributes significance to the fact that Franz Lehar, the composer of the Merry Widow waltz (Die Lustige Witwe in the original) was Austrian and suggests that the insert scenes of waltzing couples imply a European cosmopolitanism The necessity of attending to these multiple generic, social and historical contexts becomes evident when unpacking the rich dialogue spoken throughout the film (such as when Charles tells his niece “The same blood flows through our veins, Charlie” evoking the romance and terror of consanguinity). My analysis of the film is rooted in my agreement with James Naremore that Shadow makes Charles’ “critique of an idealized, Norman Rockwell community seem at least partly valid.”59 It is equally in tune with Andrew Britton’s contention that “The film can be seen as a major instance of a theme which has characterized American art from Thoreau to Norman Mailer’s ‘white negro’ – the problem of the perversion of fundamental energies which cannot be accommodated by bourgeois-capitalist American democracy.”60 Charlie Newton is carefully introduced by the film as a thoughtful, capable young woman existentially discontent with normative life in Santa Rosa.61 She yearns for an intimate bond of knowledge with someone who isn’t merely going through the 29

Shadow of a Doubt motions of life. Her jubilant “He heard me, he heard me,” as she returns from the telegraph office (her journey there having become unnecessary when she learns that Charles has in fact sent a communication announcing his impending visit) bespeaks the film’s investment in the romantic communion of an unlikely couple.62 It is also in keeping with certain norms of wartime separation that prevailed in the period of the film’s release – in other words, the romantic frisson of the couple who share a supernatural communication across distances had a wartime resonance. The fantasy of telepathic communion under these conditions was associated with social practices such as the use of Ouija boards. As Christina Lane notes “Between February and June 1944, a department store in New York City reported that fifty thousand Ouija boards had been sold to customers who were mesmerized by their movements and hoped to receive messages about soldiers abroad.”63 In addition to establishing a romantic kismet between Charlie and Charles this early section of the film is important in setting a pattern of vivid female characterization below protagonist level. David Humbert writes that “Like Shakespeare, Hitchcock fills his scenarios with subordinate characters whose dialogue and actions echo the main actions and conflicts of the principals.”64 In what might be understood as a repudiation of Charles’ taxonomy of female value, Shadow of a Doubt manifests a particular interest in women who have low or lost use-value in patriarchy – it does this chiefly through Emma of course but also through the rich secondary portrayals of other Santa Rosa women including telegraph operator Mrs. Henderson, who only sends telegrams “the normal way,” the librarian Mrs. Cochran and of course Louise Finch. All three manifest authority in a certain sense over communication, information and the value of objects and involve themselves in the concerns and interests of Charlie Newton and the Newton family (Emma converses familiarly by phone with Mrs. Henderson and when Charlie appears at the telegraph office the operator draws from the conversation to refer to Charles as “the spoiled one”). Shadow builds skillfully from the separate introduction of uncle and niece to heighten a feeling of expectation about Charles’ arrival and an initially pleasurable sense of disruption that he delivers. In Elaine Lennon’s assessment, “The scale of emotion in Shadow is demonstrated by Young Charlie’s creeping realization of what she has invited into her midst; but also by the knowledge that her connection with her uncle is on a deep level – and that he represents something inside her.”65 30

Shadow of a Doubt Charlie’s romantic telepathy with her uncle forcefully contrasts with her inability to reach Jack Graham once he has left Santa Rosa despite him having furnished her with a detailed itinerary. Different drafts of Shadow of a Doubt’s script in the Academy of Motion Pictures Library show the film settling into a shape during the development process that intensifies the Charles/Charlie relationship, curtails Graham’s agency, heightens Emma’s role and deepens the sense of institutional mistrust and moral ambivalence overall. Richard Allen has written of the “romantic inversion” that seems to characterize Shadow of a Doubt.66 It is impossible to understand the film, in my view, without grappling with the (family) romance that centers it. The unlikely couple at its heart, Uncle Charles and his niece and namesake Charlie Newton both cherish and despise the family. While she abhors his murderous conduct, to exterminate his influence over the family she must take a life herself. At the heart of the film is a complex, never fully ruptured compact between Charles and Charlie. As I will argue, in a certain sense, Charlie concludes the film as both widow and killer, confirming but also complicating Julie Kirgo’s reference to her as her uncle’s “better half.”67 We should note the multi-layered nature of Shadow’s investigative mode – through much of the film Charlie is investigating Charles and the film might be said to be investigating its milieu/social context. The film’s deep interest in the speakable and unspeakable elements of middle-class family life and of the family’s relation to the social protocols of the community is a subject which I will explore further. Shadow of a Doubt is a film which manifests important links to the incestuous economies of contemporary films such as Blue Velvet (1986) and American Beauty (1999) and to newer, trenchant though perhaps less subversive films (due to their compromised endings) such as Little Children (2006) and Juno (2007). But its greatest significance may lie in its status as a master narrative of American life. It is fully as resonant in its need to pinpoint and expel the other within (while underlining the impossibility of ever fully doing so) as the greatest Hollywood films. Specific comparison might well be made to The Searchers (1956), famously argued to be the film Hollywood keeps making over and over again and American audiences keep wanting to see over and over again. (Most recently critics have identified this same dynamic in In the Valley of Elah [2007], a film whose triangulation of national violence, misdirected rage against those with whom 31

Shadow of a Doubt we share bonds and the deep unknowability of those we are close to bears some comparison to Shadow.) To my mind, the most salient point of comparison hinges on the similarities between The Searchers’ Ethan Edwards and Charles Oakley as protagonists positioned outside the family whose intense emotional relationship to it vacillates between idealism and disenchantment. In both cases the protagonists are positioned as complex figures of salvation/destruction. Explicit remakes of Shadow have taken such forms as the eldritch Stoker (2013) while other films such as Woody Allen’s Irrational Man (2015) rely openly on its narrative strategies (as I discuss in greater detail later in this book). Moreover, in her narrow, unlikely defeat of a serial killer Charlie Newton also manifests a distinct resemblance to the prototypical “final girl” delineated by Carol J. Clover who addresses herself to more contemporary films but sketches the position of the female survivor in the horror genre in ways that evoke Shadow’s focal female character.68 Shadow of a Doubt is conspicuous in Hitchcock’s capacious body of work for the perspectival centrality it gives to a teenage girl (this may begin to explain why conventionally critics have overlooked it in favor of films like Vertigo [1958], Psycho [1960] and Notorious where the tortured psychology of a white man is centered). The film was released during a period in which teenagers were just beginning to establish greater (if contested) social authority, and in this book I consider how Shadow’s young protagonist aligns with a mid-twentieth century turn toward the teenage girl as cultural subject. It is important to note that the liminal space between girlhood and adulthood was unusually charged in the 1940s; following a cluster of late 1930s films about unruly women (Jezebel [1938], Gone With the Wind [1939]) and their unhappy fates, the period saw an efflorescence of girl stars: Deanna Durbin, Margaret O’Brien, Judy Garland, Ann Blyth, Elizabeth Taylor and Shirley Temple all maintained significant levels of stardom in this era. Popular music culture in the 1940s foregrounded the image of the female “bobbysoxer,” an energetic young music fan so called because of the custom of dancing shoeless on hardwood gymnasium floors. (In 1947 Temple would appear in The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer.) As Georgeanne Scheiner notes: “The exigency of war increased the market power of the teenage girl in the 1940s. The emergence of a strong subculture and a subcultural marker, the bobby soxer, was instrumental in the continuation of a public identity for girls. Their increased market strength was 32

Shadow of a Doubt tied to new avenues of consumption, as whole industries like music and clothing manufacturers, began catering to teenage girls.”69 In its opening minutes as Shadow moves to Santa Rosa it introduces Charlie Newton as “the oldest child and the family member most dramatically poised at the edge of a philosophical threshold.”70 Charlie is presented as apprehensive about a future in which she will be locked into the same kind of self-abnegating life that she sees her mother living in a town where, as Emma Newton will later say, “women keep busy with their homes mostly.” Shadow opens with a nebulous though still pungent critique of the placement of women in middle-class family life. In a sequence of shots identical to those used in the prior introduction of Charles, Charlie is depicted lying on her bed in the daytime in a funk. Charlie asks her father “Have you ever stopped to think that a family should be the most wonderful thing in the world and that this family’s just gone to pieces?. . .We sort of go along and nothing happens.” Joel Gunz’s observation in regard to Charlie’s introduction that “In Hitchcock’s world, boredom is often a precursor to chaos” is largely apt in narrative terms though it does not perhaps capture the complexity of her despair.71 Certainly, superficial evidence to bolster Charlie’s claim that the Newtons have “gone to pieces” is nowhere to be found (at least on the surface) in the film’s opening scenes of mundane routine as the family members return to the house from work and school, pursuing leisure and respite. Yet in a busy household with a teenaged daughter and two small children, we glean nevertheless a sense that the family’s unified presentation conceals considerable alienation as they talk over and disregard one another, the small children clamoring for attention from their parents and obsessively focusing on minute details. Young Ann seems particularly keen to escape into the world of books; a committed bibliophile, she has taken a “sacred oath” to read two books a week.72 Elsie B. Michie has advanced a productive line of argument in which she joins together the girl’s precocity and devotion to reading, her prompt to her sister to visit the library where Charlie’s reading discloses her uncle’s identity and the value of books to women trying to understand the world.73 If Ann is intuitive and knowledgeable, nevertheless here and elsewhere in the film she and her brother are totally overridden; they hardly get to finish a sentence. Bill Krohn goes so far as to say that Ann and Roger “have their own monomanias to match Herb and Joe.”74 Shortly 33

Shadow of a Doubt after these character introductions as the family gathers at dinner after Uncle Charles’ arrival, in a dialogue line I have previously singled out that is breezily delivered but that hints at familial discord, Charlie comments that “For once we’re all happy at the same time.” These early scenes and the subsequent actions seem sufficient to justify Andrew Britton’s contention that “The family life of the Newtons in Shadow of a Doubt is characterized by constant and habitual repression.”75

Figure 3: Charles’ arrival in Santa Rosa highlights a centering role for Joe that he will surrender to his brother-in-law and an instinctive mistrust on the part of Ann.

In its early sequences Shadow of a Doubt sketches a portrait of small-town stasis economically yet vividly; we understand that interruptions of daily routine here are rare. When the family go to meet Charles at the train station, for instance, Roger later points out that they were the only ones there who met someone. This of course heightens our expectations; having seen what order is like in Santa Rosa, the prospect of some disorder is rather appealing both narratively and ideologically. Charles’ charismatic attractiveness is rooted in the prospect that he will deliver Charlie from her social fate as he himself has defied social expectations in his own life.76 But as I have suggested, the pleasurable sense of disruption he delivers is short-lived, transforming quickly into a realization that the Newton family is 34

Shadow of a Doubt internally contaminated. This realization is signaled most emphatically later in the film in Charlie’s breakdown when she and Charles return home from the ‘Til-Two Bar and the happy image of domesticity she glimpses from the footpath is rendered malignant and false. These sequences strikingly bear out Barbara M. Bannon’s contention that “Just as Hitchcock’s characters may be fragmented, so the world in which they live is seen as essentially chaotic, merely overlain with a veneer of stability of which it is the perverted mirror image.”77 Charlie’s privileged place in the Newton household is communicated by myriad narrative details (not only do her parents both seem to seek her out when they return home, later her father will allude to her academic achievements). Later still we learn that she is the only driver of the family’s car and her uncle will tell her unctuously “You’re the head of your family, Charlie, anyone can see that.”78 A beautiful, white middle-class girl coming of age in mid-century America, Charlie, we come to understand, perceives a world that is both welcoming and hostile to her. Notably her centrality and agency sit alongside the film’s recognition that she is perceived by others in terms of her marriageability. Speaking of Emma, FBI agent Jack Graham tells Charlie on their date “All mothers lose things – one day she’ll be losing you.” This issue is latent in the film from its earliest scenes, namely the introduction of Charlie lying on her bed in a torpor in which she characterizes herself as an “old maid.” In deploying this pejorative patriarchal designation, she connects herself to a category of illicit femininity akin to that of the “merry widow.” Paul Gordon observes that “In bestowing the same name upon the two characters Hitchcock wants us to realize the familial origin of Uncle Charles’ crimes, but this does not mean that young Charlie is trapped by childhood fixation the way her uncle is. Quite the contrary, throughout the film young Charlie is in the process of asserting her independence through her relationship with detective Graham, whom we must assume she eventually marries.” Gordon, in my view, mischaracterizes the prospects Graham will offer Charlie as a husband and it is hard to read her relationship with a white-collar professional man her mother conspicuously approves of as anything other than the taking up of a normative social role. Like Hitchcock’s earlier Rebecca, in which Maxim de Winter famously exhorts his bride “Please promise me never to wear black satin or pearls – or to be 36 years old,” 35

Shadow of a Doubt Shadow of a Doubt thematizes the dangers of female adulthood. A Pandora’s Box narrative in which the heroine longs for knowledge but comes to rue what she has learned, the film understands the comfort and vague dissatisfaction that accompany ignorance as well as the way that social institutions and norms act as buffers to critical reflection.79 Helen Hanson observes that “female investigators – femme detectives, girl-sleuths, investigating school teachers, reporters, and librarians – were actually staple female figures in popular detective fictions and films in the 1940s.”80 In Hitchcock’s films women who exert agency or pursue knowledge operate as provocations and they are customarily punished. In Shadow that punishment is psychological rather than physical, manifested in Charlie’s sorrowful mien and diminished affect as she stands (significantly) outside the church listening to the minister’s encomium for her uncle at the close of the film. For some viewers, and in keeping with the film’s ambivalent resolution of Charlie’s epistemophilia, this scene entails the heroine already trying to forget what she knows. Without minimizing the significance of Charlie’s disenchantment, we may say that Shadow constitutes the director’s richest exploration of women’s normative social roles without as brutal a punishment as those meted out in many of his other films.

The Family Romance in Shadow of a Doubt Shadow of a Doubt conspicuously complies with three-act structure storytelling as it has traditionally been practiced in Hollywood. It does not begin or end randomly and is tightly unified by credible notions of causality. It richly delivers on spectatorial expectations for internal cohesiveness and wholeness, clearly designating its key concerns and dealing with them in a consistent fashion. Aristotelian principles dictate that a well-crafted narrative is one which is “complete in itself ” and Shadow certainly fulfills this brief. During its first hour Shadow commits itself to exposition but also sets in place a question about the true identity of Uncle Charles. The answer to this question is resolved nearly exactly at the film’s one-hour mark and acts as a fulcrum between its first two dramatic acts. After Charlie’s visit to the library (a revelation scene which is also a reversal, its import punctuated with the use of a dramatic crane shot) the film neatly rounds the corner from Act I to Act II, raising the stakes considerably.81 36

Shadow of a Doubt The dramatic high angle camerawork used to punctuate the close of the scene points the way toward a key shift in which Hitchcock will begin to present “young Charlie’s descent into the maelstrom in increasingly dark, claustrophobic, and compositionally off-balance visual terms.”82 For Elsie B. Michie the resonance of this revelation scene is tied to the way the newspaper article, recounting an exemplary female biography in Thelma Schenley’s transition to “Mrs. Bruce Matthewson,” intimates the victimization and losses associated with taking up normative female roles. As she writes, the scene discloses the story “not just of Uncle Charlie’s crimes or even of the suffering of his victims but of the path Charlie must follow if she is to become a wife and mother.”83 Charlie’s original goal had been to bring Charles back to the family, her goal from this point forward will be to drive him away. While it is indisputable that Charles is a threat to the Newtons, the question of whether he should be understood as external or intrinsic to the family unit might be difficult to parse but stands at the heart of the film and its meanings. To explore this, I will turn to psychoanalytic theory to explore what is at stake in the dynamic that structures Charles and Charlie’s relationship and motivates their separate behavior as characters through the psychological complex formulated by Sigmund Freud as the “Family Romance.” Freud posits that in order to grow up and reach adulthood we have to separate ourselves from our original relationship with our parents. We do this in stages: • In the first stage we realize our parents are not as perfect as we thought they were. After believing in early childhood that they live their lives to please us, we perceive that they have other concerns. (Here we recall that Charlie opens the film expressing dissatisfaction with her parents and her family life.) • As a result, we imaginatively substitute other people for our parents, conjuring a fantasy that they are our real parents and completely devoted to us. This process of finding “new and improved” versions of them resembles the way Charlie invites her uncle into the house where he takes up a position as the head of the family. We understand that in some sense Charles materializes to gratify Charlie’s fantasy of securing an ideal husband and of being rescued from her mother’s fate of being trapped in marriage. 37

Shadow of a Doubt • While all of this customarily plays out in childhood, some traces of the complex linger into adulthood where we choose romantic partners who act as substitutes for our parents, typically holding the same sorts of values that they hold. Channeling these childhood concerns into socially acceptable forms entails navigating life partner choice in terms of endogamy and exogamy. Here we should recall Jack Graham’s statement to Charlie that “average families are the best – I come from an average family.” (His claim vividly contrasts with Uncle Charles’ resonant assessment that the Newtons should be classed as “AllAmerican Suckers”.) Freud’s conceptualization of the Family Romance drives our attention to the social marking of appropriate and inappropriate ways of trying to regain the love and attention we felt from our parents as children. The normative means of so doing is through adult, heterosexual marriage to someone similar to our family of origin but biologically outside it. In Shadow of a Doubt this will entail Charlie’s substitution of Jack Graham for her Uncle Charles. The regret and ambivalence that subtend this process are associated in the film with Charles (who must be killed off) and also, I suggest, with ‘Til-Two waitress Louise Finch who exists in a kind of social death, the normative allotted fate of promiscuous, unpartnered women. These “shadow characters” embody the energies and impulses that have to be suppressed for the sake of the family. At the level of surface plot, one may read Shadow as delineating Charlie Newton’s progress through the stages of conventional sexual maturation in the sense that she moves from endogamy to exogamy; that is to say she transfers her attachment from a family member to an appropriate figure outside the family. This normative version of the female coming-of-age story has propelled countless Hollywood films sometimes with a tinge of anxiety as in the original and remake cycles of Father of the Bride (1950, 1951, 1991, 1995). More recent hits like Pretty Woman (1990) stage romances in which the age and economic differences between the couple in the love plot implicitly guarantee the restoration of paternal care. You’ve Got Mail (1998) produces closure predicated in part on the suppression of its heroine’s over-attachment to her mother. Contemporary postfeminist Hollywood overall has demonstrated a consistent fondness for orphan heroines and highlighted the need for women to find economic guardianship amidst the exigencies of neoliberalism. 38

Shadow of a Doubt Some films come as close as they can to staging the heroine’s romantic security in a way that suggests she will not need to leave the family; in Clueless (1995) for instance Cher falls in love with her former stepbrother (to whom she has no biological relation). In My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2001) Toula experiences her Greek-American family as suppressive and overwhelming, but when she marries outside her ethnic clan her parents present the couple with the house next door as a wedding present. Yet in Shadow the formation of the ideal couple is strikingly presented in terms of loss. We should note that Charles too sustains an important relationship to the Family Romance as he strongly idealizes the family and kills women who flout the family ideal. Fixated on the past and a childhood in which his female relatives were appropriate love objects, his visceral disgust at women who challenge such relationships of interdependency is displayed in his shocking dinner table speech (often the most well-remembered part of Shadow for casual viewers).84 We glean that Charles “feels forced to defuse the threat of independent women.”85 At a deeper level, Charles appears to be someone who can’t appropriately substitute adult sexual relationships for original family ones, and so he kills women who have stopped needing the men they’re related to.

Figure 4: Publicity for Shadow of a Doubt handled the fact that Charlie Newton’s “dream man” is her uncle with some care.

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Shadow of a Doubt When we come to the betrothal scene that takes place privately between Charles and Charlie in the kitchen just after he has presented his gifts to the family, we arrive at a critical juncture. The scene is significant of course because of the introduction of the ring, an important structural element that carries multiple motivations as it is simultaneously a symbol of Charles’ guilt and a signifier of some type of acknowledgement between the pair. I characterize the scene as a betrothal in part because of the obvious romantic conventions it deploys (we note the formality with which Charles asks for Charlie’s hand and slides the ring onto her finger and the intense besotted facial expressions of both characters). Charlie’s lack of materialism clearly pleases Charles illustrating that she is nothing like the “Merry Widows” he so despises.86 The betrothal scene is of course far from the first sign the film gives us of Charles and Charlie’s couplehood. The telegraph scene stages a romantic telepathy between the two and, though I have not lingered on it, the scene of Charles’ and Charlie’s first encounter in the film (at the Santa Rosa train station) is likewise highly romanticized. In Carl Freedman’s account “the meeting of niece and uncle is shown in a cinematographic turn nearly always used in Hollywood film to represent the reunion of lovers: the camera switches from one to the other as each is shown rushing toward the other, both faces beaming with joy and anticipation.”87

Figure 5: Charles and Charlie’s first meeting in the film is staged as a romantic reunion.

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Figure 6: In the kitchen betrothal scene Charles and Charlie forge an epistemological compact.

In one sense, there is a trance-like quality to the kitchen scene that extends our awareness of Charles as a vampire who mesmerizes and deceives his victims. However, Charles is equally transfixed by Charlie and it is here where she first establishes her capacity to uncover evidence (even if she does not yet understand why it is significant that the ring is engraved “TS from BM”). The film’s investment in them as a couple is signaled in the ways that they are presented here as well matched. From this point forward, key shifts in the relationship between the two will be marked by the status of the ring as it shifts from Charlie’s proud possession to a token reclaimed by Charles in a sort of sleight-of-hand maneuver at the ‘TilTwo Bar to a reclaimed form of evidence that Charlie procures while the family is out of the house attending Charles’ lecture. Charlie’s re-possession of the ring compels her uncle to announce his imminent departure but in Gilberto Perez’s apt description “she comes down wearing his ring, and he raises his glass when she makes her entrance, just as if this were their engagement party.”88 Perez further observes that Graham and Charlie “are like brother and sister, but this is incest without erotic spark.”89 Certainly the emotional intimacy between uncle and niece is singular amongst all the relationships in the film. The quasiincestuous affinity between them is suggestive of the film’s understanding of the ways that original family members reward and gratify us. The “betrothal scene” is significant, in part because it illustrates early on just how radical the film is prepared to be when it comes to conventional gender and family relationships. As 41

Shadow of a Doubt Paula Marantz Cohen details: “The ring-giving scene is perhaps the most unsettling in the film. It is uncomfortable to watch because it makes the relationship between uncle and niece a site of intense emotion without clearly defining it. There is the romantic rhetoric, but there is also the age gap and family connections as well as the confusion produced by the duplication of names. The uncategorizable quality of the relationship is part of its threat, because it suggests that conventional hierarchical and relational cues involving age and sex (cues that suggest a conventional fatherdaughter relationship) may be disregarded, giving rise to something both freer and more intense.”90 Thus, the compact forged between uncle and niece in the kitchen “betrothal scene” is based in part on their shared positioning as stalled within the terms of the Family Romance, their resistance to conventional maturation according to the terms of psychoanalytic heterornormativity. Julie Kirgo vividly describes Uncle Charles as “a killer with a mission, bent on the destruction of what he sees as ugly, his crazed eye fixed on a vision of a lost time.”91 Certainly, it is apparent that Charles’ devotion to and longing for original relationships is his signature characteristic. He tells his sister upon arriving in Santa Rosa, “I keep thinking of those things – all the old things.” His situation helps to elucidate the nostalgia at the heart of family values, the way that any idealization of family life depends on a selective sense of the past.92 While the family romance offers a trenchant mechanism for explaining Charles’ contrastive impulses toward integration and annihilation, the question remains, one that any serial killer film requires us to ask, why does the killer kill? (A question that to my mind has not always been probed deeply enough in existing scholarship.) Uncle Charles has been analyzed as a Hitchcock dandy – Sabrina Barton notes “he is the only character in the film who dresses with any flair,” while Thomas Elsaesser observes that “Hitchcock’s villains are often either sharp dressers or aristocratic aesthetes, often made ‘sinister’ by stereotypically homosexual traits or hints of sexual perversion.”93 This reading is at the heart of David Greven’s account of the film which centralizes the impossibility of a permanent alliance between an unruly young woman and a gay man. Certainly, Charles’ debonair, louche style is signaled in small ways by the film such as his association with and consumption of alcohol. He brings the family a bottle of sparkling burgundy that is served in the second dinner scene; we understand the consumption of alcohol to be an unusual 42

Shadow of a Doubt occurrence as Joe frowns and Emma trills “Wine for dinner, sounds so gay.” In the ‘Til-Two Bar Charles downs two double whiskeys in short order and later in the film, when Charlie is overcome in the garage Charles instructs his sister “There’s a bottle of whiskey on my bureau.” After his speech to Emma’s club, Charles assiduously pours and distributes glasses of champagne to the guests gathered at the Newton home. When the minister refrains on behalf of himself and his wife on religious grounds, he mock chastises Charles, “Now, now, Mr. Oakley, I thought champagne was only for battleships.” Of course, a psychoanalytic paradigm such as the family romance offers one mechanism for understanding Charles, but it is not an exclusive one. In the estimation of some critics he has also been straightforwardly deemed mentally ill, his sociopathic tendencies a function of the childhood skull fracture which is only referenced once and very vaguely.94 And Charles’ attitude toward his victims has also been variously interpreted. For Jan Olsson “Body disgust offers the premise for Charles Oakley’s serial killings in Shadow of a Doubt. . . Useless widows, to Uncle Charlie’s mind, usurp the ideal of small-town domesticity and are thus his targets for ridding contemporary America of excessive female fat and collecting money in the process.” William Rothman, in his analysis of Shadow of a Doubt, perceptively notes however that this disgust is not the only factor at play in Charles’ emotional relation to his victims. He finds that there is some ambivalence involved, as Charles’ contempt “comes with an undercurrent of affection – for his victims’ lost grace and beauty.”95 Olsson’s assessment calls useful attention to the intense revulsion Charles holds for women who are neither young nor thin but affluent and to the fact that this fits a pattern within Hitchcock’s work as a whole.96 I am arguing as well that the three women Charles has killed are culpable in his mind because they have failed to keep familial arrangements in place and flout the requirement of social invisibility for unpartnered women. In this respect, Charles may be considered a consummate example of the popular culture serial killer. Annalee Newitz maintains that “serial killers and stories about them are associated with the period beginning roughly near the end of the 1950s” while David Schmid among others has noted the rise of “the huge serial killer industry that has become a defining feature of American popular culture since the 1970s.”97 In a trenchant assessment Schmid contends that in the contemporary 43

Shadow of a Doubt post-9/11 era “the serial killer has emerged as a quintessentially American figure; indeed, as a piece of ‘Americana,’ with all that term implies about folksiness and even a perverse kind of nostalgic fondness.”98 Schmid’s account is thus useful in pinpointing the serial killer as a major trope in perpetuating the disavowal of American misogyny and violence, something that Hitchcock’s film anticipates and uncannily apprehends. In his book on European cinema narratives about serial killers Richard Dyer observes that such characters tend to “touch on something sensational that is also apparently real in the society in which they are made and consumed.”99 In analyzing Italian giallo films Dyer notes that marriage and the family “produce the antagonisms and traumas that turn people homicidal but also inspire killings to protect and preserve them. The family generates violence, of itself and in its defense.”100 He goes on to say: “The victims in most of these films have not only damaged the family, as the killer sees it, but are most often by definition enemies of the family, that is of proper reproduction. Straying wives and independent women, notably those in the professions of display (fashion, modelling, pornography, prostitution), and frolicking, undisciplined teenage girls all undermine patriarchal authority and threaten to create an alternative world not based on marriage and the family.”101 Though produced within a different cultural framework and in a different era, giallo films thus position the serial killer in a manner similar to Charles as a deranged defender of the family. The complexity of Charles’ family feeling is such that he both disavows it and takes it up as the source of criminal inspiration. Of course, the film provides a small narrative justification for the belief that Charles is cognitively impaired as a result of a vague event that occurred when he was a boy. But there is nothing at all substantive in the brief reference to Charles’ “childhood accident.” My sense is that this is merely a feint and I find R. Barton Palmer’s description of this section of the film astute. He writes: “Emma provides a simplistic psycho-physiological explanation for Charlie’s behavior (he fell on his head as a child), but the film resonates with a Romantic protest against the inadequacies of modern life that, as we have seen, is not recuperated by Graham’s moralizing.”102 David Humbert argues “We are being told in this scene not of a chance brain injury that inevitably altered Charles and made him ‘bad,’ but of how he reacted to a chance reminder of his vulnerability and dependence.”103 44

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Figure 7: The cryptic revelation of Charles’ childhood accident complicates our sense of his murderous pathology.

On balance, it seems that the film classes its serial killer as more culturally typical than biologically damaged. Charles’ rage is directed at women who re-make their family relations, leaving behind one arrangement in favor of a new one. Thus, he kills widows who seem to be enjoying their widowhood, dotes on the sister who secretly considers her relationship with her brother to be somehow truer than the relationship she has with her husband and children, and seeks to cement the primacy of his relationship with his niece in a symbolic betrothal he believes in enough that he considers her attachment to Jack Graham a disloyalty. In so doing, Charles thus aims squarely at a contradiction at the heart of family values as they are practiced in Western, industrial societies. On the one hand, the family is supposed to be the greatest, most stable and enduring locus of identity for women. On the other, women are expected to be flexible enough in their emotional attachments to be able to re-make them on occasion, notably in the social expectation that female adulthood entails a de-prioritization of the family of origin.104 The loyalty code Charles wants women to adhere to would thus undo the precise calibration of emotional devotion/flexibility culturally required of women. We can better understand the film’s interest in the nature and origins of misogyny when we note that Charles’ anger is directed at exactly the central paradox of 45

Shadow of a Doubt women’s emotional lives in patriarchal cultures and the way in which family values paradigms make us all hypocrites. In this sense, Charles’ unhealthy overreaction is an excessive version of “normal” psychological loss. Family values are recognized as a complex form of homesickness by the film. This is a homesickness that can never be gratified – our emotional bond with the film’s serial killer rests on the recognition that his quest is ours too and it is an impossible one, to recover the homes that are always lost to us.

Homesickness and Shadow of a Doubt Shadow is fundamentally concerned with the psychic costs of adhering to the emotional parameters of middle-class life and in this context the telegraph scenes resonate. It is as he dictates the telegram that, as James McLaughlin points out, Charles repeats the name (in a film where his repetitions serve as incantations) of the town he’s traveling to “in a tone of exquisite elegiac longing.”105 Even though of course Charles is seeking a place of safety far away from the locations of his crimes, the choice to relocate to the home of his only living relatives is an irrational one (indeed it is not long before detectives Graham and Saunders show up). But his choice is illustrative of the depth of his homesickness – Uncle Charles’ announcement to the Newtons by telegram that he is “lonesome for you all,” is in one respect an intimation of his ominous intentions (as I have noted he also says “and try and stop me”) but it reflects as well a deeply emotionally complex relation to family. Charlie is homesick for the kind of home she doesn’t have; Emma it turns out is homesick for her first home in Saint Paul. Shadow of a Doubt centralizes a multi-faceted definition of “homesickness” that suggests a strong relation between it and any number of American films, but one which stands out is The Wizard of Oz (1939). In a powerful analysis of that film, Salman Rushdie contends that “Anybody who has swallowed the scriptwriters’ notion that this is a film about the superiority of ‘home’ over ‘away,’ that the ‘moral’ of The Wizard of Oz is as sickly-sweet as an embroidered sampler – ‘East, West, home’s best’ – would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice, as her face tilts up toward the skies. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving, a dream at least 46

Shadow of a Doubt as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots.” Rushdie’s characterization of the earlier film’s rich staging of the tension between the desire to escape home and the desire to be rooted in it is remarkable in part because he quotes the same proverb spoken by Uncle Charles in Shadow of a Doubt. That line is delivered at a notable juncture, after his confrontation with Charlie in the ‘Til-Two bar and their conversation on the walkway in front of the Newton home. Charles re-enters the house, lies smoothly to Emma that he and Charlie “went for an ice cream soda,” and jauntily exclaims “East, West, home’s best,” as Joe piggybacks Ann up the staircase. The blithe expression signals that the devotion to home is mere performance and suggests the multiplicity of ways in which the invocation of home as a panacea serves to disguise how it can also be a source of sickness (as indeed may be the case with Charles). 106

Diane Carson’s reading of the film is particularly adept at bringing forward Emma’s key role in the narrative. Her assessment that “Lacking the self-awareness of Young Charlie and failing to realize its import, Emma nevertheless repeatedly acknowledges that the home is a trap” is a persuasive one.107 In a film that consistently thematizes ingress and egress from the Newton house Emma first appears in the film arriving home and saying “Those back stairs are steep,” and it is unclear why she would have used them when her young children are gathered downstairs in the living room beside the front door.108 In this way she seems to be motivated by the most literal, even banal definition of homesickness: she is sick of being at home. When Graham and Saunders visit the Newton home on the pretense of profiling them, she tells the men “this house owns us,” pointing toward a coercive domesticity. Charlie’s epistemophilia contrasts markedly with the practiced ignorance of townswomen like Emma who blithely tells Graham and Saunders that she has no idea what her beloved brother’s occupation is, relaying “He’s just in business, you know, the way men are.” Emma’s desire to remain apart from the exigencies of the present seems to find form in her response to Charles – “Oh, not current events, we get current events” – when he suggests a topical subject for his address to the Women’s Club. The film shows sustained interest in what Jack Sullivan has identified as “Hitchcock’s theme of terror in the ordinary,”109 and the desperation of women and men alike in Santa Rosa. In one sense the condition of boredom 47

Shadow of a Doubt saturates the town (a boredom Charles’ arrival conspicuously relieves). That sense of ennui, certainly in the Newton household at any rate, may be seen to be compensated for in the strenuous engagement with fictional worlds (in Ann’s case) and in the zealous quantification and collection of facts (in Roger’s). In Andrew Britton’s judgment these escapist actions bespeak antagonistic emotions that can’t be openly expressed. He aptly assesses Ann’s invocation of the childhood nursery rhyme in the scene outside church, “Step on a crack you’ll break your mother’s back. I broke my mother’s back three times” as reflecting “her repressed resentment of the family” although he may somewhat misread the little’s girl’s positioning and awareness level when he refers to “Anne [sic] Newton, a little girl characterized by a sustained autistic withdrawal from reality.”110 In fact both of the young Newton children function as mouthpieces for the conventional wisdoms that govern life in Santa Rosa, some of which they parrot very amusingly as when Ann tells her brother, “You’re not to talk against the government, Roger.” Critics including Diane Carson and Tony Williams see evidence in the film of Roger’s positioning as a successor to Uncle Charlie.111 At one stage when Graham asks Charlie what she really knows about her uncle she references her mother saying “He’s her younger brother. Just like Roger is mine,” a statement that seems strangely and uncharacteristically vapid in one sense but implies a connection between uncle and nephew that is suggestive. Williams observes that “As the youngest in the family, Roger endures the same type of maternal dominance as his uncle once did.”112 When we last see Roger he is elated to have the opportunity to explore the train before it pulls out of the station with his uncle aboard and he speculates excitedly “Maybe it’s too late, maybe I’ll have to go along,” when cautioned by Charlie that the train will shortly depart. The dialogue attests to the boy’s desire to get out of a small town and his euphoric embrace of forms of transportation the film has symbolically linked to Charles, offering perhaps the suggestion that Roger hopes to go “Charles’ way” in both a narrow sense and a broader one. In this scrupulously organized film, we should note that this moment is not an isolated one and Roger’s connection to Charles and to transport has come through earlier when Charles seeks to arrange for him and Charlie to travel separately to his Women’s Club talk and the rest of the family by taxi. Wishing to avoid being alone with her uncle, Charlie attempts to quash the plan, saying they 48

Shadow of a Doubt can all fit in the family car and Roger pipes up, “I want to ride in a taxi,” making it impossible for her to do otherwise and guaranteeing that Charlie will go into the garage alone to obtain the car. In a discussion of US cinema in the1940s, Dana Polan finds that “spiritual redemption through the forces of domesticity – through the imposition of a domestic space – is unavailable in an America for whom innocence is becoming a mark of a vanished past.”113 Certainly, in Shadow we glean a sense of a superficially harmonious domesticity that is disturbed and roiling underneath – the film gives us glimpses of domesticity as a con for women and a performance space. Emma’s performative anxiety about it is showcased during the visit of the “magazine men” (FBI agents Graham and Saunders) where she instructs them with painful intensity on the precise timing of her baking plans so that they will be on hand at the right moment to photograph her cracking an egg into a bowl.114 During the visit Emma tells the men the kitchen isn’t as she wants it to be, part of a sustained pattern of commentary Diane Carson detects from her across the film about the deficiencies of the house. “For Emma nothing in the house really is the way she’d like it,” she notes.115 Charlie too says her room is not the way she’d like it and her mother relays that Charlie “thinks everything in the house needs fixing” further amplifying the film’s numerous suggestions of a shared dissatisfaction with domesticity between mother and daughter. Through these references, the film conjures the home as a scene of disappointment and imperfection for women. Going further, we may say that Shadow of a Doubt frames an implicit contrast between the unfulfilled housewife, her only meaningful identity a relational one, and the “Merry Widows,” who, unconstrained by domestic obligations, pursue pleasure and self-interest. It is a measure of the film’s complexity that it neither endorses Charles’ de-humanizing critique of the latter nor caricatures and dismisses the former. For all that Shadow emphasizes the limitations and constraints of normative couplehood and domesticity, they are still the “only game in town” for the women of Santa Rosa and the film unmistakably emphasizes the social capital represented by a single, attractive wealthy man. Charlie’s friend Catherine openly angles for an introduction to her uncle while Mrs. Potter fawns over Charles in their first introduction at the bank, going to elaborate rhetorical lengths to communicate 49

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Figure 8: Joe and Herb devote themselves to imaginary murder scenarios and true crime lore while oblivious to the actual murderer in their midst.

her widowed status and later inventing an identical travel plan on the spot when Charles announces that he will be leaving the next day.116 A shrewd diagnostic of subterranean emotional economies, Shadow regularly depicts how the superficial pleasantries of middle-class life in Santa Rosa paper over a host of illicit desires. Joe and Herb’s avid consumption of murder mystery lore is a socially acceptable outlet for the two men’s (self-)annihilation impulses. While it is fondly written off by characters like Emma who insists on the fictionality of the murder scenarios they discuss by referring to the two as “literary critics,” we should not forget that Herb in fact symbolically poisons his neighbor by putting soda in his coffee, telling Joe happily that he used the same amount he would have used with an actual poison. (Herb, of course has two defining characteristics – his interest in homicide scenarios and his care for his unwell mother.117 In respect of the latter whom we never see Herb points forward to Psycho’s Norman Bates whom he resembles in manner.)

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Shadow of a Doubt In an early study Jane Caputi recognized the “genre of modern serial sexual murder... as a mythic ritualistic act in contemporary patriarchy.”118 Shadow emphasizes the thrill of the Merry Widow Murderer’s exploits for Joe and Herb when the latter avidly (though mistakenly) relays to Joe that the killer has been caught in Maine. Charles’ similarity to his murder-fixated brother-in-law Joe and neighbor Herb speaks to the sense that what he does at some level enacts a widespread impulse. Like Hitchcock himself, Charles seems to relish order (in the scene where he and Charlie visit the bank he speaks of his fondness for “all the little details”), while scenes such as the one in which Charles makes strangulation gestures while peering down from the house at Charlie and Graham on the lawn bespeak the director’s own interest in the strangulation of women. The effectiveness of the film lies in part, I contend, in its understanding that we may agree a little with Charles. The film’s spectators inevitably live in societies that make precise calculations about everyone’s social worth and such scales of value would often assess aging older women with disposable income and leisure time to be very problematic subjects. Charles might be deemed unusual only in the extent to which he articulates and acts on such assessments. Shadow of a Doubt is fundamentally concerned with the complexly perverse and instrumental relations that dominate family and communal life and their risk of continual exposure. Such relations imbricate all of us and Hitchcock literally shows his hand in this regard early in the film making an appearance that effectively imputes him in the pathologies in which the film is steeped. Upon her uncle’s arrival at the train station Charlie says to him, “At first I didn’t know you, I thought you were sick.” In one of his most interesting appearances in one of his films, the director appears back to camera as one of a group of bridge-players on the train as Uncle Charles (traveling as Mr. Otis) feigns illness and sequesters himself in a closed compartment during the journey to Santa Rosa.119 Just outside the compartment are the card players, one of whom is a doctor whose wife exhorts him to offer help to the unwell passenger and who rather callously replies “I’m on my vacation.”120 The doctor, however, does look directly at Hitchcock who is playing cards, with the man assessing “Well, you don’t look very well either.” We see that Hitchcock is holding a suit of spades (the best possible hand in bridge). This moment constitutes a joke about directorial control and power but more 51

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Figure 9: Hitchcock’s customary cameo appears early in the film, constituting a joke about control and a diagnostic of the director and by implication the audience.

meaningfully it operates as a self-diagnostic and because the camera takes up a position behind Hitchcock the doctor’s diagnosis extends to the audience as well. Casey McKittrick has aptly summarized the authorial marking that goes on in this scene, noting “The idea of the Hitchcock cameo as a tableau that sets questions of power and agency in motion can be glimpsed in the very brief appearance of Hitchcock in his beloved 1943 thriller Shadow of a Doubt.”121 Hitchcock’s cameo is just one of a chain of references through the film that work to puncture the inviolability and security of middle-class decorum. When Charlie says that the revelation of her brother’s status as the Merry Widow Murderer would kill her mother she may be referring to social death, and indeed the precarious status of propriety is starkly revealed near the close of the film when Emma breaks down at Charles’ announcement of his imminent departure. This emphatically punctuated plot event discloses the conditions of loss and disappointment that underwrite Emma’s life and constitutes an extraordinary moment of empathy for a midlife woman in a Hitchcock film. Aptly described by Elsie B. Michie as a scene in which “the fear suddenly surfaces that what the mother actually desires is not union with her family but separation from them,” the breakdown pushes a maternal centrality that has not previously been openly acknowledged into plain view.122 Emma’s admission of a life defined by relationality in which “you forget you’re you” is of course a corroboration of Charlie’s assessment of her mother’s positioning at the 52

Shadow of a Doubt start of the film and it is her anguish that is foregrounded here (the camera reveals the Newtons’ guests’ mortification and evasive gazes as Emma and her daughter are both brought to tears).123 Emma’s exposure of difficult, authentic emotion in the midst of passing canapes and drinks to her guests near the close of the film is a stunning moment, comparable to Charles’ self-justifying speech at the dinner table. Hitchcock closes this remarkable scene with the emphatic aesthetic punctuation of a fade to black. Its impact may be heightened by our knowledge of the fact that it was Patricia Collinge’s involvement in shaping the dialogue here that likely renders it so powerful and poignant. The depiction of Emma has drawn the admiration of critics, not least Bill Krohn who refers to it as “one of the most insightful portraits of a wife and mother in any American film.”124 Although it did not make it into the finished film, there was original dialogue in this scene that went even further in highlighting Emma’s deep connection to her brother as the only remaining member of her family of origin. In a copy of the film’s shooting script in the Academy of Motion Pictures Library, there is a strong suggestion that Emma discounts her current family in favor of the Oakleys. Remarkably the script called for her to respond to Charles’ announcement as follows: “Why, you’re the only family I have (she pauses and indicates her own family – laughing a little). I mean, we grew up together, you and I.”125 Shortly after this the family and others including Herb and Catherine gather to see Charles off at the train station and brother and sister say an emotional goodbye. Having contrived for all his sister’s children to join him on the train Charles takes hold of Charlie as it becomes clear that he does not intend to let her leave. In the last moments before the train begins to accelerate Charles refers to Emma’s breakdown at the party and tells Charlie “She’s not very strong,” adding a cryptic “I remember one time when she was very little. . .” that is never concluded as Charlie realizes her opportunity to deboard is ending and that Charles intends to restrain her. This fragmentary reference, however, resonates as a suggestion that everyone’s childhoods contain dark and unsettling events that shape them into the present. If Charles’ pathology is sourced in his boyhood, what are the earlier sources of Emma’s deep attachment to her brother and inability to remake the circumstance of her current life? A brief set of references near the conclusion that narratively clarify Charles’ philanthropic value to the powers-that-be in Santa Rosa also ideologically inflect 53

Shadow of a Doubt this thread in the film. As Charles raises his glass in a toast after his Women’s Club lecture, he announces that “I’ve arranged with Dr. Phillips for our little memorial for the children.” While we learn no further details about this donation to the local hospital it functions as another sign of Charles’ association with childhood trauma. In Shadow of a Doubt, as in so many Hitchcock films, “the house becomes a trap, the family a means of confinement.”126 As Shadow proceeds we come to see that its family roles are officially normative but actually disordered. Crucially, it’s not just the two Charlies who feel bored and dissatisfied in the roles normal family life assigns to them. In Shadow of a Doubt an entire set of characters all seem completely unsuited to the familial roles they are supposed to play – Joe doesn’t center the family in any but the most superficial sense, leaving a gap his brotherin-law quickly fills; Emma doesn’t take much notice of her young children except to correct their manners in superficial ways; and the children themselves are bored and disconnected. Emma’s lack of engagement with her younger daughter is underscored in Ann’s vivid anguish as Charlie lies unconscious on the lawn after being subject to the carbon monoxide attack in the garage. The dramatic response by the distraught girl bespeaks Charlie’s role as more of a parent than a sister to her.

Resonances of Film Noir and the Female Gothic in Shadow of a Doubt Shadow of a Doubt manifests strong links to the cinematic cycle of the “female gothic” which was particularly robust in the war years of the 1940s. Films of this sort drew upon a rich literary inheritance that included such novels as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The classic formula of the gothic entails the meeting of a young/inexperienced/ orphaned woman and a mysterious older man to whom she is shortly married. She then experiences a series of bizarre or uncanny incidents which raise the question of whether or not the hero is trustworthy and whether he loves her. She begins to suspect he may be a murderer. In the end, she learns her fears are unfounded and that she needs to trust that even when the hero appears culpable, he is not. 54

Shadow of a Doubt In staging this plot the gothic relies upon complex emotional and literal domestic geographies. In Steven Jacobs’ words, “the house as a site of mysteries, secrets and forbidden sections answers to the principle of what Freud calls the uncanny.”127

Figure 10: Publicity material for Shadow of a Doubt activated recognizably gothic thematics.

It seems clear that Shadow of a Doubt’s publicity material actively solicited the presumptively fraught female spectator of the war years, activating themes of mistrust, suspicion and romantic disappointment intrinsic to the gothic (see Figure 4 and Figure 10, above). The film was produced and distributed in the middle of an active cycle of gothic film production in Hollywood. As Diane Waldman has observed, “in the period from 1940 to 1948, Gothic romance films were produced by almost every Hollywood studio, utilizing some of their most prestigious directors and top box-office performers.”128 As Waldman attests, the “female gothic” has been a key genre in the advancement of feminist film theory. In an influential 55

Shadow of a Doubt early account of the gothic’s literary manifestations that helped to set the agenda for film theorists Joanna Russ taxonomized key elements of the formula stressing the domestic primacy of the genre, its emotional economy of fascination/repulsion and the fact that conventionally the gothic heroine “gradually becomes aware that somewhere in the tangle of oppressive family relationships going on in the House exists a Buried Ominous Secret.”129 If the gothic customarily focuses on a young woman, an older man and his prior relationship to femininity, we can see how Shadow both recycles and modifies some of the form’s staple elements. This is most apparent, of course, in the film’s renunciation of female paranoia as narrative strategy. Another striking departure from convention entails the stress on Charlie’s agency in place of the gothic heroine’s typical passivity in books where, as Russ shows, “any necessary detective work is done by other persons.”130 However, as I suggest throughout this book, Charlie’s agentic capacities, while noteworthy, are not transformative; they operate in tension with constraints that Shadow does not (and could not credibly) do away with. Gothic films dedicate themselves to revealing the inadequacies of the domestic mythologies so strongly associated with white Western femininity.131 Sound is often a favored register for communicating a sense of apprehension and anxiety in regard to such mythologies and for exploding the notion of domesticity as succor. Helen Hanson has alluded to “the instabilities of voices, sounds and music in the female gothic cycle.”132 In a discussion focused on Shadow of a Doubt Bill Krohn points out that it is a “film haunted by off-screen voices because it is set in a house where people are always calling to each other from room to room or between floors: the first time we hear Charlie’s voice it is off-screen, calling down to Ann to answer the phone, and the last voice we hear in the film – the minister delivering his eulogy for Uncle Charles – is an off-screen drone.”133 My reading of Shadow of a Doubt throughout this book holds that American society (at the time of the film’s release as now) is governed in many ways by a deep fearfulness which is among other things manifested in small rituals of order-keeping. In Shadow one way this is put across for instance is through the young Newton children, Ann and Roger, who neurotically overvalue literary worlds and systems of quantification respectively. This fearfulness is also linked to the conditions of restraint under which Charlie Newton, inheriting some of the 56

Shadow of a Doubt positionality of gothic heroines tends to operate. As Michelle A. Masse observes, “The heroines of the gothic, inculcated by education, religion and bourgeois family values, have the same expectations as those around them for what is normal,” thus “the protagonist’s options for escape are confined to those the environment and her own internalization of its codes permit.”134 Much of the feminist literature on the gothic ultimately positions the genre as an ideological safety valve. In Janice Radway’s assessment “while the popular gothic is essentially conservative in its recommendation of conventional gender behavior, its conservatism is triumphant because the narrative permits the reader first to give form to unrealized disaffection before it reassures her that such discontent is unwarranted.”135 Yet Shadow of a Doubt does not comply with this mandate, corroborating its female protagonist’s discontent rather than invalidating it. The gothic adds a supernatural frisson to melodramatic plots but even as it does so it retains strong links to real-world gender hegemonies. In this way “The Gothic plot is thus not an escape from the real world but a repetition and exploration of the traumatic denial of identity found there.”136 Gothic narrative formulae, in the judgment of many of the feminist critics who have examined the genre in both its literary and cinematic manifestations, tend either to articulate and then do away with the heroine’s concerns and insights or arrive at a kind of impasse or paralysis. Masse usefully expresses the limitations of gothic critique as follows: “The Gothic heroine’s story is not simply one of self-awareness in which the burden is the individual’s alone, however: it necessarily implicates and indicts the culture that refuses her voice. Her anxiety is grounded in a real and present danger, and her repetition actively attempts resolution. Her resistance to authority – finally, to her own victimization – is extraordinarily complicated by its seemingly ubiquitous manifestations and by her own continuing relationships to her culture. What action can follow recognition?”137 The gothic is adept at spotlighting the emotional conditions and impasses of female subjugation but deficient at devising resolutions that can significantly transform the heroine’s position. Writing about the conventions of the gothic novel, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes that “Always for women. . .life begins with a blank.”138 This description, of course, harmonizes closely with Charlie’s state of mind and expressed dissatisfactions at the start of the film. While Charlie Newton typifies the kind of young, unworldly 57

Shadow of a Doubt female protagonist associated with the gothic cycle, she also stands as a striking exception to Lisa M. Dresner’s expansive claim that “in all media at all time periods the Anglo-American female investigator is presented as in some measure fundamentally flawed. . .she serves as a marker of the incompatibility of the cultural categories of ‘woman’ and ‘investigator’.” Moreover, Dresner contends, the figure is “most limited as she is portrayed in film, a medium in which she is routinely categorized as mad.”139 Along with Sabrina Barton, I find that “there is feminist value in laying claim to Charlie’s personhood, to her efficacy as an active, intending, thinking character.”140 In Shadow of a Doubt the epistemological quest of its female protagonist is one of the most distinctive features operating to link the film and this larger category as “knowledge relations” are central in the gothic. In Helen Hanson’s terms, the gothic displays an “ambiguous knowledgeability.” As she writes, “the heroine, and the viewer, are given distinct reasons for suspicion (the gothic husband’s unpredictable behavior, stories from other characters), but these reasons must be clearly defined for the enigma to come into focus and be resolved. Defining the enigma is the investigative process of the female gothic narrative.”141 In a characterization that is central to my understanding of Shadow’s generic commitments Tania Modleski writes that “The Gothic has been used to drive home the ‘core of truth’ in feminine, paranoid fears and to connect the social with the psychological, the personal with the political.”142 In general, the 1940s gothic moves from women being proved wrong to women being proved right and Shadow of a Doubt may be a pivotal text in this regard. Thomas Schatz observes that while some of the earlier gothics had patently rushed and unconvincing endings by the time we arrive at Shadow of a Doubt this tactic had been intensified so that: “the best of the noir Gothics, however, manage to turn this convention back on itself, presenting resolutions so rife with irony as to seem positively Brechtian.”143 Shadow adheres to gothic formulae in many critical respects, but we might also say that it alters certain of the form’s ideological norms and narrative habits. The film takes the conventional plot and spins it in a different direction so that those things that are “certain” in a standard female gothic become fundamentally uncertain. For instance, the central relationship is not officially a marriage only a symbolic (and incestuous) one. 58

Shadow of a Doubt Shadow’s failure to arrive at an ideologically confident mode of closure is notable and it starkly illustrates how differently it operates from the (literary) gothic narrative template sketched by Masse: “Returning to benign reality, earning a husband and erasing horror are the wages promised for virtuous passivity at novel’s end.”144 Emotionally Shadow pays off in an entirely different manner from this though its sense of disquiet might be seen to resemble that of Hitchcock’s earlier Rebecca, in which the unnamed heroine begins the film with a voiceover that suggests she has not put aside the events at Manderley and there is no “pick-up” voiceover of the sort that would close the film in a conventional way commenting on lessons learned or a happy life lived. If the conventional gothic “successfully disarms the anger it induces” Shadow works differently, conjuring a sense of indignation as a serial killer’s life is celebrated in the film’s conclusion.145 And it typifies the manner in which Hitchcock’s variations of the gothic introduce complexities that exceed the standard forms of the genre. In terms of how Shadow revises female gothic conventions, it is important that the revelation scene in the library is private, it doesn’t involve anyone else (except arguably Mrs. Cochran at a distance) and it ratifies Charlie’s suspicions rather than discrediting them. On the whole, however, the dispatch and autonomy Charlie exhibits, in pursuit of the evidence against Charles are striking; her behavior should be contextualized by the wartime milieu and the emergent tradition of the girl detective and the empowered teen as I will explore below. We may note that key gothic texts of the mid-twentieth century period include: • Rebecca (1940) • Suspicion (1941) • Gaslight (1944) • Dragonwyck (1946) • Secret Beyond the Door (1947) • Sleep My Love (1948). While the more recent films in the list are less well known today, one stands out. 59

Shadow of a Doubt Gaslight, though also not widely seen by present-day viewers, has acquired renown many years after its release. In the contemporary era the film is a reference point for a tactic of manipulation, often but not always used by men against women. In “gaslighting,” a lie or set of lies is put across so vehemently and robustly and against all evidence that the person being lied to suspects they must somehow be in the wrong. In Shadow Charles’ efforts in this regard made in the ‘Til-Two Bar and in the silhouette scene on the back porch are brief and entirely unsuccessful (he generally seeks to flatter Charlie as being uniquely perceptive and agentic in the same manner in which he sees himself). The conflation of love and violence is thus axiomatic of the female gothic. This conflation is illustrated in Shadow of a Doubt as Hitchcock employs the cinematic grammar of a love scene for the one between Charles and Charlie on the back porch while sending signals that the official love scene between Charlie and Graham that precedes it is “off.” Uncle and niece are romantically lit and draw physically closer as the scene on the back porch proceeds. It is here where Charles seeks to gaslight Charlie telling her he hasn’t got the inscribed ring which is the evidence of his crimes and suggesting that she has no real proof he is the Merry Widow murderer. “Who would you tell?” he asks her. “Who’d believe you?” Sarah E. Whitney makes the point that the “Gothic. . .has been and continues to be abundant ground for the working out of fears about sexual violence.”146 Throughout Shadow Charles’ often silky manner is effectively contrasted with vehement, harsh outbursts. Initially this confounds Charlie (and the spectator) and sets in place a dynamic which is characteristic of the gothic milieu in which “The problematic nature of feminine perception of male behavior is underscored by the presentation of gestures which are ambiguously sexual or violent.”147 As Sabrina Barton and others have intimated in Shadow this dynamic is encoded by a series of incidents foregrounding Charles’ hands. When Charlie flaunts her discovery of the newspaper article Charles had sought to conceal, he briefly violently assaults her grabbing her wrists until she cries out in pain, “Uncle Charlie, you’re hurting me – your hands!” Later when Graham and Saunders impersonate journalists to infiltrate the Newton home and take a picture of Charles, he extends his hand for the film he demands they surrender and Charlie stares at it seemingly transfixed. In the second dinner scene Charles forms his hands in a strangulation gesture when he instructs Roger to 60

Shadow of a Doubt obtain a “big, red bottle” he has placed in the refrigerator. Catching up with Charlie when she runs out of the house distraught a few minutes later, Charles once more takes Charlie by the arm and she protests “You’re hurting my arm – again.” Later, as Charlie says goodbye to Graham on the front lawn and Charles peers down at them, his hands again frame a gesture of strangulation that corroborates his status as the “strong-handed strangler.” He subsequently joins the couple on the lawn and during the encounter grasps Charlie’s face in his hands far too strongly for it to read as a gesture of affection, telling Graham “She’s the thing I love most in the world.” Strangulation, of course, is an act that in the simplest terms symbolizes the desire to cut off the female voice. “A type of action paradigmatic of misogyny,” it is also “a prevalent form of intimate partner violence” and in a more contemporary era it is increasingly recognized as an all-too-common feature of domestic violence by men against women and as a sexual practice (sometimes consensual when it may be referred to as “breath play,” sometimes not) often inspired by pornography.148 The invocation of such practices also increasingly features in the alibis of male defendants accused of the murder of female intimate partners. As Anna Moore and Coco Khan observe, writing of the UK context: “Strangulation – fatal and nonfatal, – ‘squeezing,’ ‘neck compression’ or, as some call it, ‘breath-play’ – is highly gendered. On average, one woman in the UK is strangled to death by her partner every two weeks, according to Women’s Aid. It is a frequent feature of non-fatal domestic assault, as well as rape and robbery where women are the victims. It is striking how seldom it is seen in crimes against men.”149 The connection between strangulation and sexuality that might only have been implicit seventy-five years ago has become more manifest in a contemporary era. Exploring even if only in a partial way the connections between Shadow of a Doubt and the broader category of the 1940s gothic film enables us to recognize some of its typicality as well as its exceptionalness. I see the film as part of a set of mid-twentieth century cinematic “representations of women that paradoxically do challenge objectification and the circumscription of women performed by patriarchal ideology even as they also participate in those systems.”150 Although produced well within the boundaries of the genre’s “classic period, which begins in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon and ends less than a score of years later 61

Shadow of a Doubt with Touch of Evil,”151 Shadow of a Doubt’s relationship to film noir is partial and variable in critical accounts. It is generally not centered in the film noir canon though the film warrants an entry in the reference work Film Noir: An Encyclopedia Reference to the American Style. That book’s editors note that “many of Hitchcock’s films manifest enough qualities of film noir that they must be considered from that perspective.”152 Sheri Chinen-Biesen classes Shadow as one of a cluster of wartime texts unified by noir aesthetics and a turn toward the psychological. As she writes: “During World War II, European émigré directors such as Hitchcock, Wilder and Preminger were influential in cultivating a distinctly dark psychological breed of American noir films. Film noir and noir style gothic thrillers employed psychology to evade screen censorship.”153 The contributing cinematic tributaries to film noir are customarily considered to include German Expressionism, French poetic realism, the gangster film and the hard-boiled novel.154 Earlier, I have alluded to the ways in which Shadow of a Doubt manifests the influence of German Expressionism and to the extent that the film can be considered a film noir, we should note the consistent interrelatedness of those two forms. Certainly, Shadow shares with many full-fledged noirs at least a partial commitment to the evocation of a “dislocated world permeated by alienation and human despair.”155 Like Geoff Mayer, Brian McDonnell and Mark Bould, however, I am inclined not to be too proscriptive when it comes to the definition of film noir and in common with critics like Robin Wood to see it as one stylistic/ideological system into which Shadow delves.156 Bould contends that Hitchcock films like The Paradine Case (1947) and Rope (1948) have been overly associated with noir partly because of the “parallel canonisations of Hitchcock as auteur and film noir as genre,” while arguing that of a set comprised of those two films and Shadow it is only Shadow that “might be considered in any way central to film noir.”157 The ‘Til-Two Bar scene is customarily read by critics as the section of the film in which the aesthetic and ideological tactics of film noir are openly deployed. Steffen Hantke, for instance, nicely describes it as “a dark and unsavory spot of noir urbanity, a Capra-esque Pottersville, complete with a seedy bar where the waitress is a study in frustrated dreams and ambitions.”158 Of the same section Barbara M. Bannon writes, “This scene makes us feel that we and Young Charlie are being subjected to sinister playback of earlier moments in the film when we were all 62

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Figure 11: The ‘Til-Two Bar scene’s striking film noir aesthetics underscore the ideological gravity of the confrontation between Charles and Charlie.

younger and more innocent.”159 Certainly, the urban feel, the tough talking style adopted by Charles here, the nocturnal setting, the presence of a “fallen woman” (Louise Finch) and the depiction of a scene of leisure in which there is an undertow of menace all evoke a film noir world. As Brian McDonnell has noted, the film noir city is consistently linked to “a distorted, expressionistic, portrayal of it as an existential site of alienation.”160 Yet to the extent that film noir uses elements of cinematic style over and above the “invisible editing” associated with Classical Hollywood Cinema in general, we may track signs of the style in numerous scenes in and around the front and back staircases of the Newton home and on the second floor, in other words at the heart of familial domesticity. Film noir elements, I suggest, are hardly confined to one scene in Shadow but operate as ambient characteristics of the text at large. For instance, Robert G. Porfirio links film noir to a Sartrean sense of disgust with the world: “disgusting because it was too rich, too soft, too effusive; behind it lay the Jungian archetype of nature, the fertile female. The film noir best expressed this effusiveness visually 63

Shadow of a Doubt through a variety of techniques, the most important of which is the use of deepfocus or depth-staging.”161 Such disgust, of course, is strikingly similar to the rhetoric of Charles’ speech at dinner (as well as at the ‘Til-Two Bar). Other critics track noir elements arising in the film as a function of Charlie’s disenchantment. For Jonathan Freedman, once Charles’ guilt has become apparent to his niece “the film becomes literally darker” transforming into “a film noir before the term had been coined.” The “initially sunlit” Newton home exterior shots “become dappled with shade; more of the film comes to take place at night.”162 Bould links the introduction of Charles in an ethos of squalid urbanity to a deft activation of noir potentialities that the viewer is then misdirected to set aside. After the introduction “we are then wrong-footed by the switch to what looks like it is going to be one of those gentle comedy dramas about the quaintness and quirkiness of small-town life.”163 Finally, the most important point is that Shadow manifests a broad ideological compatibility with more full-fledged (and mostly later) films noir. In Ed Dimendberg’s assessment film noir “conveys a palpable fascination for a transitional period in American society whose seemingly transparent social structure – a world in which power relations could still be traced with relative ease by a morally irreproachable detective figure – would shortly vanish.”164 Shadow’s deep skepticism about institutions, its deliberate and noteworthy withdrawal of effective agency from Jack Graham, and its morally troubled conclusion suggest some of the ways in which it adheres to the program of noir representation.

Shadow of a Doubt and Gendered Wartime Culture Released in 1943, roughly at the midpoint of the United States’ involvement in World War II, Shadow of a Doubt has often been understood, as I have earlier suggested, as Hitchcock’s first truly “American” film – while the director had worked chiefly in the U.S. since 1939, the film’s (for the time relatively rare) location shoot, emphatically contemporary setting and largely American (or at least Americanseeming) cast of actors gave a distinct new national credibility to the work of its expatriate director. 64

Shadow of a Doubt There are some ways in which Shadow may be considered as a historical prism text and two of the most significant might be how it invokes the context of World War II and its connection to an emergent youth culture whose profile was shifting in crucial ways at the time of its production and release. Principal photography for the film began on July 31, 1942 and it wrapped almost exactly four months later on October 28.165 By 1943 Hollywood was putting out numerous war-themed films across a range of genres; that year alone saw the release of Watch Along the Rhine, Destination Tokyo, Guadalcanal Diary, The North Star, This Land Is Mine, Minesweeper, Crash Dive, and The More the Merrier among others. Shadow’s production would have been very much influenced by the wartime context; its production team operated under restrictions set by the War Production Board that impacted nighttime shooting, for instance. It is hard to imagine though how the film could possibly have contributed to national morale-building on the terms envisioned by the Office of War Information (OWI) set up just a month before Shadow started shooting. As Gregory D. Black and Clayton R. Koppes detail, the OWI asked filmmakers to consider a set of questions among them: “‘Will this picture help win the war?’ And ‘If it is an “escape” picture, will it harm the war effort by creating a false picture of America, her allies, or the world we live in?’”166 In this supercharged context, it is all the more striking that war references in Shadow are subtle and stay in the background. The tendency for the film to make oblique rather than direct references to a wartime context is perhaps best explained by the author of an article in American Movie Classics Magazine which reads Hitchcock’s 1930s and 1940s films in relation to the wartime cause, who notes that “Perhaps, in the end, the moral clarity of the war ill-suited Hitchcock’s own preoccupation with shared guilt, mistaken identity, and the secret attraction of evil.”167 In the same year that Shadow was released James Agee wrote of cinema’s capacity to communicate America’s proximity to World War II and potential to reinforce civic responsibility.168 Shadow of a Doubt has generally not been taken up in Film Studies scholarship on the wartime context although Michael Renov has classed it as one of a cluster of films in that period about familial imbalance and alludes to it in discussing “the volatile profile of the American wartime woman.”169 Another exception is Catherine L. Preston, who writes of Shadow that it “introduced the chilling suggestion that the enemy is not only here at home but exists as part of the 65

Shadow of a Doubt family in small-town America.”170 Jacqueline Foertsch maintains that in the wartime period “Because film was America’s most influential medium for representation to its own and world audiences, implicit in Hollywood’s mission during this era was the reflection (and prescription) of best behaviors: international intervention for moral instead of financial reasons, self-interest subordinated to collective action, sacrifice as a personal responsibility, racial tolerance, recognition of women’s contribution and all-round good neighboring.”171 Likewise, Thomas Doherty maintains that the exigencies of World War II fundamentally shifted Hollywood’s cultural status and relationship to its audience. He asserts that a key function of film culture in the war years was to provide reassurance and continuity and his observation that “women-minded wartime cinema made certain to channel and constrain whatever revolutionary spirit it unleashed” underscores just how subversive Shadow’s ideological critique was in relation to other contemporaneous film releases.172 Though Shadow of a Doubt sustains few overt connections to its wartime setting this is of course not to say that those connections might not have been implicit at the time of its release for audiences responding to intertextual and cultural cues that are hard to parse some seventy-five years after the film appeared in cinemas. For instance, both Shadow’s stars had appeared or would appear in war-themed material (to give just two examples, Wright in Mrs. Miniver in 1942 and Cotten in I’ll Be Seeing You in 1944). And one might well contend that the wartime context was so omnipresent that it was a structuring concern in virtually all forms of entertainment during the early 1940s. Robert Fyne estimates that in the four years following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hollywood produced approximately 300 “propaganda films” excluding serials, documentaries, and cartoons.173 Going beyond the work of earlier film historians who noted Shadow’s sociohistorical placement but offered little commentary on it, Steffen Hantke has more recently carried out a detailed analysis of Shadow as a wartime text, calling particular attention to the way that Uncle Charles’ status as an internal outsider, a dangerous infiltrator who is nothing like what he initially seems to be, correlates with public suspicions about Japanese and German Americans in the wartime period. Hantke situates it as interstitial in its positioning between a set of 66

Shadow of a Doubt Hitchcock’s World War II era films he classes as “studiously apolitical” (Rebecca, Suspicion and Mr. and Mrs. Smith [1941]) and those he reads as wearing “their political credentials on their respective sleeves” (Foreign Correspondent [1940], Saboteur [1942] and Lifeboat [1944]).174 Demonstrating an insistence on the film’s political resonances that I share, Hantke writes of Shadow, “Clear as its wartime message may be in its essence, its delivery is muted, fractured, and strangely complicated.”175 In an apt characterization Hantke writes that “For its home-front audience, the film thus reproduces the war as an oddly uncanny experience – both present and absent at the same time, on everyone’s mind and yet strangely unspeakable, a central fact of life that manifests itself perpetually elsewhere.”176 In Hantke’s reading, Charles “is the carrier of a creeping corruption of values and ideals, of a lassitude verging on nihilism which undermines the nation’s will to fight, its wartime morale.”177 Hantke’s analysis is deft in many ways, but it proceeds as if Hitchcock is unsympathetic to Charles’ antisocial views while I am not entirely sure that is the case. Critics writing before Hantke certainly took the position that Shadow’s generic coordinates implicitly link it to the sociohistorical frame of World War II. As Thomas Schatz maintains, “the female Gothic deals with a troubled, war-torn world, but without attributing those troubles to the war itself.”178 Michael Wood meanwhile observes that “The link between this film and the war lies in the sheer invisibility of the criminal aspect of Uncle Charlie to everyone except his niece and the cops. What Hitchcock’s war looks like in his films is not so much a battlefield as a constantly invaded home front.”179 I have suggested the film has manifestly little to do with wartime homefront culture yet notably in one key scene (in the ‘Til-Two Bar) where Charles and Charlie speak forthrightly and openly to each other for the first time in the knowledge of the crimes he has committed, the repressed war context suddenly bursts through. While the war is not wholly unreferenced in the film up to that point it remains very nebulous.180 In an earlier scene where Charles visits the manager of the bank where Joe works to arrange to make a substantial deposit, for instance, we can see bond drive posters in the background and eagleeyed viewers may also spot one in the library beside the newspaper rack. Charlie and Jack go on their date to a restaurant called Gunner’s Grill, an invented site whose name is a reference to a military artilleryman and where soldiers are very 67

Shadow of a Doubt briefly glimpsed.181 But in the bar scene we see foregrounded soldiers in uniform, and this is followed by a more oblique but nevertheless potent reference when Mr. Green congratulates Charles after his talk to the Women’s Club commenting that “We don’t get many American speakers, seems like foreigners make the best talkers.” This would appear to be a reference to the supercharged demagoguery associated with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and in this sense, it is important to observe (as I have previously noted) that early Shadow scripts contained repeated references to Charles’ travels abroad (though almost all were excised in the finished film). Raphael Mostel suggests a critical link between the Merry Widow operetta (from which the waltz is drawn) and Hitler, noting that it was well known in the 1940s that the German Führer loved the work and it had become indelibly associated with Third Reich cultural events such as the 1939 Festival of German Values. Mostel contends that the piece would have been used knowledgeably by Hitchcock and accounts for the queasy distortedness in its presentation in Shadow of a Doubt by suggesting it reflects an association with distorted, homicidal thought beyond the boundaries of the film.182 A clear sense of wartime context appears in Charles’ denial of the humanity of his victims who he deems “fat, wheezing animals;” his need to exterminate those figures who threaten his notion of the social certainly resonates in historical context. In this sense and given the film’s emphatic stress on Charles as a product of the family, it might be seen to provide a set of reflections on the intimacy of fascism. In my thinking on this point, I am guided by Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley who usefully emphasize that fascism is a global phenomenon that is not fully captured when it is located in a single national site or historical era. As they write, “its birth certificate is held in the archives of many nations.”183 Charles’ incarnation of a particularly American version of fascism is linked to his fetish for order. (As he transacts business with bank manager Mr. Green, Charles sets to work on the necessary form-filling with relish, commenting “Ah, details. . .they’re most important to me, most important.”) Diane Waldman has observed that “in Shadow of a Doubt, the Gothic male’s misogyny is connected (albeit tenuously) to an inability to come to terms with change of any kind and/or incompatibility with democratic principles,” while 68

Shadow of a Doubt Adeney Thomas and Eley point out that “Gender politics is central to fascist ideology.”184 Charles’ contempt for what he reads as the frivolity and decadence of the widows he seduces and kills comports with broader historical fascist campaigns to purge a nation or region of decadence associated with minority groups. The age of the women is part of their offense in his eyes and in keeping with fascism’s attraction to youth Charles is deeply attracted to Charlie, admiring her graduation picture as he takes up residence in her bedroom early in the film. Robin Wood has argued that Hitchcock’s work “is pervaded on every level by fascist tendencies to a degree of clarity and expressiveness unequalled (so far as I am aware) in the work of any other Hollywood filmmaker” and, indeed, Shadow is systematically structured as a struggle for control, regulation and alliance in ways that evoke the fascist political regimes that so preoccupied the U.S. in the 1940s.185 But the complexity of the film lies also in its connection to what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have called “microfascism,” the desire for authoritarian control that often lurks beneath seemingly open social surfaces. Thus, to reduce Shadow’s fascist textuality to Charles’ speech at dinner is to overlook the film’s far more sustained engagement with the complex of desires from above and below that motivate fascist forms of domination and engagement. One reasonable question a viewer might pose in relation to Shadow of a Doubt is why Charles, an able-bodied man within the recruitment age range has no seeming relation to wartime mobilization. It is useful in this regard to recall that a prominent social category of aberrant masculinity during the wartime period was the man who had been deemed unfit for military service or “4F,” in reference to the US Selective Service designation for such men set out in the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940. Tiffany Leigh Smith has documented how during World War II “remaining men on the homefront quickly became limited to minors, men too old for military service, necessary war, civilian or agricultural workers, men with dependents, and militarily rejected men.”186 Charles Oakley conspicuously fits into the last of these categories and it may be relevant in this context to observe that “mental disease” served as one of the grounds for disqualification for military service. During the war years, “4F” men faced heavy social stigma; even Frank Sinatra, a wartime crooner with a huge female fandom was apparently the subject of some considerable resentment in the 1940s for his 4F status.187 Smith details the extent 69

Shadow of a Doubt to which “4F” morphed into a criminal category; she observes that “With so many 4-F men remaining on the home front, crimes being committed by those within the group of rejects were unavoidable yet further developed the meaning of 4-F classification to include the implications of wholesale moral deficiency and criminal inclination.”188 The implausibility of Charles’ position becomes evident against the backdrop of the considerable resentment toward “4F” men by draftees and the wider cultural mistrust directed toward them. Poorly remembered today (in part because of a reflexive sentimentalization of the war effort and its “Greatest Generation” participants) “4F” designates were significant in number and suggestive of exactly the position Charles occupies – the man who is consummately “one of us” and yet decidedly aberrant. To what extent might the film permit a reading of Charles as a failed military recruit? We may certainly speculate that for audiences of the time this linkage might have been readily made. There is another sense in which Charles’ commitment to the extermination of “unworthy” women resonates in a wartime context. As Robert B. Westbrook has shown, in a searching analysis of the gendering of wartime obligation in the 1940s, enlisted men in the US army were exhorted to idealize both their sweethearts and their female family members as well as Hollywood stars as figures of inspiration while enduring the trials of military service and combat on the front lines.189 The defense of white womanhood as inspiration even went so far as to include rape propaganda posters captioned “This Is the Enemy” depicting Asian men carrying off naked white women. Charles’ murders of unpartnered women enact a dark flip side to this regime in which he seeks out women on the homefront who (in his assessment) fail to inspire, neglecting moral virtue and flaunting their access to leisure and pleasure. Such positioning deepens the way in which throughout the film Charles at once enforces hegemonies and seeks to resist them. A small but telling exchange between Charles and Jack Graham is also relevant here as it (perhaps unexpectedly) directly invokes the political rights and obligations of citizens. As Charlie and Jack exit the garage where he has proposed to her and encounter Charles on the lawn, Charles chastises the detective for having earlier taken his picture without permission, saying “Rights of Man. You know, freedom?” 70

Shadow of a Doubt In so doing Charles alludes to Thomas Paine’s 1791 treatise Rights of Man in which Paine argues that revolution is justified in circumstances where people’s natural rights are trampled. In addition to obliquely critiquing Jack as a doctrinaire enforcer of “law and order” the remark heightens Charles’ association with the subversive and reinforces his placement as a figure of opposition to consensus, morale and the status quo. If it is the case that Shadow of a Doubt is a text evocative of the discourses and ideologies associated with World War II, it is nevertheless the case that in terms of its surface plot it consistently holds its wartime context at a remove. This contrasts quite forcibly with another film in which Joseph Cotten appeared in 1943, Hers to Hold. In that film Bill Morley (Cotten) and Penny Craig (Deanna Durbin) meet in the film’s first scene at a Red Cross Blood Donation Center and although Penny is a wealthy singing star she soon takes a job on the wing assembly team at an aircraft plant motivated by patriotism and her desire to be close to Bill. (From this point she consistently appears in a “Rosie the Riveter” style headscarf, a key signifier of wartime femininity, as I discuss below.) Bill is a pilot awaiting his commission in the Air Force and while some romantic suspense is introduced as a function of Bill’s decision to break things off between them in order to avoid putting Penny in the position of worrying about him while he is at war, the couple reunite in the closing minutes with Bill heading off and Penny consoling herself with the contribution she is making to the war effort. As the couple say their good-byes Penny adopts a phrase she had earlier heard a co-worker use, telling Bill “I’ll build ‘em, you fly ‘em.” Female agency, capacity and resilience were key concerns of the wartime period and I want to turn more fully now to some of the ways those thematics organize Shadow of a Doubt as it is apparent that the film’s status as a Pandora’s Box narrative is secured by Charlie’s positioning as a girl detective. In this regard we may observe that Ilana Nash and Elaine Lennon have both noted links between the figure of Nancy Drew and the 1940s film heroine.190 (Between 1938-1939 Warner Bros. released four Nancy Drew films starring Bonita Granville.) Charlie’s flashes of intuition and her ability to deduce that her uncle’s clumsy attempt to conceal the newspaper story about the Merry Widow murderer suggests an important secret are among the film’s signs that her character operates in this tradition. (In the brief scene where she returns at night with a flashlight to verify her suspicion 71

Shadow of a Doubt that Charles had sabotaged the back stairs, she also fully exemplifies this sort of role.) Charlie’s epistemophilic zeal (signaled in the dialogue line spoken to Graham on their date: “I don’t think – I know”) is one of her defining traits and her successors in the Hitchcock oeuvre include, of course, the intrepid Lisa Fremont in Rear Window and Lila Crane in Psycho.191 Charlie’s quest to see the world for what it really is is one that she shares with her Uncle whom she tells early on “But we’re sort of like twins, don’t you see? We have to know.” Charlie’s desire is perversely gratified through the revelation of Charles’ misogyny and, from this point, Charlie’s positioning shifts, putting her in the paradoxical role of fighting to keep uncontaminated the small-town ethos she found so stultifying in the film’s introduction. When later on Jack tries to remind Charlie of the significance of letting her uncle escape, saying “The man’s dangerous. If he gets away, he’ll go and –” and Charlie responds “I don’t want to hear what he’ll do”, we understand that given where knowing things has gotten her, she now wishes for ignorance. Gaylyn Studlar contends that “the 1940s did not witness the kind of sexual revolution that occurred in the 1920s, when the system of dating and radical changes in young people’s public behavior occurred, but the fear of precocious female sexuality and its impact on U.S. society was perhaps greater than at any other time since the Jazz Age.”192 Her assessment calls attention to the unsettled gender relations of the wartime years. Certainly it is apparent that Shadow manifests some relation to the fraught American discourse of the teenager and the related category of the juvenile delinquent that would coalesce in the postwar period. Ilana Nash’s foundational work in cataloguing and theorizing representations of the teen girl has strongly informed my thinking about the characterization of Charlie Newton. Nash notes that “the liminality of the adolescent girl makes her simultaneously disturbing and attractive to patriarchy.”193 Going further she observes that “Standing at the crossroads between childhood and womanhood, the teen girl faces Janus-like in both directions, a liminal figure who combines two identities that incite pleasure and anxiety in the adult male. She has therefore been consistently put ‘back in her place’ by media narratives.”194 Shadow is distinct in its flouting of this convention given that here the small-town teen girl overpowers the adult male of high cultural capital and cosmopolitan elan calling him to account for his crimes against women. The film’s complexity lies, however, in the way that Charlie is put back in her 72

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Figure 12: Charlie’s intermediate position between the realms of criminality and law enforcement.

culturally allotted place in the conclusion, at least partially re-sutured into a role that was once stifling but by the close is at least safe (if wholly ideologically discredited). The film’s emphasis on Charlie’s bedroom and Charles’ occupation of it evokes the notion of “bedroom culture” introduced by Angela McRobbie.195 McRobbie’s work opened up critical space to consider how teen girls’ bedrooms are often particularly expressive spaces and documented their association with the socialization of girls toward compliance with social norms. Though Jack Graham makes the case that Charlie’s bedroom should be photographed to document the family’s averageness and representativeness, saying “Typical girl, typical room,” we may note that from its opening minutes Shadow shows us Charlie using that space subversively, countering the standard presentation of female bedroom culture with a diatribe about the deficiencies of family and small town life. Ilana Nash notes that teenage girl narratives “speak to national identities and images – not of exploration and wilderness-taming but of domesticity and the practice of democratic ideals in the father-centered family unit that symbolizes the American nation.”196 It is apparent that social consternation and coercion around the coming-of-age woman sharpen in periods of exigency (like wartime). Nash argues that 1940s girls were often seen as vulnerable in ways that were tied to the social turbulence/fallout of the war. She pinpoints sexual tension in girl star films of that 73

Shadow of a Doubt era that characteristically included a troubling attraction between a girl teen and an older man that was resolved through patriotism. Broadly speaking, the 1940s were a decade in which, in Rachel Devlin’s estimation, “teenage girls threatened to break free from the family in new ways.”197 It is important to map Shadow of a Doubt’s place within a social history of moral panic associated with “homefront” female sexuality in an era in which “American women became a suspect category, subject to surveillance for the duration of the war.”198 One manifestation of this was a preoccupation with so-called “V-girls,” promiscuous teenagers who sought out the company of soldiers in exchange for material favors. Grace Palladino cites social commentary of the period that deplored a national failure to make use of adolescent energies. In a similar vein, Max Lerner decried that “We have not taken their restless energies, their eagerness. . .their wayward impulses, and channeled them into something. . .useful and healthy.”199 Tim Snelson characterizes the first half of the 1940s as a period in which “the celebration of the newly realized capabilities of women’s bodies was accompanied by an increasing fear of their possible culpabilities.”200 Shadow of a Doubt intimates this dynamic on numerous levels. Charles’ rage toward free, unpartnered women reverberates internally in terms of his family of origin and externally toward an emergent wartime environment in which mistrust of such women ran rampant and governed social policy in many respects. Shadow may be seen to resonate within a discourse on wartime female delinquency. Typical of such discourse is a front-page article which appeared in the Dallas Morning News in July 1943 that bemoaned the activities of female teens “not getting enough support from the home front as they contend with war-loose morals.” Fretting that the war was impacting family, economic and social roles in such a way as to produce large numbers of girl runaways, hitchhikers, alcoholics and drug takers, the article even challenges the sanctity of the white middle-class and its assumed control over its daughters. It cites “the conscious or unconscious neglect of parents, the lax conditions on streets and in unsupervised night spots, the apathetic attitude of Dallas’ smug nice people who think themselves and their children untouched by this flood of the war’s backwash.”201 Sketching a national overview Grace Palladino contends that “Justifiably or not, the war cast new light on disaffected teenagers, elevating juvenile delinquency to a national crisis. . .and the popular press was making juvenile delinquency a household concern – during the 74

Shadow of a Doubt first six months of 1943 alone, twelve hundred magazine articles appeared on the subject.”202 In a 1944 magazine article FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called attention to “the increasing wartime waywardness of teen-age girls”203 fueling a perception that, in Rachel Devlin’s words, “girls in particular had somehow slipped beyond the bounds of control.”204 Such moral panics around the activities of young, comingof-age women in a dangerously unregulated wartime America are suggestive for both Charlie and her doppelgänger Louise of the ‘Til-Two Bar and to a lesser extent Catherine, who seems keenly interested in all the new men in town. Charlie’s adjacency to the category of wayward wartime femininity is summoned in the actions and statements of authority figure Mr. Norton who scolds Charlie (“You’re always running around the streets at night”) while obliviously enjoying a cordial introduction to a serial killer.

Figure 13: Press coverage of wartime female delinquency such as this July 1, 1943 article from The Dallas Morning News painted a picture of dangerously unstable social roles in the period of Shadow of a Doubt’s release.

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Figure 14: Shadow of a Doubt’s New York world premiere took place at a benefit celebrating female resilience.

As Kelly Schrum has argued, “the years before 1944 witnessed the emergence of a teenage market and the development [even if uneven] of teenage girls’ culture.”205 Shadow was released in a period of social consternation about what girls and women might do when they lacked male supervision and chaperonage as fathers, husbands, brothers and boyfriends were conscripted or made absent due to industrial relocation. At this time, the prospect of “good” middle-class girls going ideologically rogue seemed vivid and the distinction between female virtue and vice sharpened. This contextualizes Charlie’s transformation across the film from infatuation to antipathy toward her uncle, leading to the remarkable moment in which she vehemently tells Charles that if he doesn’t leave Santa Rosa “I’ll kill you myself. You see, that’s how I feel about you.” 76

Shadow of a Doubt Dana Polan refers to “a mythology of the strength of the ordinary person” that flourished in the wartime period. That mythology regularly took female form in the image of “Rosie the Riveter,” the brawny, competent woman working in industrial production in support of the war effort.206 (Indeed, we may note the close coincidence of Shadow of a Doubt’s January 12, 1943 release and the Memorial Day publication on May 29, 1943 of the Saturday Evening Post issue featuring Norman Rockwell’s famous image of Rosie the Riveter on its cover; in 1944, Republic Pictures would release B musical Rosie the Riveter.) Charlie Newton’s characterization may be seen to inflect this prototype of female resilience and capacity with a complex, melancholic resonance. The broader wartime context in which women and girls would take on breadwinner roles and perform industrial and other jobs conventionally reserved for men heightens the salience of Charlie’s agency throughout the film. A notable thematic congruity emerges between the film’s content and the “Women Can Take It” showcase of its New York world premiere. According to Howard Barnes the benefit premiere held at the Rivoli Theatre in New York (a Greek revival picture palace that seated over 2000 and was a frequent site for the screening of “event films”) “was supplemented by a stage show featuring prominent women of the stage, opera, radio and sports.” The stage extravaganza depicted “a cavalcade of women of history who have proved their ability to take punishment in the cause of freedom.”207 It is apparent that wartime culture promoted a capable, resilient national femininity – one which didn’t exploit new wartime social freedoms and was governed by a strong sense of familial, communal and national devotion. Emotional self-regulation was a key part of this image; women were expected not to go emotionally out of bounds and to stoically accept the emotional losses they might incur. The characterization of Charlie Newton both fits within and registers a protest against this affective prototype.

Santa Rosa as Site of Middle-Class Normalcy Certainly, Shadow of a Doubt’s capacity to evoke the texture of life in an American town was a key strength of the film for some reviewers writing at the time of its release. For instance, Archer Winsten observed that “In this picture, Hitchcock for the first time feels able to apply himself to the small things of an American town. What he does with the Californian town of Santa Rosa is a revelation.”208 In 77

Shadow of a Doubt more contemporary assessments the film continues to draw praise for the thematic suitability of its locale with Adam Bat among others singling out “the perfect idyll of Santa Rosa, a location defined by its white picket fences and modest yet familiar town square.”209 In a precise assessment David Denby notes “the somnolent town is treated with a tenderness that can only be called ironic and even malicious.”210 In the behind the scenes featurette that appears on the DVD version of Shadow, both Patricia Hitchcock and Associate Art Director Robert Boyle are at pains to stress these elements of the film’s setting. Hitchcock characterizes early 1940’s Santa Rosa as “a sleepy little town” while Boyle emphasizes that “this was an old-fashioned town. It was a kind of a town that didn’t say where it was. It was America.”211 Undoubtedly “Hitchcock took a lot of trouble in establishing the almost extravagant ordinariness” of Santa Rosa and Shadow of a Doubt sustained unusually close relations to the site of its production.212 Hitchcock reportedly disliked location shooting but the decision to undertake a large amount of it in Santa Rosa seems to have served both practical and creative ends.213 As Bill Krohn notes, “After America entered the war, the War Production Board put a ceiling of $5,000 on set construction using new materials in Hollywood.”214 The casting office set up for the film in Santa Rosa’s Chamber of Commerce led to the hiring of both Edna May Wonacott (as Ann) and Estelle Jewell (as Catherine) while local people comprised the crowds seen on the streets of the city during Charles’ funeral. As Steven Jacobs notes, “The location angle was quite a novelty in the early 1940s and it was elaborately discussed in the press” drawing, for instance, an eightpage profile in the high-profile national periodical Life.215 Local press coverage of the film’s stars and the progress of the shoot was regular; Hitchcock himself was conferred an honorary “Special Deputy Sheriff ” card by local law enforcement. Issued by A.A. Wilkie, the Sheriff of Sonoma County (for which Santa Rosa is the county seat) on August 6, 1942, the card confers a lifetime status upon the director, attesting that the bearer “has the right to make arrests as provided by law but does not give him the right to violate the law himself.” In humorously extending Hitchcock’s authority beyond the cinematic realm, the card places him in much the same role as Uncle Charles, as a kind of “favored son” who can exert power in Santa Rosa. It is certainly a strange relic to come across in light of the director’s complex ambivalence about the authority of the law. 78

Shadow of a Doubt David Greven has aptly summarized the jaundiced worldview of Hitchcock’s film, writing “Dominant forms of power, such as heterosexual enclaves populated by white and upper-middle-class personae, are never secure, but instead riven by anxieties and incoherencies that threaten to topple them: capitalism has freezing effects on social relations, denaturing and constricting them; social experience proceeds as a contest of dominance and subordination that is, especially among the subordinated, neither organized around a clearly defined set of goals nor enacted through a clearly defined set of roles; gender and sexuality are privileged sites for these forms of social contest and struggle.”216 In line with this, I have intimated that Shadow of a Doubt is a film highly concerned with the contamination of American ideals. It discredits the bank, the church and the club as institutions founded on ignorance whose gatekeepers are readily in thrall to the charisma of an urbane, seemingly wealthy white man. The film’s broad lack of faith in the institutions and agencies that organize American life is further illustrated by the limitations of FBI agent Jack Graham from whom the film withholds any opportunity for heroic action. Graham actually tells Charlie, “Alright, I’m a detective, a pretty bad one,” in the scene outside Gunner’s Grill and of course this is intended to be a statement of professional authority (using period vernacular) but also might be understood to suggest that he’s not very good at his job. The ineffectuality of detective pair Saunders and Graham is indeed striking – the two arrive in town with a clumsy premise for infiltrating the Newton home that Charles sees through right away and then they essentially try to get Charlie to do their work for them. Later when Charlie is in grave danger Graham can’t be found anywhere. Broadly speaking his mediocrity contrasts with Charlie’s proficiency. Shadow’s inside-out portrayals of small- town complacency call attention to the mercenary interests and instrumentality that govern social relations in Santa Rosa. In many ways, Shadow operates as a catalogue of what Sianne Ngai has pinpointed as “ugly feelings,” those socially problematic emotions which must be suppressed at all costs.217 Its moments of greatest dramatic intensity are correlated with the exposure of such emotions – Charles’ revelation of the murderous rage he feels for “Merry Widows,” Emma’s confession of unhappiness in her marriage and maternal role and Charlie’s profession of her willingness to kill Charles rather than have his crimes become known in Santa Rosa. 79

Shadow of a Doubt One scene which particularly showcases these attributes in the film plays out in the visit paid by Charles and Charlie to the bank. In a milieu of staid middleclass propriety (and the workplace where Joe earns a living to support his family), Charles enters and loudly asks his brother-in-law: “Can you stop embezzling a minute and give me your attention?” Joe blanches a bit at this attempt at humor and goes off to find the president of the bank, the aptly named Mr. Green. Charlie reproaches her uncle but what is most noteworthy perhaps is Charles’ blunt expression of his nihilistic philosophy.218 He amuses himself by commenting, “I guess heaven takes care of fools and scoundrels,” confident in the knowledge that he will be taken for the former when he is actually the latter. His worldview is bluntly expressed when he alludes to the amount of the deposit he’s going to make: “$40,000 is no joke, not to him [Mr. Green] I bet. It’s a joke to me. The whole world’s a joke to me.” Some viewers may strongly affiliate with Charles’ cynicism regarding the church, the law and financial institutions. The officiousness of the bank manager, the crossing guard and the minister would certainly do nothing to dissuade us in this regard.

Figure 15: Charles’ visit to the bank contrasts a milieu of sober citizenship with bluntly nihilistic statements that shock his niece.

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Shadow of a Doubt Santa Rosa is presented by Shadow as an almost caricatural site of white middleclass complacency and devotion to order. With a population of 130,000 at the time the film was shot, it exemplified the kind of all-American typicality integral to the film’s thematizations of a close-knit, seemingly homogeneous community. Associated in a more recent time with the wine production industry of Sonoma County and with the hazards of increasingly intense wildfires in the United States West (5% of the city was destroyed by fire in 2017), Santa Rosa is situated on the Hayward-Rodgers Creek Fault system and its seismic history includes 1906 and 1969 earthquakes that destroyed much of its downtown. Santa Rosa’s most famous son might be said to be the Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz; a museum dedicated to his work is located in Santa Rosa (although Schulz was born and raised in Minnesota and only came to Santa Rosa much later in his life).219 His claiming as a native product nevertheless reinforces a sense of the city as a seat of mild, middleclass “normality.” At the same time, given the dark edges of Schulz’s long-running syndicated comic strip with its emphasis on the dissatisfactions, resentments and antagonisms of childhood and recent biographies which have presented the cartoonist as a melancholy and embittered man we may be inclined to class him as an apt son of Santa Rosa in a sense obliquely analogous to Charles Oakley. Shadow’s location choices similarly reflect a commitment to quintessential Americanness. As the film’s Associate Art Director Robert Boyle put it, the home was to appear to be encoded with innocence, “the kind of house where you didn’t lock the doors.”220 Indeed, the house at 904 McDonald Avenue in Santa Rosa which served as the Newtons’ home, an Italianate Victorian on a pleasant, tree-lined street, generates a forceful visual contrast to the urban blight of Newark, the setting in which we first glimpse Uncle Charles. Hitchcock’s preference was to film interior scenes in the house itself but when this proved impractical a Los Angeles set was used.221 The film nevertheless relies on a rather precise sense of the geography of the house, – its rooms, front and back staircases, front walkway and adjacent garage. In keeping with the conventions of the female gothic, the house emerges as psychologized terrain, and a space of contestation between Charles and Charlie. The ability of both Charlies to command this space and to move through it strategically to confront or evade one another is of course essential to the film’s plot. Murray Pomerance notes that “Hitchcock’s grasp of social class relations and 81

Shadow of a Doubt the tiny revealing indices of class membership was more than articulate and precise.”222 One of the levels at which Charles disrupts the Newton household is socioeconomic: his showy wealth, presentation of expensive gifts and cosmopolitan demeanor mark a contrast to the Santa Rosa community in which the Newton family is situated. (As his sister ushers him into the living room after the first family dinner she says to Charles, “lead a life of luxury.”) Charles’ appearance seems to put pressure on his brother-in-law’s status as a bank clerk (and may raise questions for viewers about how a family living on a clerk’s salary can afford such a comfortable, large house). In numerous ways Charles displaces Joe as patriarch over the duration of his stay with the family – his warm, seductive, and intimate relations with his wife and daughter push the mild Joe to the margins in his own home. Charles conspicuously sits at the head of the family at dinner and is given Joe’s newspaper to read when the meal is concluded. (Later, in a diversionary maneuver, he will use the newspaper to build a paper house, the flimsiness of which is suggestive of the film’s understanding that our domestic constructs are far more precarious than we might think.) Upstairs after dinner Charles’ hope of giving up his Merry Widow murderer identity and taking refuge in Santa Rosa will be signaled when he characterizes the newspaper article he was trying to conceal as being about “someone I used to know.” As I have observed, all the Newton family members may be seen to superficially inhabit their approved social roles. Roger and Ann are anxious and escapist in their behaviors while Shadow suggests in numerous ways that Joe is an emasculated patriarch.223 After his conversation with Charlie at the start of the film, Joe has few extended exchanges with anyone other than Herb. His subordinated role at the bank is made clear in Charles and Charlie’s visit there to make a deposit where Joe takes up a peripheral place; once the business is concluded the manager tells Joe he “may show Mr. Oakley to the door.” Near the close of the film as the family depart in formal clothing for Charles’ speech to the Women’s Club, Joe complains that his wife has perfumed him, though Emma firmly tells him the scent is “just the fresh clean scent of lavender.” During Emma’s remarkable breakdown when she confesses to the loss of her identity in marriage, Hitchcock’s camera finds the deeply embarrassed faces of the Newtons’ guests but there is no reaction shot of Joe. For Andrew Britton Joe’s position is a familiar one. He contends that “the sense that the 82

Shadow of a Doubt domesticated small-town male is castrated is an obsessive cultural preoccupation and surfaces in numerous movies.”224 The vacancy in the space Joe would normatively fill clears the way for Charles’ entry into the family. Charles’s (pathological) investment in the past is his defining attribute. In precise dialogue early in the film he establishes his idealized relationship to the past and to his family of origin. Upon seeing his sister as she runs downs the steps of the Newton home to greet him, he attempts to symbolically freeze her in the past exhorting her “Emma, don’t move. Standing there, you don’t look like Emma Newton. You look like Emma Spencer Oakley of 46 Burnham Street, St Paul, Minnesota. The prettiest girl on the block.” What appears as a compliment to Emma’s appearance may be considered far more in light of the specifically commanding (though genial) style of Charles’ speech. His fixation on the past (rather than mere recollection of it) is suggested by the excessively detailed and precise references in his remarks. When Emma says “Imagine you’re thinking of Burnham Street. I haven’t thought of that funny old street in years,” Charles’ reply, “I keep thinking of those things. All the old things,” decisively sets in place his reverence for the past time of his childhood. One of the most important narrative details in the entirety of the film falls into place here – when Charles greets his sister as “Emma Spencer Oakley” we come to understand that he has been using his mother’s maiden name as his criminal persona. Charles’s diatribe about “Merry Widows” is often read as an articulation of fascist self-justification but its rhetorical similarities to Charlie’s despairing comments at the start of the film are typically overlooked. Not only do animal metaphors link the two speeches, they are also connected by the speakers’ scorn for money and for repetitive, meaningless, shallow modes of living. In relation to Charles’ speech Tony French goes so far as to speculate “Is he, one wonders, doing much more than expressing (if with horrible violence) what his niece herself was complaining about near the start of the picture?”225 The film’s second dinner scene (in which Charles breaks the fourth wall in his self-justifying account of the expendability of “useless women”) is so spectacular it would be easy perhaps to overlook the first, which is full of pungent details and key narrative information. As the family gathers the camera takes Emma’s position 83

Shadow of a Doubt at the table, an aesthetic articulation of her deep satisfaction in being reunited with her brother. Prompted by the visual axis of affinity between sister and brother, we see through her eyes as Charles distributes gifts – purchased ones for Ann, Roger and Joe but ones that are tokens from his victims to Charlie and Emma.226 This redistribution of the spoils of his killings aligns with his use of his mother’s maiden name and the moral justification Charles operates under to eliminate “unworthy” women while idealizing the women of his family past. In an irony typical of Hitchcock, this redistribution is unknowingly ratified by Charlie when Emma exclaims in delight at the gift of a fur stole and her daughter pronounces “Oh mother, it’s exactly right. It’s what you should have,” with a strong stress on the word “should.” Illustrating Charles’ ability to unify and center the family in ways Joe can’t, Charles even symbolically brings the family of the past together through his second gift to Emma, a picture of their deceased parents; as they gather to contemplate it Charles stands while Joe sits and the family’s guest is the largest figure in the frame, his arms seeming to encircle them all.

Figure 16: Figure positioning is indicative of status in this image of Charles gathering the Newton Family around him shortly after his arrival in Santa Rosa.

Charles’ height in the scene is suggestive and is also typifies an important aesthetic pattern across the film. Early on Charles’ inexplicable ability to evade his pursuers 84

Shadow of a Doubt and make his way to a rooftop launches this pattern. Later, he will be consistently associated with a spatially dominant voyeurism; he is situated in numerous scenes in an elevated position looking down at his niece – the height differential between Joseph Cotten and Theresa Wright makes this a feature of all their interactions but it is particularly apparent in the scene where Charles pauses at the top of the stairs on the first floor while his niece stands below in the ground floor doorway and when he overlooks Charlie and Graham outside from the window of Charlie’s bedroom, making a strangling gesture as he looks down at she and Graham. At another point, having sabotaged the back stairway of the Newton home Charles is seen at the top of the interior stairway gazing out toward the exterior door where Charlie has fallen. Late in the film, of course, Charlie is significantly elevated in relation to him as she descends the staircase wearing the ring. The gift-giving scene is the film’s most sustained depiction of Charles’ wealth and elan and it bears out Murray Pomerance’s contention that “There are no American Hitchcock films in which the consumer society is not pointedly reflected or thematically central.”227 Though there are other scenes and small moments that underscore this (such as Emma’s admiration of Charles’ clothes as she unpacks his suitcase, Charlie’s distress about her mother’s “awful, old hat” when Emma returns from town at the start of the film and Emma and Charlie’s frequent observations that elements of the décor in the Newton home are deficient), this scene stands out. Pomerance critically remarks that Charles passes Charlie a used piece of jewelry rather than buying her a new one and while this is of course true it neglects to attend to the reasons why a meticulous, detail-oriented character would give such a gift. Instead, the ring is a quite deliberate choice, an expression of the ideological affiliation Charles seek to forge with his niece and of his need to “rightfully” distribute the spoils of his killings. Charles’ decision to come to Santa Rosa, declare that his middle-aged sister looks like she did in their childhood and talk about the past as a warmly remembered and better time enacts a trajectory of what Svetlana Boym designates “restorative nostalgia.” Rooted in “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed” restorative nostalgia drives a desire to resurrect and re-enact the past.228 It is defined by rigidity and may be inclined toward sociopathy in its most extreme manifestations. In effect, “it knows two main plots – a return to origins and 85

Shadow of a Doubt the conspiracy.”229 Boym’s adept formulation strikingly illuminates what might otherwise be seen as a paradox in Charles’ orientation toward Santa Rosa and its institutions whereby he simultaneously idealizes and condemns them (shocking Charlie, for instance, with his commentary about bank corruption when they visit Joe’s workplace). The merry widows savor the present while Charles relishes the past; his rage toward them is founded on his contempt for their having moved on. Charles’ multi-faceted nostalgia emerges from his stalled status within the family romance, a positioning he shares with his niece and which forms the critical base for their bond. His sister, in Murray Pomerance’s assessment, exhibits an “elegiac quality”230 and anchors Charles’ conceptualization of an idealized family of the past. The quasi-romantic reunion between Charles and Emma on the footpath in front of the Newton home pre-figures two incidents between Charles and Charlie that will take place in the same location. The first of these occurs in an encounter between uncle and niece as the family return home from church. Charles has conspicuously not joined the family and takes the opportunity to criticize rituals of religious faith, asking Charlie if there was a full house at church and noting that, “The show’s been running for so long I thought attendance might be falling off.” (We understand that the caustic cynicism Charles had previously expressed about banks applies to all the respected institutions of small-town life.) As they stand there Charlie and Charles overhear a conversation between Joe and Herb in which Herb relates that the Merry Widow murderer has been caught in Maine and Charles smiles and expresses his anticipation for dinner.231 He bounds up the steps of the central staircase but then turns back without explanation at the top, a moment that is punctuated with a crescendo on the soundtrack. Charles, it seems, is transfixed by the purity of Charlie’s image as she stands posed in the sunlight, white gloved and in a gingham dress, her hat in her hands. This scene might well cue us to contrast Charles’ desire for his female family members to stay young and innocent with his perception of the merry widows as “fat, wheezing animals” to be slaughtered. Such a view would not be incorrect but I think the film is sufficiently trenchant that we come closer to capturing its full complexity if we say that Charles is ambivalent about whether he wants Charlie to be knowledgeable or remain pristinely unaware. The figure of the ‘Til-Two waitress Louise Finch is critical here for she represents 86

Shadow of a Doubt Charlie fully converted to a knowledge of the world. Louise implicitly welcomes Charlie to the sorority of women who know how the world works when she says, “I never thought I’d see you here.” Louise speaks in the dead, flat voice we associate with world weariness and which is used in the film’s first sequences by both Charlies. When she says she’s “been in half the restaurants in town,” we recognize this as an allusion to the kind of experience a mid-century Hollywood film can’t explicitly name. Charles’ role as Other to the middle-class family is echoed in that of Louise who physically resembles Charlie and knew her at school. The bar scene forces consciousness of the social and economic fates of unpartnered young women raising the stakes around Charlie’s decision-making. Both Charles and Louise speak bluntly about money and the value of things, breaking middle-class social taboos and causing some discomfiture in those around them. When Louise instantly assesses the emerald ring as a valuable piece and says that “For a ring like that I’d just about die,” she is intuitively articulating the dichotomy of family membership and death that organizes Charles’ typology of women and their value. Bearing in mind Shadow’s strong stress on the familiarities and petty forms of authority that structure middle-class life in Santa Rosa, it becomes apparent that Charles embodies the threat of elsewhere in a place that needs to be as hermetically sealed as possible if it is to maintain its operating mythologies. When the bottle of sparkling burgundy that Charles has brought is presented in the second dinner scene, Joe looks abashed and says “Oh – imported.” As noted, in earlier versions of the script there are repeated references to Charles’ travels abroad which would have worked to enforce a contrast between the customarily closed social world of Santa Rosa and all that lies beyond it.

Irresolution and Euthanasia in Shadow of a Doubt It appears that in the process of moving from script to screen, Shadow of a Doubt lost a lot of moral certainty, particularly where such certainty arose from the stability of Jack Graham as a reliable enforcer of an effective law and order system. In particular the anxious and unresolved qualities that permeate the film’s 87

Shadow of a Doubt conclusion deviate from what was on the page in the film’s shooting script. Papers in the Alfred Hitchcock Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences indicate that the closing conversation between Charlie and Jack originally centered a confidence that Jack knows how the world works and could manage the crimes committed in it. Thus, when Charlie tells him her Uncle believed “people like us have no idea what the world’s really like,” she adds “You’d know. Is it as bad as that?” Jack then replies reassuringly, “No of course not. But it takes a lot of watching. It’s not necessary that they know whatever bad there is. We’ll watch it.” Even after the dialogue had been revised to the less confident version we hear in the final film, Jack is attributed a distinctive power of reassurance so that after replying to Charlie “the worried look goes from her face and she smiles up at him. They turn and walk away from camera, hands clasped. The organ music swells.” The tone of the conclusion as it was actually produced is well summarized by Adam Knee who writes that “The detective who pursues Uncle Charlie as a criminal and Charlie as a wife makes some comments at the close of the film which are intended to assuage the young woman’s concerns about her uncle’s claims, but in effect really confirm some of them.”232 The insufficiency of Graham’s role is also highlighted by R. Barton Palmer who observes: “As a detective, he can assist (however ineffectually) in the containment of Charlie’s madness, but he cannot re-order the society which views the criminal as a savior. The grounds for Graham’s limited optimism are unsteady in another sense as well. For, unlike the viewer, he has not been made privy to young Charlie’s dissatisfaction with the dullness of smalltown life, nor does he comprehend the depth of her attachment to her uncle.”233 Graham’s placement as a bit of a “mug” articulating exactly the kinds of platitudes that the film’s protagonist couple see through is also tied to the fact that we previously saw him having given Charlie his forwarding details but he turns out to be unreachable anywhere when she seeks his help. While one might argue that this is a narrative contrivance on the film’s part (and it is) it nevertheless diminishes his reliability and credibility. Finally, I would note that Graham’s attempted reassurance to Charlie that the world “seems to go crazy every now and then,” syncs up rhetorically with Norman Bates’ statement in Psycho that “We all go a little mad sometimes,” putting him in the ideological company of a serial killer and casting even further doubt on the succor he seeks to provide. 88

Shadow of a Doubt The uneasy feel of Shadow’s ending highlights Charlie’s agency in keeping with a cultural turn toward the girl detective and the empowered teen and with the calls for women to take up new roles as would be needed in wartime that I have discussed previously. It also marks a dramatic contrast with Graham’s absence and ineffectiveness; he leaves Santa Rosa at a critical moment despite his seeming strong belief that Charles is the Merry Widow murderer. More broadly, Shadow’s productive ambiguities are highlighted when it terminates at a point at which Charlie has officially repudiated her uncle’s value system yet in committing a secret killing upholds it insofar as she proves willing to do away with someone who she finds morally objectionable. (And our capacity to dismiss Charlie’s killing as simply a heat of the moment action carried out purely in selfdefense is limited in light of her professed earlier resolution to her uncle that she will kill him if necessary.) Moreover, we arrive at a conclusion in which Santa Rosa (and the Newtons as his presumed inheritors) are enriched by the spoils of Charles’ killings, direct beneficiaries of his elimination of problematic social subjects. Thus, the excessive capital held by “unworthy” women is distributed back to the small town and the family but only once these institutions have been discredited, their hollowness and hypocrisy revealed. For some viewers, an incongruous element in this well-crafted film is the credulitystraining death of Uncle Charles. While Charles seems to easily physically overpower his niece the sudden implausible reversal in their tussle beside the open door of the moving train that allows Charlie to push him out and into the path of an oncoming locomotive can best be explained as the culmination of Charles’ agency rather than a contradiction of it. Paul Gordon characterizes the final encounter between uncle and niece, noting that it “can be seen both as a seduction as well as a murder.”234 This strikes me as an apt assessment of the scene given the sexual overtones of the struggle but it might also be read as a culminating moment in Charles’ not wholly successful but far from unsuccessful ideological seduction of Charlie. Charles’ decision when he is being pursued to take shelter in the home of his relatives is hardly consistent with that of a person who wishes to continue his killing spree undiscovered. We may also recall that Charles has come into the film giving away cherished possessions, a well-recognized clinical feature of suicidal ideation. The sense that Charles has closed a page in his life in coming to Santa 89

Shadow of a Doubt Rosa is also hinted at when he abruptly pauses in the first dinner scene while regaling the family with stories of a luxurious yacht he had been on, saying “What am I talking about? That’s all over.”

Figure 17: A Shadow of a Doubt publicity still coyly references Charlie’s proficiency with train mechanics and accelerative momentum.

In the key conversation with Charlie in front of the Newton house he tells her that before resolving to come to Santa Rosa he was profoundly tired and at the end of his rope and says “I was going to. . .” – but doesn’t finish his sentence. Uncle Charles’ statements and actions lend credence to the idea that his death is at least in part self-willed and my reading of the film holds that in its later stages it depicts Charles essentially training Charlie in his methods to engineer his own mercy killing. In this sense Charles’ removal of the key article from the newspaper directs her toward an incriminating article just as his gift of the inscribed ring furnishes her with an indisputable piece of evidence. Later, as Michael Wood observes, as the two struggle on the train “the Uncle says, ‘Not yet, Charlie,’ as if the timing were up to her.”235 Similarly, dialogue such as Charles’ fervent “I count on you, Charlie” spoken in the context of his understanding that he will be executed if his guilt is discovered, may be read as a coded plea for euthanasia. Charlie’s murder of her uncle, therefore, is 90

Shadow of a Doubt meant to seem implausible – at some level, he can’t really be gotten rid of that easily. To reiterate, if in some sense Charlie’s murder of her uncle is a “mercy killing” it’s important to recall Charles’s ambivalent state of mind at the start of the film – he nearly admits he was on the verge of killing himself, he’s come to town giving away expensive gifts and things he’s owned apparently all his life (like family pictures). The craving for such a death, we may consider, is in keeping with his character; Hitchcock is careful to show from the earliest moments of the film that Charles is adept at getting people to do things for him – in just the first nineteen minutes of the film Mrs. Martin picks up the cash he’s strewn on the floor, the porter pays him solicitous attention then together with the elderly doctor and his wife assists Charles in getting off the train, and Joe, Charlie, Ann and Roger all carry his bags at the station while Charles strolls behind them. Charlie will again carry his suitcase upon their arrival at the Newton home telling her Uncle that she “loves to carry.” After dinner, Charles will be comfortably settled on the sofa while the women clean up, his sister reminding him “You were never much for helping.” It is thus coherent and continuous with broader patterns of refusal of responsibility within Charles’s character that he would seek to make another person responsible for the extermination which at some level he knows he deserves. He craves understanding and possibly forgiveness from his namesake and the one person who truly knows him. It is in this sense that we can begin to unpack the importance of the scene in front of the house that succeeds the one in the ‘Til-Two Bar. By the close of this scene when Charles re-enters the house, Charlie stands significantly outside it. We understand that he has now put her in a position where her knowledge keeps her apart from the family life she once believed in and this is the only time in the film that she breaks down.236 But the discussion between the two outside the house is also significant because it signals the way in which simply getting away with his crimes isn’t enough for Uncle Charles. He says “Charlie, you’ve got to help me. I count on you,” and he means something other than helping him to get out of town. Even when Charles has an assurance from Charlie that she will let him escape, this still isn’t enough for him. He presses his niece, “You realize what it’ll mean if they get me?” Here, I think, is where the film lays the groundwork for my explanation of the train scene at the 91

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Figure 18: In an easily overlooked but critical scene outside the Newton home after the ‘Til-Two Bar, Charles wins Charlie’s agreement that he will leave town on his own terms.

close – Charles makes it essentially inevitable for Charlie to kill him. By the time he announces his departure from Santa Rosa, he has allowed Charlie (very easily it would seem) to procure the evidence to incriminate him. (Another oblique suggestion that Charles is minded toward suicide in the context of his bond with Charlie is the manner of death he envisions for her in his second [and serious] attempt on her life – carbon monoxide poisoning in a garage being frequently linked to suicide). Since Charles will inevitably resume his habits upon leaving Santa Rosa (indeed, Mrs. Potter is lining up to be his next victim) there is a great deal at stake here. Perhaps, as David Sterritt briefly suggests, he anticipates his own imminent death.237 We have to ask to what extent is Charles invested in securing his own death at Charlie’s hands? Although the film finesses this by presenting uncle and niece in a physical fight to the death it is significant that Charles makes Charlie a killer too. For some critics this means that Shadow concludes in a manner that emphasizes how “young Charlie is a morally ambiguous figure.”238 92

Shadow of a Doubt We may also question Charles’ instantaneous decision to leave Santa Rosa when Charlie descends the staircase wearing the ring she has obtained from Charles’ room (which of course is her own loaned bedroom, and we may recall that she has already demonstrated her ability to raid it while it’s under Charles’ occupation when she obtains the newspaper pages). Elaine Lennon shrewdly notes how frequently Hitchcock’s heroines take staircases to places they don’t want to go.239 When Charlie slowly and deliberately walks down the stairs with the ring back on, the significance of the gesture is unclear – is this a vow of faithfulness? Has he won her back in ideological terms? The act seems to represent Charlie’s victory (she now has the evidence to force Charles out of town) but it may also be Charles’ in the sense that the ring symbolizes the re-securing of their original compact, their twinship. We see that the Newton home is no longer ideologically pristine; in addition to becoming a criminal’s sanctuary it is also now a repository of evidence. Charles may be prompted to leave in part because he is satisfied that he has truly converted Charlie to his worldview. Such a reading would be consistent with the ways in which conventional epistemologies and the institutions they support are ferociously critiqued by Shadow of a Doubt.

Domestic Space, Public Space and Transport in Shadow of a Doubt Shadow is a spatially meticulous film. Elaine Lennon notes that “Staircases, hallways and rooftops are the liminal spaces and areas of transition that convey information about Uncle Charlie’s perspective.”240 It is important to consider how the film thematically organizes space and locates the conflict between uncle and niece, particularly in vertical space (as Ronnie Scheib has pointed out), generating key moments of confrontation between them so as to illustrate complex affinities and discrepancies. Public space is initially positively coded by the film (we see Charlie floating through it in a reverie after she leaves the telegraph office, the Newtons happily occupy it in collecting Uncle Charles at the train station and Charlie gushes “I love to walk with you, Uncle Charlie” as the two walk in town) but it loses this association – Charlie’s acquisition of knowledge re-configures her relationship to it. Once she leaves the library where she verifies her uncle’s criminal status, we understand that she will never walk through Santa Rosa the same way again. 93

Shadow of a Doubt It is important to observe that Charles deploys elements of the Newton’s domestic property as weapons against Charlie – the back stairs (whose steepness is noted in Emma’s first line of dialogue) are blamed by her for Charlie’s fall (as she runs to her daughter’s aid she says “They’re too steep and rickety. They ought to be fixed”) and the garage door has a propensity to stick. In this way, Charles shows Charlie how punishing the domestic is and entices her toward a larger (if also nihilistic) view. A central contradiction in the film is the way Charles functions both as a promise to Charlie of release from her mother’s life and a figure of coercion toward conventional domesticity as the only safe space. He both wants to persuade Charlie to his worldview and calls on her to eliminate him. Alfred Hitchcock famously memorized transport schedules as a boy and his persistent interest in trains, cars, ships, etc. can be glimpsed for instance in the fact that many of his “sneaky appearances [in his films] are connected to motorized transport” (as is the case in Shadow).241 Broadly speaking, Shadow of a Doubt emphasizes the hazards of transport – we note that Charles’ boyhood accident was a collision with a streetcar, that the wanted man in Maine thought to be the Merry Widow Murderer dies when he runs into the propeller of a plane and that Charles is ultimately killed when he falls into the path of an oncoming train. Yet by its conclusion the film has established Charlie’s adeptness with transport; the only driver in the Newton family, she is also the only family member seen around cars and automotive paraphernalia (she steps out of a taxi returning with Charles after she has shown him the town and says goodbye to Jack Graham beside his car when the detective wrongly concludes that Uncle Charles is not the Merry Widow murderer). Of course, ambivalence around the female driver is notably showcased in later Hitchcock films like Psycho and The Birds (1963). For Elaine Lennon, Charlie’s driving proficiency represents another link to the pre-eminent girl detective Nancy Drew who famously drove a blue roadster.242 It is significant that Charles’ serious attempt on his niece’s life takes place in the garage as does Jack’s indirect proposal of marriage. (The first attempt may be considered a warning given that a fit young woman is unlikely to fall to her death because of a broken step on a staircase.) The second attempt is serious – to prevent the family from hearing Charlie’s escape attempts Charles turns up the radio in the house and tells Emma that they are in no rush to leave for the Women’s Club talk 94

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Figure 19: Crossing Guard Mr. Norton’s efforts to regulate public space in Santa Rosa bespeak a larger quest for order the film recognizes as superficial and even absurd.

and it is only Herb’s proximity to the garage that prevents Charlie’s death from asphyxiation.243 Charlie is depicted as expert is navigating Santa Rosa and its institutions; the only exception to this are the two instances in which keen on getting to the library in one case and evading her uncle in another she seeks to cross the street against the light and is pushed back to the sidewalk by Mr. Norton. The crossing guard tells Charles “I’ll have to give her a ticket for speeding one of these nights,” and while the two men momentarily collaborate in the project of curbing a wayward woman, Charles’ more resonant communication is with his niece who he rather drolly admonishes, “Hear that, Charlie, don’t want to break the law.” Hitchcock’s likely view of the petty tyrannies of Mr. Norton was ambiguously conveyed in his discussion of the film with François Truffaut in which Truffaut suggested: “You are always rather hard, tough on the police. One feels that the character of the policemen very often in your pictures does not have the same value for you as for the public. For instance, I suppose that the character of the policeman in Shadow of a Doubt for you is a very mediocre guy, almost contemptible.” Hitchcock replied with a brief but seemingly affirmative “Um hm.” It is certainly apparent in moments such as this that Shadow is a key text in what Frank M. Meola identifies as “Hitchcock’s ongoing commentary on the fragility of American social and community codes.”244 Charlie’s capacity for engaging with and mastering the pre-eminent technologies of modernity might be understood as fully realized in the scene where she pushes 95

Shadow of a Doubt Charles from the train. Such a reading is bolstered by the way in which Charles coaches his niece to “wait till it gets a little faster,” as they struggle on the train, his seeming instruction at odds with his ostensible plan to kill her. These references to speed and acceleration recall Enda Duffy’s argument that “access to speed is always political;”245 in the case of Shadow that politics is one of gendered value. Charlie is able to replicate techniques of power associated with her uncle and to utilize transport in so doing.

Figure 20: The complex encounter between Charles, Charlie and Mr. Norton stages a contrast between a normative socially conservative view of Charlie’s agency and Charles’ ambivalent one.

Shadow of a Doubt’s interest in the symbolics of transport and mobility might be seen to reach back beyond its present day setting to the recounting of Charles’ childhood injury in which according to Emma he took a newly-received bicycle out and skidded into a streetcar, sustaining an injury whose exact nature is both mysterious and seemingly highly consequential (even if ultimately a feint, as previously suggested). The adult Charles, however, displays an adeptness in both domestic and larger geographies and it would seem that by the close of the film he has transferred to Charlie an ability to master building layouts and mechanisms of transport. We can recall here how Charles evades the detectives tracking him 96

Shadow of a Doubt with an almost supernatural skill at the start of the film (we see him dart around a corner and then suddenly he is on a rooftop); there is something perhaps equally supernatural about Charlie’s physical defeat of her uncle at the close. Another way in which the encounter between uncle, niece and Mr. Norton exceeds straightforward narrative value is in the way it reveals Charles’ adeptness in leveraging his sex, race, wealth and apparent gentility for his own gain. Charles, we should note, is happy to place himself in the position of advantage granted to him by patriarchal capitalism. Although he derides the law, he is perfectly content to employ it in his mastery of his niece as is symbolically conveyed when Mr. Norton detains Charlie on the street corner enabling Charles to catch up with her. This fits with Charles’ broader ambivalence and his role in enforcing the gender and economic roles of the family – roles from which he wants to release his niece but also confine her. In this way, Shadow communicates its understanding of the ways that “Women have structurally been put in the position of representing the contradictions between autonomy and dependence, between love and money.”246

Shadow of a Doubt’s Popular Culture Afterlife Thomas M. Leitch has persuasively argued that “Hitchcock’s films have not dated; they have simply been historicized in a process that turns the iconic status formerly assigned to their defining moments to new use.”247 In keeping with this insight we may note that Shadow of a Doubt has had a rich afterlife in popular culture, often serving as a point of reference in other texts focusing on a young woman’s coming of age. In Jennifer Egan’s 2017 novel Manhattan Beach, for instance, protagonist Anna Kerrigan reaches a crossroads when her disabled sister dies and her mother leaves New York to return to the Midwest. As she roams the city on her own, starting the process of writing the terms of her own life as an adult Anna contemplates going into a screening of Shadow of a Doubt but concludes that she “no longer wanted to sit and watch a scary picture.”248 Anna Kerrigan resonates with Charlie Newton as a young woman coming of age during WWII who has untested capacities and is stronger than she knows.

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Shadow of a Doubt Shadow of a Doubt pairs intertextually with the 1953 film Niagara in part through the casting of Joseph Cotten but also through the films’ shared interests in disturbances to the field of gender-normative couple relations. If, as I have suggested, Shadow narrowly holds at bay the spectre of the man whose mental illness renders him unfit for military service (the “4F”), Niagara centralizes the man whose post-traumatic stress after serving in the Korean War triggers violence in the site par excellence of idealized postwar coupledom, Niagara Falls.249 There, Ray and Polly Cutler, a couple taking a delayed honeymoon, encounter George (Cotten) and Rose Loomis (Marilyn Monroe) whose volatile relationship is colored by George’s mood swings and insomnia after his release from a military hospital for treatment of mental illness. (The film is notably precise in its reference to the actual Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco.) But the Loomis’ marriage is equally destabilized by Rose’s bombshell sexuality (“Hey, get the firehose,” says Ray at the sight of Rose in a party dress) which has led to an extra-marital affair and a plan for Rose’s lover Patrick to kill George so they can be together. Part of “the flood of honeymoon-themed movies and journalism in the 1940s and 1950s,” Niagara can easily be understood as a film about the fragility of the postwar couple.250 A thread of hysteria runs through the film from George’s rages, to Rose’s overwrought collapse when she is brought to the morgue to discover it is Patrick’s body lying there rather than George’s, to the film’s use of telling music played at Niagara Falls’ Rainbow Tower Carillon. The lovers’ intended signal to one another, the Carillon’s playing of the song “Kiss” is appropriated by George after he has killed Patrick. In this way the film’s symbolic use of music as a sign of murder resembles Shadow’s use of the “The Merry Widow Waltz.” Other similarities between George and Uncle Charles include George’s attraction to the past (symbolized in his hobby of building old-fashioned model cars), George’s fugitive status in a place associated with idealized coupledom and family life and the two films’ interest in women who fail to conform to patriarchal regulation. A small but critical motif of the film – Ray’s seeming obsession with posing his wife for photographs – suggests the anxieties that underwrite Niagara’s visual economy of gender and pinpoints violence by men as the byproduct of instability in that economy. The film’s influence is likely to have been far broader then I can show here but there is value in at least a partial inventory of some of the ways Shadow has 98

Shadow of a Doubt been taken up as touchstone or inspiration in other creative endeavors. (Carl Freedman, for instance, links Shadow to a literary “impulse to excavate evil beneath the apparently innocuous appearances of American society” that incorporates contemporary novelists as diverse as Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King.)251 I have suggested that Shadow bears comparison to numerous other films of the wartime period, notably other female gothics. Another film to which Shadow of a Doubt might be compared is Meet Me in St Louis (1944) of which Dana Polan writes, “by 1944, an innocent small-town America is explicitly a fiction, an aesthetic construction.”252 Based on a series of short stories by Sally Benson, who was a key creative contributor to Shadow, the film’s thematic investment in an idealized, family-centered small town world that turns precarious and dark certainly invites comparison to Hitchcock’s film, as does its depiction of a constrictive domesticity and rather anxious, strained efforts to celebrate and re-consolidate a hometown. When Judy Garland’s Esther Smith anticipates romance with the boy next door in the film, saying, “I want it be something strange and wonderful,” she employs similar language to that used by Charlie in the betrothal scene when she tells her uncle “I have a feeling that inside you somewhere there’s something nobody knows about. . .something secret and wonderful.” Clearly the sense of a family’s embeddedness within their local community is central to Meet Me in St Louis and the same is true of It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), which also tests the gap between idealized experiences of domesticity and community and more pessimistic prospects.253 Notably, however, and in contrast to Shadow, both of the later films drive toward reconstituting the social and family worlds they had called into question, relying on late reversals and magical devices to do so. Adam Knee carries out a detailed comparison of The Return of Dracula (1958) with Shadow of a Doubt, noting that “Shadow of a Doubt appears a film that already has a vampiric subtext: rather than radically shifting the prior material, The Return of Dracula in effect unearths what is already there in repressed or hidden form.”254 In addition to its interconnections with such “B” grade cinematic fare, Shadow has served as a regular intertext in the work of distinguished filmmakers. James Naremore, for instance, notes the indebtedness of Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946) to it.255 Park Chan-Wook’s 2013 film Stoker is likely the contemporary film with the most 99

Shadow of a Doubt explicit debt to Shadow of a Doubt as it reworks a number of the earlier film’s elements and motifs to serve its own gothic dramatic ends. In the film, the young India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) has suffered the loss of her father when Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), a family member she had never known existed arrives at the family house and begins a long-term visit. The charismatic Uncle Charlie (a man whose psychopathy is disguised by charm) shares with Charles Oakley a quasimagical ability to materialize within and beyond the family home (in a deleted scene from the film he tells India “I think I know your house even better than you do”) and a habit of lingering on and around staircases. As in Shadow of a Doubt, uncle has been sending niece gifts, in this case each year a new pair of saddle shoes, the distinctive black-and-white patterned shoes associated with 1940s girlhood (though India believes the shoes were from her father).256 This Uncle Charles also strangles his victims, credits his niece with heightened powers of perception and appeals to her that “we share the same blood.” Like Hitchcock’s film, Stoker mingles references to horror and opera and it conspicuously supercharges the earlier film’s erotics. Where it differs from Shadow of a Doubt is in its conclusion, which fully enacts the possibility that the niece shares the uncle’s capacity for violence and does not restore India to her dysfunctional family of origin but sees her take to the road and murdering the sheriff who likely suspects that crimes have been committed by the Stoker family. At least one critical reading of the film has emphasized the emancipatory character of this conclusion, noting “Whereas Young Charlie is left to endure the agony of Uncle Charlie’s funeral, in which the speakers say nothing but great things about a man she knows to have been a sick killer, India — a murderer, a freak, an Uncle Charlie — is set free.”257 In Samantha Lindop’s account of the film India Stoker constitutes an example of postmillennial noir’s “fille fatale,” a figure that articulates “a pervasive dread about the increasing power and centrality of young women in contemporary Western culture.”258 She notes that having become more and more like her uncle, India “essentially becomes Charles’ successor” in the film’s conclusion.259 Shadow of a Doubt might well be linked to Jonathan Demme’s 1991 The Silence of the Lambs in which female investigator Clarice Starling shares a charged bond with a serial killer.260 Some perceive a stylistic and thematic debt to Shadow in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) with its emphasis on doubling and female 100

Shadow of a Doubt epistemologies. Likewise, Lynch’s earlier Blue Velvet has drawn comparison to Shadow in its depiction of a sunny superficial world barely concealing a darker, subterranean core. The Coen Brothers’ 2001 neo-noir The Man Who Wasn’t There also pays homage to Hitchcock’s film, setting itself in Santa Rosa in 1949 and focusing on a deliberative barber involved in intrigues to do with money and murder. The film is iconographically reminiscent of the 1943 film in its inclusion of a white picket fenced house, a precocious late teenaged girl, a man who kills with his hands and dialogue lines like “sometimes knowledge is a curse.” It is no doubt these aspects of Shadow of a Doubt that Woody Allen had in mind when he opted to incorporate a clip from it in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), his film about two young American women whose summer in Spain illustrates their different philosophies of life and approaches to sexual morality. Despite their differences the conservative Vicky (who describes herself as “grounded and realistic”) and the free-spirit Cristina nevertheless both sleep with the painter Juan Antonio; for Vicky this act unsettles her sense of herself as a stable, predictable middle-class wife-to-be. The film makes clear that Vicky’s marriage to the staid and predictable Doug represents safety and security rather than a genuine bond of intimacy and yet her persistent attraction to Juan Antonio and potentially also an American student in her Spanish language class (with whom she goes to see a matinee of Shadow of a Doubt) lead Vicky to characterize herself as “a little out of control.” At the conclusion of the film, on the verge of an adulterous reunion, Vicky and Juan Antonio are confronted by his pistol-waiving ex-wife and Vicky is grazed in the hand by a bullet. This near-miss encounter with fatal violence cements Vicky’s dedication to her approved social role. Some years after Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen’s Irrational Man cribbed directly from Shadow. Philosophy professor protagonist Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) is at a low ebb as the film begins but is recharged by his relationship with his student Jill Pollard (Emma Stone). Philosophical arguments about when violence may be considered ethical take center stage in the film as does the attribution of blame for a murder committed by Abe of an innocent man. In a conclusion that is remarkable for its similarity to Shadow a physical tussle between Jill and Abe as he tries to kill her leads improbably to his own death (in a fall down an elevator shaft) and Jill finishes the film reunited with her boyfriend Roy and pondering her relationship 101

Shadow of a Doubt with Abe. In press conferences supporting Irrational Man, Allen acknowledged his debt at least in general terms saying, “I learned it all from Alfred Hitchcock movies.”261 A similar sense of debt may have been in effect for horror director Wes Craven, whose highly self-referential hit Scream (1996) shot scenes in a house on McDonald Avenue in Santa Rosa. Suspense specialist Craven has been regularly compared to Hitchcock and it appears that he intended a location-based homage by using a property adjacent to the one that featured so critically in Shadow. An apocryphal (though apparently erroneous) story that one of Scream’s producers first located the “ghost face” mask so strongly associated with the Scream franchise in the Shadow of a Doubt house at 904 McDonald Avenue circulates occasionally, being invoked as recently as October, 2020 in a New York Times piece about the iconography and endurance of horror masks.262 A key entry in Hitchcock’s body of work, Shadow of a Doubt has no doubt influenced a range of serial killer fictions. Tony Williams suggests as much, writing that “Shadow of a Doubt and Psycho reveal sexual, economic and institutional mechanisms behind actions performed by later heirs of Uncle Charlie and Norman Bates such as Jason, Michael and Freddy.”263 Signs of Shadow’s influence may of course be large or small (in 1973’s The Killing Kind, Terry Lambert whistles the Merry Widow Waltz prior to committing a murder, while Night Moves [2013] pays homage to Shadow in its staging of a library revelation scene that confirms a murder has taken place).264 Finally, we may note a certain debt to Shadow of a Doubt in the centralization of the charismatic serial killer in various forms of what is often construed in the contemporary era as “prestige television”: a deep interest in the psychology of the figure organizes series including Dexter (Showtime 2006-13), Hannibal (NBC, 2013-2015) The Fall (BBC/RTE 2013-2016), Mindhunter (Netflix, 2017-) You (Netflix, 2018-) and Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (Showtime, 2019-).

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Conclusion

Shadow of a Doubt If in very general terms the major thrust of Classical Hollywood cinema is to take shaky ideological structures and render them symbolically stabilized, Hitchcock’s films tend to represent those structures as superficially stable, exposing their frailty. Such is the case in Shadow of a Doubt, whose politics are, in R. Barton Palmer’s assessment, “anti-establishmentarian,” and in which the promises and deficiencies of the family are laid bare.265 I have observed that Shadow of a Doubt was widely praised in popular criticism upon its release but on rare occasions when it was criticized the criticism tended to focus on the film’s unsettling ideological effects. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, for instance, complained that “the moral is either anti-social or, at best, obscure.”266 Like so many of Hitchcock’s films, Shadow narrowly skirts the boundaries of Hollywood morality. Its conclusion officially complies with Motion Picture Production Code (informally known as the Hays Code) diktat that prohibited the rewarding of crime and stipulated that “correct standards of life” be adhered to in screen representation. Nevertheless, the film operates as “a critique of the patriarchal ideology it represents, as a text which shows the cracks and fissures in the sexual roles born and existing in the institutions of the family.”267 Hitchcock’s stringent film unearths the repressed clefts in family life; it consistently deconstructs rather than celebrates “averageness” as we see when Graham’s paean to mundanity in the Newton garage falls flat (as it is meant to). It closes on the image of the ideal couple, yet they are situated outside the church rather than within it and their constitution is in no way celebratory. (Given the importance of doorways throughout the film it’s all the more significant that Charlie closes the film positioned just outside one.) The sense of deflation in the conclusion is achieved not only by Charlie’s listless demeanor and the fact that while Graham speaks, she is often looking away. The funeral sequence also works in the tradition of Hitchcock films marked by “a recurring pattern wherein sequences of extreme tension are followed immediately by very static, stagy, dialogue-ridden scenes (often headed by a representative of institutional authority and knowledge).”268 For many who have written about Shadow of a Doubt the film’s value lies in the way that it exposes profound moral complexities and details how “patriarchal family structures make everyone monsters and victims.”269 As David Denby writes, “Goodness can be terrifying, too, and its collusion with evil is part of the movie’s enduring 104

Shadow of a Doubt fascination.”270 It is for these reasons that a critic like Richard Brody refers to “the horrific contingency of the ending.”271

Figure 21: The film’s culmination in an official celebration of a serial killer as a “favorite son” cuts against the possibility of positive narrative closure.

I suggest that part of the reason we know Charlie will stay with Jack (or someone just like him) is that, as James McLaughlin points out, “Single women with money (or some kind of power) are deadly in Hitchcock: they provoke uncontrollable anxiety in men, which turns to murderous rage. They are regarded as inhuman and unnatural, unhinging both the social and natural orders.”272 However, McLaughlin is wrong in deeming Shadow “a chart of [Charlie’s] progress from rejection of her family and premonitions of her future status within it to wholehearted acceptance of her mother’s position.”273 There is nothing wholehearted here – at best, Charlie’s position at the end of the film reflects her capitulation to the normative social order as a strategic choice based on her newfound awareness of the rage patriarchy holds toward “free” women. As I have noted, the sense of “realness” associated with location shooting in Santa Rosa was consistently one of Shadow’s promotional talking points. The 105

Shadow of a Doubt accumulation of people who turn out for Charles’ funeral is striking and its significance heightened when we know that the crowd consists of actual Santa Rosan citizens. The extraordinary outpouring for the cortege calls to mind the serial killer’s previous designation of the Newton family as “All-American suckers.” Charles’ bitter assessment is spoken when he hears (Graham and Saunders’ cover story) that the family have been selected as profile subjects for a magazine article, but of course this is merely a ruse. The turnout and the minister’s profuse eulogy suggest that indeed all the residents of Santa Rosa are suckers, having similarly fallen for Charles’ misrepresentations. In the previous seeing-off scene at the train station, the Minister has told Charles “We feel you’re one of us” (and he is right).274 The effect of such a conclusion powerfully renders Catherine L. Preston’s contention that Shadow of a Doubt “challenges the entire mythos of middle America.”275 Certainly it is hard to fully dismiss Charles’ nihilism if we accept that Shadow of a Doubt gives us a society both infinitely corruptible and infinitely gullible, a society capable of finding happiness only through ignorance or illusion.”276 Shadow of a Doubt’s terrors have to do with the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. The film understands that the patriarchal family is sustained by illusions jointly held by its female and male members and this helps to explain Hitchcock’s sense of affinity with both his male and female protagonist. One of the reasons I’m not satisfied with a reading of the film some critics have generated holding that Uncle Charles is only a projection of Charlie’s psyche is because that would make the film only about her psychology (rendering Charles an accessory figure) when I think it is about them both and their mutual binding disenchantment.277 Noting the reunion thematics of the telegraph scene, the first train station scene, the kitchen betrothal scene and various other moments of affinity that arise throughout the film, I have taken seriously the couplehood of Charles and Charlie as a form of ideological kinship that remains fundamentally unruptured. Such an assessment is not, of course, intended to diminish Charlie’s centrality. In a 2017 public interview, Tania Modleski commented, “I think of Hitchcock as a great director of women’s films.”278 Her view is one that I share, as I hope this book has made clear. In addition to noting the film’s links to the traditions of women’s 106

Shadow of a Doubt cinema, two important further generic considerations with respect to Shadow of a Doubt are its status as a revisionist gothic and its ideological proximity to film noir. Shadow of a Doubt’s conclusion opens up as many questions as it answers, giving us an apparent return to equilibrium, but an underlying feeling that this just isn’t working. The depiction of imperiled normality propels the film through an Aristotelian structure of stasis, crisis and resolution as I have noted, but one that is complicated by our ambivalent wish to see that normality altered or even destroyed. The wholly normative couple of Charlie and Jack Graham will forever be shadowed by the illicit couple of Charles and Charlie, whose final symmetry is both affective and ideological. Hitchcock himself acknowledged as much in an interview with François Truffaut where, in speaking about the relationship between the two Charlies, Truffaut characterizes the film’s ending as showing “that for her whole life she’ll be in love with him,” and Hitchcock responds “Yes, yes.” The tense two-shot of Jack and Charlie that closes the film is matched with dialogue that appears abbreviated and inconclusive. As James Naremore observes, “The ostensible happy ending leaves [Charlie] shaken and depressed.”279 Charlie tells Jack that her uncle “hated the whole world – you know, he said people like us had no idea what the world is really like.” Jack’s tepid reassurance that “It’s not quite as bad as that. Sometimes it needs a lot of watching” predicts the confident morality of the United States’ postwar interventionist global posture but fails entirely to quell the charismatic complexity of Uncle Charles. As I have argued, the unreal nature of Charles’ death aligns him with the undead vampire and his physical death belies his ideological endurance. His niece mirrors Charles’ lassitude at the close of the film and is, in short, far more Charles’ widow than she is Jack’s fiancée. William Rothman reminds us that “‘We always kill the one we love,’ is a maxim Hitchcock never tired of citing in his interviews or illustrating in his films.”280 Elaine Lennon overstates the case, I think, when she refers to Charlie’s “own murderous impulses and how they might be sated.”281 (Such concerns are more applicable to Stoker’s India Stoker, as I suggest above.) I see no evidence in the film of Charlie’s annihilative drive. But she has clearly entered a state of disenchantment at the film’s close and the ebullience she manifests in the early stages of Charles’ visit is suppressed forever. For this reason, the funeral at the close is more 107

Shadow of a Doubt comprehensive than we might at first perceive. Its resonance derives in part from the way that such a conclusion culminates “a tension between private and public histories and women’s relationship to them” that Alison McKee identifies as being characteristic of the 1940s woman’s film.”282 In this book I have situated Shadow of a Doubt as an unconventionally femalecentered Hitchcock text marginalized in the massive scholarly canon on the director’s body of work and a milestone film, not only because it marks his emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life but because it opens a window into the placement of femininity in World War II consensus culture and more broadly into the politics of mid-century gender and family life. I have argued that Shadow concerns itself with all that the family ideal must fend off and suppress in the (always doomed) effort to hold itself inviolate. I see it as a proof text of the ways that as influential family historian Stephanie Coontz notes, “the ‘traditional family’. . .evaporates on closer inspection.”283 Indeed, the film strikingly illustrates how “in Hitchcock, the family is never innocent.”284 Finally, instead of neat closure Shadow provides an experience of intensely mixed feelings about family life, a keen attentiveness to the impasses of gender and an awareness of the high costs of keeping the family ideal intact. While Charles is eradicated, his vision of the world is at least partially confirmed. In their paralleled introductions at the start Charlie wants to move in a broader world (contrary to the norms of femininity) and her uncle craves a domestic family life he can believe in and cling to (contrary to the norms of masculinity), and the tragedy of the film is that neither of them can have what they want. In this way, the film’s impeccable narrative structure may be seen to be wedded to radical ideological content.

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Acknowledgements This book is dedicated to my parents William and Mary Negra, long-ago teenage sweethearts who worked together as an usher and a cashier at the Floral Theatre, a “picture palace” in their hometown of Floral Park, New York. I have always been sustained by their support and pride in the work I do. I am grateful to Mark Bould, Charles Barr, Peter William Evans, Jennifer Fay, Paula Gilligan, Liam Kennedy, Lucy Mazdon, Anthony McIntyre, Doranne Metz, Julia Leyda, Aoife Monks, Alan Nadel, James Naremore, Martina O’Sullivan at Palgrave, Milette Shamir, and Tim Snelson for their support and thoughtful contributions to my thinking as I wrote this book. Alison McKee shared an electronic copy of her book on the woman’s film with me when I had no other means of accessing it during the 2020 coronavirus crisis demonstrating in a pragmatic way the values of collegiality. Diane Carson did the same, sharing a copy of her seminal article on Shadow of a Doubt. Similarly, Suzanne Leonard and Alan Billing helped me track down a citation when I had no access to one particular source and Yvonne Tasker shared with me a copy of a needed article. In the same period Tony Williams kindly supplied page numbers from his work when Google did not. I warmly thank them all for their collegiality. Vicki Mayer generously provided me a long-term stay in New Orleans during which I wrote major portions of this book. For me, New Orleans is an ideal place to think and write. Thanks to Café Envie for its caffeine sustenance and “classic alternative” playlist. University College Dublin is fortunate to have a librarian of the calibre of Mark Tynan. During the time I was working on this book, Mark provided speedy and knowledgeable answers to research queries whenever I asked. James Keyes and Stacy Grouden provided valuable administrative support. Catherine Carey, the Administrator of the Clinton Institute of American Studies, kindly scanned and printed different versions of the manuscript and the proofs at a late stage of my work on the book.

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Shadow of a Doubt John Atkinson at Auteur/LUP has been a pleasure to work with in every respect. Likewise, designer Nikki Hamlett has been of crucial help in the production process, and Lydia Osborne has facilitated marketing. I record my sincere appreciation here to the British Academy which provided me with key research funding in 2008 that provided the means to conduct archival research, obtain illustrations and begin mapping out the shape of this book. University College Dublin approved my sabbatical leave in 2018-2019 thereby furnishing me with the time and space to complete this long-planned project. Queen Mary University of London honoured me with a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship which gave significant impetus to my work and put me in the pleasant company of colleagues there for two weeks in 2019. Aristotle University in Thesaloniki did the same appointing me as Guest Professor in 2020. Cindy Lucia and Bill Luhr, the Co-Rapporteurs of the Columbia University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation kindly invited me to present my research in progress to a group of eminent film scholars and that experience spurred me on at a critical stage. This book has benefited from long-term engagement with numerous students with whom I have discussed Shadow of a Doubt at universities in the United States, Germany, Spain, Poland, Greece, Norway, the UK and Ireland. I particularly enjoyed and benefited from the opportunity to discuss the film with students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology during a visit there in 2018 and with the MA students at Aristotle University in 2020. In both cases it was a pleasure to undertake a detailed examination of Shadow of a Doubt with students of unusual dedication and analytic skill. Finally, this book is deeply indebted to Tom Schatz, who taught Shadow of a Doubt to wonderful effect at the University of Texas at Austin for many years. His humane, erudite, and charismatic elucidation of the film informs this book in a great many ways.

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Notes 1.

Sara Blair notes that this sequence was produced by a newsreel crew under Hitchcock’s direction and recognizes that while it serves clear expository functions in regard to Charles’ character and state of mind as the film begins it also anticipates what would become a trademark in the director’s body of work: the use of a “repertoire of icons – material sites with deep symbolic resonance.” “Hitchcock on Location: America, Icons, and the Place of Illusion.” p. 62

2.

Throughout this book I try to consistently refer to Charles Oakley as “Charles” and Charlie Newton as “Charlie” in the interest of clearly differentiating one from the other.

3.

“Sometimes A Cigar Is Not Just A Cigar: A Freudian Analysis of Uncle Charles in Hitchcock’s ‘Shadow of a Doubt,’” p. 271.

4.

Casey McKittrick notes that “Hitchcock’s cameos are ritual enactments of his belonging to the cinema, a means of consolidating authorial identity, and a vehicle for textual commentary.” Hitchcock’s Appetites: The Corpulent Plots of Desire and Dread, p. 46.

5.

As Steven Jacobs observes, this also occurs in Rebecca, Suspicion, Notorious and Dial M for Murder. The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 72.

6.

The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film, p. 321.

7.

Ibid., p. 331.

8.

The idea of a song as an unconscious tell for what is being repressed or as a mode of secret communication recurs in Hitchcock’s body of work, appearing in such films as The 39 Steps (1935) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). I examine the function of “The Merry Widow Waltz” more fully later in this book.

9.

David Greven offers an adept reading of this section of the film. He contends that “the child Charles in the image stands in for Emma’s own lost vitality and for the false reality that Charles is a respectable member of society, a prime candidate for marriage to one of the widows in Emma’s ladies’ club. The image child is the doorway to an alternate life never realized.” Intimate Violence: Hitchcock, Sex & Queer Theory, p. 71.

10.

The moment foreshadows the struggle between Charles and Charlie in the film’s denouement, where he again grabs her violently by the face (so that her mouth is covered and her screams cannot be heard).

11.

This is true even of feminist work on Hitchcock; for instance, the film is not among the profiled texts in Tania Modleski’s landmark study The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. I want to be clear though that in pointing this out I am hardly criticizing Modleski whose achievements in the book I find both exemplary and inspiring.

12.

In Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies Donald Spoto notes that Shadow’s star Teresa Wright had played the lead role of Emily Webb in the touring production of Our Town and it was Thornton Wilder who suggested her for the film. p. 79. Wright would of course go on to have an extraordinarily successful early career in Hollywood being nominated for an Academy Award for the performances she gave in each of her first three films: The Little Foxes (1941), Mrs. Miniver (1942) and The Pride of the Yankees (1942). She won the Oscar for Mrs. Miniver.

13.

For a discussion of the thematics of blonde and brunette women in Hitchcock’s work see Michael Walker’s Hitchcock’s Motifs pp. 75-76 and 85-85. Walker writes that “One feels that someone like Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt needs to be brunette; blondeness would make her a little too exotic for the role of the typical small-town girl.” p. 76.

14.

“Blood is Thicker Than Water: The Family in Hitchcock,” p. 99.

15.

Hitchcock Style, p. 64. Paula Marantz Cohen also points to the significance of Hitchcock’s status as the father of an adolescent daughter. As she notes Patricia Hitchcock turned fourteen as her father made Shadow of a Doubt. Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism, pp. 70-71.

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16.

“Introduction,” Hitchcock’s America, p. 6.

17.

Figurations of Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov, p. 18

18.

The film’s craft was frequently admired in contemporaneous reviews. Writing in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther praised “the way Mr. Hitchcock folds suggestions very casually into the furrows of his film, the way he can make a torn newspaper or the sharpened inflection of a person’s voice send ticklish roots down to the subsoil of a customer’s anxiety. It is a wondrous, invariable accomplishment.” “’Shadow of a Doubt’ a Thriller, with Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten at Rivoli – ‘Tennessee Johnson Is at the Astor.” Similarly, a review in Motion Picture Daily observed that Hitchcock “has turned out another of his masterpieces in the mood of fear and suspicion.” Jan. 8, 1943. Variety’s review noted “Alfred Hitchcock is at his best in this picture. . .Picture is drama of high order, splendidly enacted and directed, and a credit to every department.” Shadow of a Doubt, Jan. 8, 1943. Writing in the UK’s Monthly Film Bulletin K.F.B. enthused “This is a typical Hitchcock picture, and Hitchcock has revelled in exploiting to the full every emotional and psychological twist and packing in an incredible amount of action and character detail. It is first-rate story-telling.” “Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 30.

19.

For discussions of Hitchcock’s particular indebtedness to F.W. Murnau’s 1924 German Expressionist masterpiece The Last Laugh see James N. Bade’s “Murnau’s The Last Laugh and Hitchcock’s Subjective Camera” as well as Homer B. Pettey’s “Hitchcock, Class and Noir.”

20.

Film, Architecture and Spatial Imagination, p. 21.

21.

In an article entitled “Hitchcock’s Hands,” Sabrina Barton has persuasively shown that “Hands in Hitchcock’s films inscribe a pattern of implicit claims about ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity.’” p. 160. From the kitchen “betrothal” scene forward it is certainly apparent that Charles and Charlie largely communicate through their hands.

22.

Michael Walker treats this economy at length. See Hitchcock’s Motifs, pp. 238-247. Of the particular use of staircases in Shadow of a Doubt Roger Ebert writes, “Notice how many variations of camera angles and lighting Hitchcock uses with the stairs. He considered them an ideal device for introducing imbalance into otherwise horizontal interiors. . .both staircases are used for tight little sequences of threat and escape.” (“Shadow of a Doubt”)

23.

The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 28.

24.

The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track, p. 18.

25.

Ibid., p. 19; David Humbert, Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis, p. 22.

26.

“Between Heads: Thoughts on the Merry Widow Tune in Shadow of a Doubt,” np.

27.

The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film, p. 318.

28.

In this respect Shadow of a Doubt is consistent with Hitchcock’s larger body of work. Doubled, disguised and multiple identities proliferate in films such as Jamaica Inn (1939), Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1961) and Marnie (1964).

29.

By shortening the phrase “beyond a shadow of a doubt” as it is customarily employed the title of Hitchcock’s film implies not certitude but its opposite. For a critic such as R. Barton Palmer this is fully in keeping with the irresolution and anxiety that pervade the film’s conclusion. As he writes, “the title refers not only to a typically Hitchcockian emphasis on the workings of suspense, but also to the viewer’s uneasiness about the closure process which does not remove, as we have seen, all the effects of the social disruption triggered (but also ameliorated) by Charlie’s presence in Santa Rosa. Hitchcock’s film subtly undermines any simple affirmation of wholesome American values,” establishing “that ‘shadow of a doubt’ toward the normal processes (particularly closure) of Hollywood narrative and toward the social optimism that narrative ordinarily expresses.” “The Politics of Genre in Welles’ ‘The Stranger’” p. 36 and p. 38.

30.

We may speculate that the bar’s name was carefully chosen to accord with the motif of the double as it was changed in production. In the screenplay for the film by Thornton Wilder the ‘Til-Two Bar is called “The Have-One.” Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Alfred Hitchcock

Shadow of a Doubt Collection, Folder 640, Screenplay by Thornton Wilder, June 10, 1942, p. 90. Diane Carson shrewdly reads the name of the ‘Til-Two Bar as having a further significance by acting as a form of commentary on the ticking time clock of Charlie’s autonomy before she moves into marriage. “The Nightmare World of Hitchcock’s Women,” p. 18. 31.

“The Nightmare World of Hitchcock’s Women,” p. 16.

32.

The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 59.

33.

The Woman’s Film of the 1940’s: Gender, Narrative and History,” p. 7.

34.

See his “Ideology, Genre, Auteur.”

35.

Fernando F. Croce, “DVD Review: Shadow of a Doubt,” np.

36.

Christina Lane has produced a study of the career and life of screenwriter-producer Joan Harrison, a close collaborator of Hitchcock’s who worked with him on numerous films and later in television. See Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. Lane’s detailed account includes no references to Harrison’s involvement with Shadow of a Doubt although Harrison’s 1994 New York Times obituary refers to her having worked as a writer on the film. Like Lane, I have come across no evidence to substantiate the notion that Harrison worked on the film for which screenplay credit is consistently given to Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson and Alma Reville.

37.

Elan Gamaker suggests Shadow’s importance as the first of the director’s US films to carry the possessive construction that emphatically marks authorship. He writes, “While Hitchcock’s name does not appear in any publicity material in the early stage of his career in the US, it does appear in voiceover for Rebecca and as a title as early as Saboteur. Within a year, Shadow of a Doubt is marketed in the possessive.” np.

38.

In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America, p. 115.

39.

The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, p. 1.

40.

Tania Modleski,“Remastering the Master: Hitchcock After Feminism,” p. 138.

41.

A Girl’s Got to Breathe: The Life of Teresa Wright, p. 69.

42.

Ibid., p. 67.

43.

“Walk on the Wild Side,” p. 39. There is some evidence that the film has also been given short shrift industrially and historically. For instance, producer Sam Goldwyn in a meeting with Hitchcock that seems to have taken place at the end of 1942, tried to lure the director away from his deal with David O. Selznick by telling him that he shouldn’t be wasting his talents on such projects.

44.

“Shadow of a Doubt,” pps. 52 and 52 respectively. In the period not long before the release of Shadow, Joseph Cotten’s “hometown newspaper” the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia profiled him as a local boy “made good” in an article announcing preview screenings of a film I presume to be Lydia (1941). In the piece Cotten ruminates as follows: “the thought that people back home are going to see you on the screen – they couldn’t see you in stage plays, and they could only hear you on the radio – is heart-warming and a little bit frightening. You feel like an upstart. Why a little while back you were little Joe Cotten, running errands for the folks at Petersburg, and now you have the nerve to show up on the screen. You have the feeling that someone is sure to remember the time you fell into the cistern and had to be rescued by the fire department, or the time when you were 12, that you made a fool of yourself over the grocer’s daughter.” Edith Lindeman, “Previews of New Picture Opening This Week.”. np. In a stark illustration of the dissonance that can arise between promotional discourses and a film text, rather similar press coverage in the local press in Santa Rosa during the film shoot detailed (without irony) that Cotten was scheduled to be a guest speaker at the local “20-30 Club” “Actor Scheduled As Guest Speaker of S.R. 20-30 Club.” The 20-30 Club still meets today in Santa Rosa; its mission is to highlight “personal growth and leadership development” for young adults while serving in a charitable capacity to special needs children. http://active2030sr.com/our-club

113

Shadow of a Doubt

114

45.

“Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” p. 49.

46.

“Charlie’s Uncle,” p. 56.

47.

Sabrina Barton, “Hitchcock’s Hands,” pgs. 168-169.

48.

“Hitchcock and Fascism,” p. 40.

49.

Mediating the Family: Gender, Culture and Representation, p. 2.

50.

“Hitchcock the Feminist: Rereading Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 25.

51.

The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, p. 5.

52.

Both also had precedent or succeeding life in print in the form of novels and comics as well as videogame iterations.

53.

“The Nightmare World of Hitchcock’s Women,” p. 16.

54.

The adept performance of amateur child actress Edna May Wonacott certainly heightens Ann’s narrative impact. Alfred Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia has reported that she coached the little girl in the role. See “Working with Hitchcock: A Collaborators’ Forum with Patricia Hitchcock, Janet Leigh, Teresa Wright and Eva Marie Saint,” p. 54.

55.

Ibid.

56.

“1943: Movies and National Identity,” p. 96.

57.

Homer B. Pettey, for instance, reads Charles’ position as that of “a faux nobleman,” arguing that “he casts an embittered, contemptuous gaze upon the working world of middle-class men and the conspicuous consumption of middle-class wives of the leisure set.” “Hitchcock, Class and Noir,” p. 88.

58.

“Hitchcock at War: Shadow of a Doubt, Wartime Propaganda and the Director as Star.,” p. 163.

59.

“Hitchcock at the Margins of Noir,” p. 274.

60.

“Meet Me in St. Louis: Smith, or The Ambiguities,” p. 221.

61.

During the family dinner held to mark Charles’ arrival, Joe comments that Charlie was “the smartest girl in her class at school – won the debate against the East Richmond High School single-handedly. She’s got brains.” Creative decisions were apparently made in the production process to sever Charlie’s discontent from any specific source, emphasizing its general nature. In the screenplay by Thornton Wilder her melancholy is precisely tied to a sense of her family’s disconnectedness and she points out that her father has forgotten that the day is his wedding anniversary. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Folder 640, Screenplay by Thornton Wilder, June 10, 1942. p. 6.

62.

I find persuasive James Naremore’s explanation of why Hitchcock’s work is peripheral to film noir categorization. He writes that “Hitchcock celebrates the romantic union to a degree seldom found in film noir, where the threat of sexual relationships is palpable... he nevertheless treats romance with an undercurrent of dark irony.” “Hitchcock at the Margins of Noir,” p. 273.

63.

Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock, p. 157.

64.

Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis, p. 20.

65.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), p. 50.

66.

See his Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony.

67.

“Shadow of a Doubt.” p. 254.

68.

Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

69.

Signifying Female Adolescence: Film Representations and Fans 1920-1950, p. 142.

70.

Murray Pomerance, Alfred Hitchcock’s America, p. 53.

71.

“Hitchcock, Voltaire and Shadow of a Doubt,” np.

Shadow of a Doubt 72.

In Robin Wood’s assessment “The most striking characteristic of the Spencers is the separateness of each member; the recurring point of the celebrated overlapping dialogue is that no one ever listens to what anyone else is saying.” “Ideology, Genre, Auteur.” p. 50. It is a testament to the complexity of family names in Shadow that Wood mistakenly refers to the Newtons as the Spencers here.

73.

Michie writes specifically: “It is easy to dismiss Ann as either a reader of romances or an unimaginative literalist. Yet her reading contains precisely the kind of knowledge Charlie needs as she is about to enter into her adult life, stories and sayings about the kinds of things that can happen to women.” “Unveiling Maternal Desires: Hitchcock and American Domesticity,” p. 45.

74.

Hitchcock at Work, p. 63.

75.

“The Family in The Reckless Moment,” p. 221.

76.

I think R. Barton Palmer is right to argue that the film builds sympathetic traction for its serial killer protagonist both narratively and performatively, that is to say “by focusing on Uncle Charlie in the opening sequences and withholding the truth about his crimes until his niece learns it, the film encourages identification with him (a sympathy aided by the theatrical bonhommie of Joseph Cotton’s performance in the role).” “The Politics of Genre in Welles’ ‘The Stranger’” p. 35.

77.

“Double, Double: Toil and Trouble.,” p. 58.

78.

Later in the film as the Newtons prepare to leave for Charles’ speech to the women’s club, Emma tells her husband, “Joe, I wish you could drive.”

79.

An early version of the film’s script indicates that the Pandora’s Box scenario was initially selfconsciously staged. In it “the daughter” is “impelled by curiosity to go through [the Uncle’s] trunk.” Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Folder 636, Script Treatment by Gordon McDonnell, May 5, 1942, p. 4.

80.

Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film, p. 27.

81.

In Linda Seger’s manual for screenwriters Making a Good Script Great she writes that “the strongest kind of action point is a reversal. A reversal changes the direction of the story 180 degrees. It makes the story move from a positive to a negative direction.” p. 53.

82.

Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, p. 238.

83.

“Unveiling Maternal Desires: Hitchcock and American Domesticity,” p. 47.

84.

The scene is notably presented as a consummate example of filmic artistry in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s textbook Film Art: An Introduction where its formal elements are analysed in detail. It is also admired by Roger Ebert who writes of Charles’ shockingly misogynistic rant “I think that may be the most eloquence Hitchcock ever allowed a killer.” (“Shadow of a Doubt”).

85.

Diane Carson, “The Nightmare World of Hitchcock’s Women,” p. 11.

86.

David Humbert observes that “the exchange of the ring between Charles and Charlie, and her instinctive refusal to accept it at first is a prelude to her threat to expose Charles’ crimes, but also implies her immunity to the power of prestige.” Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis, p. 34.

87.

“American Civilization and Its Discontents: The Persistence of Evil in Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 95.

88.

The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film, p. 331.

89.

Ibid., p. 329.

90.

Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism, p. 72.

91.

“Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 254.

92.

In this regard James Naremore provocatively suggests that Charles’ nostalgia is broadly historical. He writes that “Charles Oakley suffers from a kind of delusional nostalgia for a nineteenth-century belle epoque.” Likewise, Eugene Levy contends that in the film there is “nostalgia for the bygone era of glamour and elegance at [sic] turn-of-the-century Europe.” (76) With these comments in mind

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Shadow of a Doubt it is intriguing to consider how Charles inspires those around him to serve and cater to his interests in a way that befits a privileged gentlemanly class of the past. In the film’s first scene Mrs. Martin, the landlady at the rooming house expresses solicitude toward Charles and reports on the visit of the detectives in his absence telling him “Those friends of yours told me not to mention they’d called. . .But I thought you’d like to know somehow.” As I have noted before, the train porter is similarly exceptionally concerned with Charles’ welfare while upon his arrival in Santa Rosa Uncle Charles’ bags are carried by various members of the Newton family. They are unpacked for him the next morning by Emma and he is later given an obsequious reception at the bank where Joe works. 93.

“Hitchcock’s Hands,” p. 172; “The Dandy in Hitchcock,” p. 10.

94.

“Shadows of Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 56.

95.

Hitchcock a la Carte, p. 34.

96.

With some exceptions, as James Naremore points out, “Hitchcock’s films reveal a contempt for certain females – especially for rich American matrons.” “Hitchcock at the Margins of Noir,” p. 273. Arguably the severity of Mrs. Cochran who reluctantly lets Charlie into the library for a strict three minutes just as it is closing, fits into this pattern, particularly given that the librarian seems to berate Charlie excessively for a small infraction.

97.

“Serial Killers, True Crime, and Economic Performance Anxiety,” p. 66; Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture, p. 1.

98.

Ibid., p. 257.

99.

Lethal Repetition: Serial Killing in European Cinema, p. 6.

100. Ibid., p. 187. 101. Ibid., p. 189. 102. “The Politics of Genre in Welles’ ‘The Stranger,’” p. 36. 103. Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis, p. 29. 104. Some sociological research (based it must be said on data gathered much more recently than the 1940s) has found that high rates of marriage and divorce are exceptional features of American life. The distinctively transient character of US relationships has been tracked for instance by Andrew J. Cherlin in his book The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. Cherlin shows that the US has the highest rates of movement partner-to-partner of any Western nation. 105. “All in the Family: Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 145. 106. The Wizard of Oz, p. 23. 107. “The Nightmare World of Hitchcock’s Women,” p. 13. 108. Emma’s entrance illustrates that both she and her daughter make strategic recourse to the backstairs and is thus evocative of a further level of synchronicity between the two. (Emma’s breakdown and the privileging of Charlie’s response to it is of course the culminating moment in this relationship). In this respect, Shadow deviates from the rather regular pattern of motherdaughter conflict and estrangement in mid-century Hollywood dramas. Films that adhere to the pattern include: Now, Voyager (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945) and Imitation of Life (1959). 109. Hitchcock’s Music, p. 90. 110. “The Family in The Reckless Moment,” p. 222. 111. Carson, “The Nightmare World of Hitchcock’s Women,” p. 19, Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, pps. 76-77. 112. Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, p. 77. Developing this line of thought further and in a perhaps too sympathetic account of Charles’ position, Barbara M. Bannon writes, “the film also implies, especially in one memorable shot where his sister Emma and Young Charlie loom over him as he lies passively on his bed, that Uncle Charlie has always been

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Shadow of a Doubt dominated and smothered by women who have expected more of him than he could ever provide: the ideal brother and the Messianic uncle. So the killing of the widows may simply represent his attempts to get a bit of his own back. We really only stop liking Uncle Charlie after he begins trying to kill Young Charlie; even then it’s not so easy.” “Double, Double: Toil and Trouble,” p. 62. 113. Power & Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Cinema, 1940-1950, p. 248. 114. Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington open their book Hitchcock’s America with an admiring account of the complexities of this scene. Of Emma’s positioning here they write: “Her very normativeness is being demonstrated to be wholly simulacral, both a pose for and a creation of the media who ostensibly record it – and, it hardly needs to be added, a pose for and a creation of Hitchcock’s self-conscious self-mocking camera as well.” p. 3. 115. “The Nightmare World of Hitchcock’s Women,” p. 16. Carson links this pattern of commentary to Emma’s unconscious preference for and sustaining connection to an earlier home in her childhood rather than the one she occupies with her husband and children. 116. David Humbert observes that Mrs. Potter’s comment that one good thing about being a widow is that you don’t have to ask your husband for money “seems an inadvertent affirmation of Charles’ estimation of rich widows.” Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis, p. 31. Humbert’s characterization adds further weight to the notion that in some respects Shadow endorses (or at least never fully discredits) Charles’ anti-social and misogynist views. 117. Herb might be seen to share with Emmy an agency that exceeds his official role in the narrative. Indeed, one of the ironic resonances of the film’s conclusion is the way that it complies with Herb’s vow to Joe “I’d murder you so it didn’t look like murder.” In a blogpost devoted to analyzing Herb’s role jaspergolfer makes a very similar point: “In his last appearance, Herbie tells Uncle Charlie that the train is approaching and that he should get ready to board. Although a small part, it foreshadows the accidental murder that Herbie has been trying to perfect the whole movie.” “Herbie Hawkins’ Role in Shadow of a Doubt (np). In a lecture on Shadow of a Doubt and Rear Window uploaded to YouTube David Thorburn insightfully notes the comparability of Herb and Joe’s pleasures to ours as the film’s spectators. See https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xt_0iNlUQ2U In other respects Thorburn’s understanding of the film is notably different from mine, particularly in regard to its gendered characterizations. Thorburn designates Emma Newton “one of the supreme airheads in American movies,” and calls Ann “a nasty little bitch who’s more interested in reading her books than in speaking civilly to her parents.” 118. The Age of Sex Crime, p. 3. 119. Robin Wood also admires the adroit nature of the director’s appearance here, calling it “one of his best and most elaborate cameos.” “Hitchcock and Fascism,” p. 38. We may note of this section of the film that the way Charles sequesters himself in a private compartment typifies a division of space Rebecca Franklin-Landi has analyzed in a discussion of Hitchcock’s “train films.” She observes that they often work from a dualism between shared accessible spaces onboard and enclosed private ones. See “The Symbol of the Train in Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest,” p. 13. 120. The couple are, however, briefly glimpsed again on the train’s arrival in Santa Rosa positioned on either side of Charles as he alights from the train still feigning illness. A further nuance to the card-playing scene is observed by Casey McKittrick who writes, “The notion of cards as an activity of leisure is resonant in that Charlie’s disgust with rich widows is rooted in their frivolous pursuit of leisure on the backs of their hardworking, deceased husbands.” Hitchcock’s Appetites: The Corpulent Plots of Desire and Dread, p. 53. 121. Hitchcock’s Appetites: The Corpulent Plots of Desire and Dread, p. 52. 122. “Unveiling Maternal Desires: Hitchcock and American Domesticity,” p. 30. Michie shrewdly connects the scene to a similar display of “unlicensed” maternal desire from Jo Conway McKenna (Doris Day) in Hitchcock’s later The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). However, Michie argues that these exposures of counter-hegemonic maternal subjectivity precede the focal families’ return

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Shadow of a Doubt to wholeness in both films, a characterization I think is misapplied to Shadow of a Doubt. As I have argued, I think the film’s closure is associated with a permanent state of rupture rather than reintegration. 123. Michie finds evidence in this scene that Emma and Mrs. Potter “in some sense understand one another.” (48) She contends that it is only Mrs. Potter who meets Emma’s gaze while she articulates her anguish about Charles’ departure. Though intuitively sympathetic to this reading, I am only partly convinced of it. It is the case that Mrs. Potter’s facial expression is less remote than those of the other guests, but we see this in a very short shot that offers scant support for an argument about ideological affiliation between the two women. 124. Hitchcock at Work, p. 63. The emotional complexities of the scene jar with Eugene Levy’s straightforwardly sexist and wholly inadequate assessment that Emma “has lost her looks and the glamour she possessed in her youth.” (Small-Town America In Film: The Decline and Fall of Community, p. 76). The basis for Levy’s claim is unclear. 125. Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Folder 642, Shooting Script, Aug. 10, 1942, p. 178. 126. Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 73. The other films which work in this way according to Jacobs are: The Farmer’s Wife (1928), Rich and Strange (1931), Rebecca, Suspicion, Notorious, The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn, Dial M for Murder, Psycho and The Birds. 127. The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 39. 128. “’At Last I Can Tell It To Someone!’ Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Films of the 1940’s,” p. 29. 129. “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband:’ The Modern Gothic,” pp. 668-669. 130. Ibid., p. 671. 131. A particularly insightful study of the contemporary gothic’s modification under postfeminism in an era “which proclaims loudly and consistently that the struggle for women’s freedom is finished,” is provided by Sarah E. Whitney in her book Splattered Ink: Postfeminist Gothic Fiction and Gendered Violence. p. 2. 132. Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film, p. 104. 133. Hitchcock At Work, p. 68. 134. “Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors and Things That Go Bump in the Night,” pps. 688 and 690 respectively. 135. “The Utopian Impulse in Popular Literature: Gothic Romances and ‘Feminist” Protest,’ p. 142. 136. Michelle A. Masse, “Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors and Things That Go Bump in the Night,” p. 688. 137. Ibid., p. 709. 138. “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” p. 261. 139. The Female Investigator in Literature, Film and Popular Culture, p. 2. 140. “Hitchcock’s Hands,” p. 173. 141. Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film, p. 57. 142. Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, p. 83. 143. Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, p. 238. 144. “Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors and Things That Go Bump in the Night,” p. 689 145. “The Utopian Impulse in Popular Literature: Gothic Romances and ‘Feminist’ Protest,” p. 158. 146. Splattered Ink: Postfeminist Gothic Fiction and Gendered Violence, p. 6.

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Shadow of a Doubt 147. “’At Last I Can Tell It To Someone!’ Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Films of the 1940’s,” p. 32. 148. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, pps. 3 and 2 respectively. 149. “The Fatal, Hateful Rise of Choking During Sex,” np. 150. The Woman’s Film of the 1940’s: Gender, Narrative and History, p. 19. 151. Alain Silver, “Introduction,” p. 11. 152. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, p. 293. 153. “Psychology in American Film Noir and Hitchcock’s Gothic Thrillers,” n.p. 154. Robert G. Porfirio, “No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir,” p. 77. 155. Geoff Mayer, “Introduction: Readings on Film Noir,” p. 4. 156. Ibid., p. 7. McDonnell, “Film Noir Style,” p. 80. Bould writes in Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City that “when we approach film noir, we are faced with neither an objectively-existing object out there in the world nor some ideal to which particular films more or less conform.” (2). 157. Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City, p. 18. 158. “Hitchcock at War: Shadow of a Doubt, Wartime Propaganda and the Director as Star,” p. 167. 159. “Double, Double: Toil and Trouble.,” p. 63. 160. “Film Noir and the City,” pps. 48-49. 161. “No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir,” p. 91. 162. “Introduction,” p. 8. 163. Email from Mark Bould, 7 May, 2020. 164. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, p. 4. 165. George Turner, Hitchcock’s Mastery Is Beyond Doubt in Shadow,” p. 65. 166. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies, p. 66. 167. “The Reel War,” p. 10. 168. See his Film Writing and Selected Journalism. 169. Hollywood’s Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology, pps. 153-154. 170. “1943: Movies and National Identity,” p. 113. 171. American Culture in the 1940s, p. 118. 172. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. pps. 4-6 and p. 155. 173. The Hollywood Propaganda of World War II, p. 9. 174. “Hitchcock at War: Shadow of a Doubt, Wartime Propaganda and the Director as Star,” p. 159. 175. Ibid., p. 160. 176. Ibid., p. 170. 177. Ibid., p. 164. 178. Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940’s, p. 239. 179. Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much, p. 53. 180. Ann’s invocation of Veronica Lake and Captain Midnight when she says her prayers at bedtime might also be construed as oblique wartime references given that Lake was a prominent pinup and famously modified her signature hairstyle lest American women working in industrial settings during the war emulate it and endanger themselves doing assembly line work. Radio serial character Captain Midnight was originally associated with the World War I context but was

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Shadow of a Doubt updated after the bombing of Pearl Harbor so that he and his Super Squadron’s activities were now clearly linked to World War II. 181. Jeff Kraft & Aaron Leventhal, Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco, p. 50. 182. “The Merry Widow’s Fling With Hitler.” 183. Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right, p. 4. 184. “’At Last I Can Tell It To Someone!’ Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Films of the 1940’s,” p. 34; Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right, p. 4. 185. “Hitchcock and Fascism,” p. 27. 186. “4-F: The Forgotten Unfit of the American Military During World War II,” p. 70. 187. For a brief discussion of this controversy and a more extended one of Sinatra’s subsequent association with critical and contestatory representations of military service see Colleen Glenn, “A Real Swinger of a Nightmare: Frank Sinatra and the Grim Side of the WWII Veteran’s Story.” 188. Smith, p. 81. 189. See his “I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl Who Married Harry James:’ American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II.” 190. Lennon specifically compares Nancy Drew to Charlie. See The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Shadow of a Doubt (1943) pps. 59-60. 191. Lesley Brill would go further; in a discussion of Family Plot (1976) he asserts that that film’s Blanche culminates a pattern of “plucky resourceful heroines” that begins with Patsy in the director’s first feature The Pleasure Garden (1925) and sustains across Hitchcock’s entire body of work encompassing “Daisy in The Lodger, Emily in Rich and Strange (1931), the mothers in both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956), Erica in Young and Innocent, Miss Froy in The Lady Vanishes (1938), young Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Ingrid Bergman in her Hitchcock films, and Grace Kelly in hers.” “A Brief Anatomy of Family Plot,” p. 299. 192. Precocious Charms: Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema, p. 200. 193. American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture, p. 23. 194. Ibid., p. 3. 195. See Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen. 196. American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture, p. 12. 197. “Female Juvenile Delinquency and the Problem of Sexual Authority in America, 1945-1965,” p. 85. 198. Marilyn Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality During World War II, p. 6. 199. Public Journal: Marginal Notes on Wartime America, p. 17. 200. Snelson, Phantom Ladies: Hollywood Horror and the Home Front, p. 5. 201. “Dallas’ Teen-Age Girls in Home Front Battle That Their City Forgot,” p. 1. 202. Teenagers: An American History, pps. 78 and 81 respectively. 203. “Wild Children,” p. 40. 204. “Female Juvenile Delinquency and the Problem of Sexual Authority in America, 1945-1965,” p. 89. 205. The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920-1945, p. 3. 206. Power & Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950, p.66. 207. “On the Screen.” 208. “Movie Talk,” p. 46. 209. “’Today’s the Thing, That’s My Philosophy;’ Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt,” np.

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Shadow of a Doubt 210. “David Denby on Shadow of A Doubt,” n.p. I have criticized Denby’s understanding of Shadow in an earlier reference and would note that his insight into the film seems to have deepened over the twenty years that passed between his two pieces of commentary on it. It is from the latter piece that I am quoting here. 211. “Beyond Doubt: The Making of Hitchcock’s Favorite Film.” 212. Michael Wood, Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much, p. 53. 213. Patricia Hitchcock has stated that her father “hated” location shooting in part because “you almost have to redo everything when you get back to the studio anyway.” “Working with Hitchcock: A Collaborators’ Forum with Patricia Hitchcock, Janet Leigh, Teresa Wright and Eva Marie Saint,” p. 56. 214. Hitchcock at Work, p. 56. 215. The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 94. In “Hitchcock on Location: America, Icons and the Place of Illusion,” Sara Blair writes that Universal convinced the magazine to do the piece in Life which was written by Dean Flowers and entitled “Shadow of a Doubt: $5,000 Production.” Flowers writes in laudatory terms about Hitchcock’s ability to work within a wartime budget: “Accustomed to spending more than $100,000 on sets alone for one picture, Hitchcock made Shadow of a Doubt by reverting to the ‘location shooting’ of early movie days. Instead of elaborate sets he used the real thing.” p. 70. 216. Intimate Violence: Hitchcock, Sex, & Queer Theory, p. 57. 217. Ngai’s specific concern is with “the negative affects that read the predicaments posed by a general state of obstructed agency with respect to other human actors or to the social as such.” Ugly Feelings, p. 3. 218. In keeping with the film’s attentiveness to the hierarchies of small-town life, the banker’s wife, Mrs. Green, is the president of the Women’s Club to which Charles gives a speech late in the film (we never learn the subject of the talk). 219. The home associated with Schulz was destroyed in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. The cartoonist’s widow, Jean Schulz, escaped unharmed from it. Centralizing another Charlie (the ubiquitous Charlie Brown) Peanuts has been understood by scholars and biographers as a rendition of American childhood permeated by grief and loss. For one account that works in the manner I am describing see David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. In Michaelis’ account the Santa Rosa that Schulz moved to in the 1970’s because of his second wife’s ties to the city was rather different to the one depicted in Shadow. Michaelis describes it as “a drowsy, formerly beautiful garden city that had allowed the freeway to mutilate it.” p. 501 220. “Beyond Doubt: The Making of Hitchcock’s Favorite Film.” 221. Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco, p. 35. 222. Alfred Hitchcock’s America, p. 8. Putting the matter more bluntly, Homer B. Pettey writes, “Class was always a particularly dark obsession with Alfred Hitchcock.” “Hitchcock, Class and Noir.” p. 76 223. It appears that Hitchcock and his team took specific steps to render Joe in these terms as in an earlier version of the film’s script he is represented as being much more emotionally connected to the family. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Screenplay by Thornton Wilder, June 10, 1942. 224. “Meet Me in St. Louis: Smith, or The Ambiguities,” p. 162. 225. “’Your Father’s Method of Relaxation:’ Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 45. 226. We should note that Charlie is already wearing a gift from Charles – a dress he had previously sent her. 227. “The Consumer Perversity of Roger Thornhill,” p. 19. 228. The Future of Nostalgia, p. xiii.

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Shadow of a Doubt 229. Ibid. p. xviii. 230. Ibid., p. 110. 231. Herb avidly describes how the man in Maine ran into the propeller of an airplane while being pursued and relates the curious detail that the man’s shirts were all initialed “C, O apostrophe H,.” The reference perhaps fits a pattern of cryptic or scatological initialization in Hitchcock’s work that includes the monogrammed “ROT” matchbooks in North by Northwest (1959). Casey McKittrick points to the director’s fondness for the initials “BM” (for bowel movement) used in a range of films including The Secret Agent, Lifeboat, Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Frenzy and indeed Shadow where the initials appear on the ring Charles gives to Charlie. Hitchcock’s Appetites: The Corpulent Plots of Desire and Dread, p. 67. 232. “Shadows of Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 56. 233. “The Politics of Genre in Welles’ ‘The Stranger,’” pps. 34-35. Palmer also notes that Graham’s speech is (deliberately) ineffective in closing Hitchcock’s subversive film because it “argues, in effect, for the world view of mainstream narrative, which would position Charlie’s psychopathology as a temporary and recuperable disorder.” (34) 234. “Sometimes A Cigar Is Not Just A Cigar: A Freudian Analysis of Uncle Charles in Hitchcock’s ‘Shadow of a Doubt,’” p. 274. 235. Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much, p. 55. 236. Charlie’s stoicism is underscored in an earlier version of the script which featured a separate conversation between the Newtons after the initial one in which Charlie’s mother and father call in to her bedroom as they return to the house. That version had Emma saying “Joe, did you ever stop to think that Charlie never cries? I don’t think I’ve seen Charlie in tears more than three or four times in her whole life.” Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Folder 640, Screenplay by Thornton Wilder. 237. Sterritt writes, “Uncle Charlie travels to Santa Rosa in a train, as if anticipating – perhaps impatiently, like a typically miserable member of the undead – the destiny that awaits him.” The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 63. 238. R. Barton Palmer, “The Politics of Genre in Welles’ ‘The Stranger,’” p. 35 239. The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), p. 60 240. Ibid., p. 59. 241. Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 44. 242. Ibid., p. 23. 243. Herb’s rather heroic turn goes entirely unrecognized by the Newtons. In fact, Emma credits her brother, “You saved her, you kept your head. You knew just what to do,” even while he is forcefully jerking Charlie to her feet. Meanwhile Herb prompts the family for recognition in vain saying “Lucky thing I passed by – don’t know how I happened to come across that way.” 244. “Hitchcock’s Emersonian Edges,” p. 124 245. See Duffy’s The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism. 246. Rayna Rapp, “Family and Class in Contemporary America: Notes Toward An Understanding of Ideology,” p. 193. 247. “The Hitchcock Moment,” p. 190. 248. Manhattan Beach, p. 185. 249. Karen Dubinsky writes that “The public recasting of the honeymoon as a specifically sexual ritual, geared solely to the honeymoon couple, occurred at the same time as the postwar travel boom; and the two trends came together at Niagara Falls, the self-styled ‘Honeymoon Capitol of the World.’” The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls, p. 228. 250. Ibid., p. 244.

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Shadow of a Doubt 251. American Civilization and Its Discontents: The Persistence of Evil in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 103. 252. Power & Paranoia, p. 259. 253. A short story writer as well as a screenwriter, Benson had made a name for herself with the bestselling collection Junior Miss in 1941. She would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award for co-scripting Anna and the King of Siam (1946). 254. “Shadows of Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 52. 255. “Hitchcock at the Margins of Film Noir,” p. 265. 256. See the Wikipedia entry on “Saddle Shoes,” which notes “They have a reputation as the typical shoes of school-girls, especially in the 1940s.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_shoe Accessed December 1, 2019. 257. Danny King, “The Vampire Mythos of ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ and ‘Stoker.’” np. 258. Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure in Neo-Noir Cinema, p. 104. 259. Ibid., p. 110. 260. In an analysis that connects the films, Michael C Reiff observes that “Clarice’s psychological ensnarement [with Hannibal Lector] mirrors Charlie’s.” “The Evolution of Evil: From Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Psycho to Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs,” p. 88. 261. Hoffman, “Woody Allen Confirms Affinity for Hitchcock and Murder Fantasies.” 262. See Maya Phillips, “Horror Masks Are Never Just About the Monster.” 263. Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, p. 72. 264. Ibid., p. 80. 265. “The Politics of Genre in Welles’ ‘The Stranger’”, p. 36. 266. “’Shadow of a Doubt’ a Thriller, with Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotton, at Rivoli – ‘Tennessee Johnson” Is at the Astor,” p. 18. 267. Hemmeter, “Hitchcock the Feminist: Rereading Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 12. 268. Susan Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humor and Tone, p. 34. 269. Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, p. 72. 270. “David Denby on ‘Shadow of a Doubt.’” 271. “Give Them a Break,” n.p. 272. “All in the Family: Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt,” p. 147. 273. Ibid. 274. Local press coverage during the Shadow shoot suggests that Joseph Cotten was subject to a hometown embrace comparable to that of his character in the film. In the Santa Rosa Press Democrat for instance, Walter Kellogg Byrd wrote fondly that “Even if he is guilty, Santa Rosans who have met him during the few days he has been in town will not hold it against the actor.” “Cotten Takes Time Out to Play Tennis.” 275. “1943: Movies and National Identity,” p. 114. 276. “The Politics of Genre in Welles’ ‘The Stranger,’” p. 36. 277. The notion that Charles only exists as a projection of Charlie’s psyche is advanced for instance by Sabrina Barton in her article “Hitchcock’s Hands.” 278. “Expanded Hitchcock: Rebecca,” Public Interview with Patrice Petro, Feb. 23, 2017, Carsey-Wolf Center, University of California, Santa Barbara. 279. “Hitchcock at the Margins of Noir,” p. 274. 280. “Blood is Thicker Than Water: The Family in Hitchcock,” p. 93.

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Shadow of a Doubt 281. The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), p. 45. 282. The Woman’s Film of the 1940’s: Gender, Narrative and History, p. 4. 283. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, p. 9. 284. Jacobs, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 99.

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Shadow of a Doubt McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen. London: Macmillan, 1991. Meola, Frank M. “Hitchcock’s Emersonian Edges.” In Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual. Eds. Sidney Gottlieb & Christopher Brookhouse. Detroit: Wayne State U P, 2002, 23-46. Michaelis, David. Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Mitchie, Elsie B. “Unveiling Maternal Desires: Hitchcock and American Domesticity.” In Hitchcock’s America. Ed. Jonathan Freedman. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1999, 29-53. Modleski, Tania. “’Never To Be Thirty-Six Years Old:’ Rebecca as Female Oedipal Drama.” Wide Angle 5(1) (1982) 34-41. Modleski, Tania. Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. New York: Methuen, 1984. Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2005. Modleski, Tania. “Remastering the Master: Hitchcock After Feminism.” New Literary History 47(1) (Winter, 2016) 135-158. Mohammed, Sideeq. “Understanding Microfascism: Reading Deleuze and Guattari Alongside Management Guru Texts.” Culture & Organization 26(3) (2020) 196-210. Moore, Anna & Coco Khan. “The Fatal, Hateful Rise of Choking During Sex.” The Guardian Jul. 25, 2019. Mostel, Raphael. “The Merry Widow’s Fling With Hitler.” Table Magazine Dec. 31, 2014. https://www. tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-merry-widows-fling-with-hitler Naremore, James. “Hitchcock at the Margins of Noir.” In Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays. Eds. Richard Allen & S. Ishii-Gonzales, London: BFI, 1999, 263-277. Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir In Its Contexts. 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Ness, Richard R. “A Lotta Night Music: The Sound of Film Noir.” Cinema Journal 47(2) (Winter, 2008), 52-73. Newitz, Annalee. “Serial Killers, True Crime, and Economic Performance Anxiety.” In Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett, Detroit: Wayne State U P, 1999, 65-83. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 2007. Olsson, Charles Jan. Hitchcock a la Carte. Durham: Duke U P, 2015. Palladino, Grace. Teenagers: An American History. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Palmer, R. Barton “The Politics of Genre in Welles’ ‘The Stranger.’” Film Criticism 11(1/2) (Fall-Winter 1986-1987) 31-42. Palmer, R. Barton. “The Hitchcock Romance and the ‘70’s Paranoid Thriller.” In After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation and Intertextuality. Eds. David Boyd & R. Barton Palmer. Austin: U of Texas P, 2006, 85-108. Palmer, R. Barton & David Boyd, eds. Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor. Albany: SUNY P, 2011. Perez, Gilberto. The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2019. Pettey, Homer B. “Hitchcock, Class and Noir.” In The Cambridge Companion to Alfred Hitchcock. Ed. Jonathan Freedman. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2015, 76-91. Phillips, Maya. “Horror Masks Are Never Just About the Monster,” The New York Times Oct. 24, 2020. Polan, Dana. Power & Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950. New York: Columbia U P, 1986.

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Shadow of a Doubt Pomerance, Murray. “The Consumer Perversity of Roger Thornhill.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17(1) (2000) 19-34. Pomerance, Murray, ed. A Family Affair: Cinema Comes Home. London: Wallflower P, 2008. Pomerance, Murray. Alfred Hitchcock’s America. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Porfirio, Robert G. “No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir.” In The Film Noir Reader. Eds. Alain Silver & James Ursini. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996, 77-94 Preston, C.L. “1943: Movies and National Identity.” In American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations. Ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon. Oxford: Berg, 2006, 94-116. Radway, Janice. “The Utopian Impulse in Popular Literature: Gothic Romances and ‘Feminist’ Protest.” American Quarterly 33(2) (Summer, 1981) 140-162. Rapp, Rayna. “Family and Class in Contemporary America: Notes Toward an Understanding of Ideology.” In American Families: A Multicultural Reader. Ed. Stephanie Coontz. New York & London: Routledge, 1999, 180-196. Raubicheck, Walter. “Working With Hitchcock: A Collaborators’ Forum with Patricia Hitchcock, Janet Leigh, Teresa Wright and Eva Marie Saint.” Hitchcock Annual 2002-2003, 32-65. Rehling, Nicola. “Everyman and No Man: White, Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Serial Killer Movies.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 49 (Spring, 2007). Reiff, Michael C. “The Evolution of Evil: From Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Psycho to Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs.” In The Silence of the Lambs: Critical Essays on a Cannibal, Clarice and a Nice Chianti. Ed. Cynthia J. Miller. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 79-90. Renov, Michael. Hollywood’s Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988. Rohmer, Eric & Claude Chabrol. Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films. Trans. Stanley Hochman, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979. Rose, Kenneth D. Myth and the Greatest Generation. London: Rouledge, 2007 Rothman, William. “Shadow of a Doubt.” in Hitchcock - The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1982, 174-244. Rothman, William. “Blood Is Thicker Than Water: The Family in Hitchcock.” In A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home. Ed. Murray Pomerance. London & New York: Wallflower P, 2008. Rushdie, Salman. The Wizard of Oz. London: BFI, 1992. Russ, Joanna. “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband:’ The Modern Gothic.” Journal of Popular Culture Vol. 6, no. 4 (Spring, 1973) 666-691. Sager, Lois. “Dallas’ Teen-Age Girls in Home Front Battle That Their City Forgot.” Dallas Morning News July 1, 1943, 1, 8. Savage, Jon. Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture, 1875-1945. New York: Penguin, 2008. Schatz, Thomas. Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Scheib, Ronnie. “Charlie’s Uncle.” Film Comment Vol. 12, No. 2, March-April, 1976, 55-62. Scheiner, Georganne. Signifying Female Adolescence: Film Representations and Fans 1920-1950. Westport: Praeger, 2000. Schmid, David. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005 Schrum, Kelly. Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teen Girls’ Culture, 1920-1945. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel.” PMLA Vol. 26 No. 2 (March, 1981), 255-270. Seger, Linda. Making A Good Script Great. Hollywood: Samuel French, 1987.

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Shadow of a Doubt Williams, Tony. Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film. Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2014. Winsten, Archer. “Movie Talk.” The New York Post Jan. 13, 1943, 46. Wood, Michael. Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much. New Harvest, 2015 Wood. Robin. “Ideology, Genre, Auteur.” Film Comment Ed. January-February, 1977, 46-51. Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited Rev. Ed. New York: Columbia U P, 2002. Wood, Robin. “Hitchcock and Fascism.” Hitchcock Annual Vol. 13 2004-2005, 25-63.

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Index Agee, James..............................................................65

Crogan, Patrick.......................................................21

Allen, Richard.........................................................31

Denby, David............................................ 25, 78, 105

Allen, Woody..................................................32, 101

Destination Tokyo...................................................65

American Beauty.....................................................31

Devlin, Rachel...................................................74, 75

Aristotelian Narrative Principles,.......... 27, 36, 108

Dexter.....................................................................102

Aryanist Race Hatred.............................................29

Dial M for Murder..................................................13

Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, The........................32

Dimendberg, Ed.....................................................64

Bannon, Barbara M..........................................35, 62

Doherty, Thomas....................................................66

Barnes, Howard......................................................77

Dracula.....................................................................54

Barton, Sabrina...........................................42, 58, 60

Dragonwyck.............................................................59

Bat, Adam................................................................78

Dresner, Lisa M.......................................................58

“Bedroom Culture”.................................................73

Drew, Nancy 71,......................................................94

Benson, Sally...............................................18, 24, 99

Duffy, Enda..............................................................96

Birds, The.................................................................94

Dufreigne, Jean-Pierre...........................................19

Black, Gregory D....................................................65

Durbin, Deanna................................................32, 71

Blyth, Ann...............................................................32

Dyer, Richard..........................................................44

Blue Velvet........................................................31, 101

Eley, Geoff..........................................................68, 69

Bobby Soxers...........................................................32

Elsaesser, Thomas...................................................42

Bogdanovich, Peter................................................19

Expatriate Directors in Hollywood,.........19, 62, 64

Bould, Mark............................................................62

Fall, The..................................................................102

Boyle, Robert......................................................78 81

Father of the Bride...................................................38

Boym Svetlana.................................................... 85-6

Female Delinquency (during World War II)... 74-6

Britton, Andrew................................... 29, 34, 48, 82

“Final Girl”..............................................................32

Buffy the Vampire Slayer........................................27

4F Military Designation............................69-70, 98

Caputi, Jane.............................................................51

Foertsch, Jacqueline...............................................66

Carson, Diane...................................... 23, 28, 47, 49

Foreign Correspondent............................................67

Chinen-Biesen, Sheri.............................................62

Freedman, Carl.................................................40, 99

Clover, Carol J. (see also “Final Girl”)..................32

Freedman, Jonathan...............................................19

Clueless.....................................................................39

French, Tony...........................................................83

Cohen, Paula Marantz...........................................41

Frenzy.......................................................................13

Collinge, Patricia..............................................24, 53

Freud, Sigmund..........................................37, 38, 55

Conversation with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes............................................102

Fyne, Robert............................................................66

Coontz, Stephanie................................................109 Corbert, Robert J....................................................24 Craven, Wes...........................................................102 Crash Dive...............................................................65

Garland, Judy..............................................32, 46, 99 Gaslight.............................................................. 59-60 “Gaslighting”...........................................................60 German Expressionism...................................20, 62 Giallo Films.............................................................44

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Shadow of a Doubt Gone With the Wind...............................................32

Manhattan Beach....................................................97

Gordon, Paul.................................................9, 35, 89

Masse, Michelle A.,...........................................57, 59

Granville, Bonita.....................................................71

Mayer, Geoff............................................................62

“Greatest Generation,” The....................................70

McDonnell, Brian.............................................62, 63

Greven, David...................................................42, 79

McKee, Alison.......................................................109

Guadalcanal Diary..................................................65

McKittrick, Casey...................................................52

Gunz, Joel................................................................33

McLaughlin, James.........................................46, 106

Hannibal................................................................102

McRobbie, Angela..................................................73 (see also “Bedroom Culture”)

Hanson, Helen............................................36, 56, 58 Hantke, Steffen..................................... 29, 62, 66, 67 Hemmeter, Thomas................................................27 Hers to Hold.............................................................71 Hitchcock, Patricia.................................................78 Hitler, Adolf.............................................................68 Hoover, J. Edgar......................................................75 Humbert, David................................................30, 44 I’ll Be Seeing You.....................................................66 In the Valley of Elah............................................ 31-2 Irrational Man.............................................32, 101-2 It’s a Wonderful Life................................................99 Jacobs, Steven..............................................20, 55, 78 Jane Eyre...................................................................54 Jezebel.......................................................................32 Juno...........................................................................31 Killing Kind, The....................................................102 Kirgo, Julie...............................................................42 Knee, Adam.................................................28, 88, 99 Koppes, Clayton R..................................................65 Krohn, Bill............................................ 33, 53, 56, 78 Lady Vanishes, The..................................................13 Lane, Christina.......................................................30 Lehar, Franz (see also Merry Widow Waltz).......29 Leitch, Thomas M...................................................97 Lennon, Elaine............................. 30, 71, 93, 94, 108 Lerner, Max.............................................................74 Lifeboat.....................................................................67 Little Children..........................................................31 Lindop, Samantha.................................................100 Lodger, The...............................................................13 Maltese Falcon, The.................................................61 Man Who Wasn’t There, The................................101

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Meet Me In St Louis................................................99 Meola, Frank M......................................................95 Merry Widow Waltz (Die Lustige Witwe)........................ 10, 11, 13, 22, 29, 68, 98, 102 #MeToo,...................................................................25 Michie, Elsie B.............................................33, 37, 52 “Microfascism”........................................................69 Millington, Richard................................................19 Mindhunter............................................................102 Minesweeper............................................................65 Mr and Mrs. Smith..................................................67 Mrs. Miniver............................................................66 Modleski, Tania................................. 24, 27, 58, 107 More The Merrier, The............................................65 Mostel, Raphael.......................................................68 Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code)..........................................................105 Mussolini, Benito....................................................68 My Big Fat Greek Wedding.....................................39 Mulholland Drive..................................................100 Mysteries of Udolpho, The......................................54 Naremore, James...................................... 29, 99, 108 Nash, Ilana...................................................71, 72, 73 Newitz, Annalee......................................................43 Ngai, Sianne.............................................................78 Niagara.....................................................................98 North Star, The........................................................65 Notorious..................................................................13 O’Brien, Margaret...................................................32 Office of War Information.....................................65 Olsson, Jan...............................................................43 Ouija Boards...........................................................30 Our Town.................................................................18

Shadow of a Doubt Paine, Thomas..................................................... 70-1

Selective Training and Service Act.......................69

Palladino, Grace......................................................74

Serial Killers in Cinema,.................................... 43-5

Palmer, R. Barton.............................................44, 88

Shadow of a Doubt ... And Authorship........... 24-5; And “Family Values”/ Family Romance................18-25, 26, 27, 36-46, 86; And the Female Gothic.................21, 23, 54-61, 81; And Fascism................................................. 68-9, 83; Dandyism in....................................................... 42-3; Film Noir Elements in...................................... 61-4; Genre, Violence and Repression in............... 26-36; Hitchcock Cameo in...............................9, 51-2, 94; Homesickness In............................................. 46- 54; Irresolution and Euthanasia in...................... 87-93; As Pandora’s Box Narrative..................26, 35-6, 71; Parallelism in...................................................... 21-3; Public Space and Transport in......................... 93-7; Popular Culture Afterlife of.......................... 97-102; Location Shooting for.........................64-5, 78, 106; And Santa Rosa Setting.................................. 77-86; Surveillance in....................................................8, 22; Synopsis of.......................................................... 8-16; Telepathy in................................................30-31, 40; World War II Context of......... 23, 26, 28, 30, 64-77

Paradine Case, The..................................................62 Perez, Gilberto..............................................9, 21, 41 Polan, Dana.................................................49, 77, 99 Pomerance, Murray................................81-2, 85, 86 Porfirio, Robert G...................................................63 “Prestige Television”.............................................102 Preston, Catherine L.,............................. 28, 65, 107 Pretty Woman..........................................................38 Psycho......................................32, 50, 72, 88, 94, 102 Radway, Janice........................................................57 Rebecca.........................................................35, 59, 67 Rear Window.....................................................13, 72 Renov, Michael........................................................65 Republic Pictures....................................................77 Return of Dracula...................................................99 Reville, Alma...............................................18, 19, 24 Rights of Man (see also Thomas Paine)............ 70-1 Rivoli Theatre..........................................................77 Rockwell, Norman............................................29, 77 Rope..........................................................................62 “Rosie the Riveter”...........................................71, 77 Rosie the Riveter......................................................77 Rothman, William................................... 18, 43, 108 Rushdie, Salman...............................................46, 47 Russ, Joanna............................................................56 Sabotage...................................................................13 Saboteur...................................................................67 Schatz, Thomas.................................................58, 67 Scheib, Ronnie..................................................25, 93 Scheiner, Georgeanne............................................32 Schrum, Kelly..........................................................76 Schmid, David..................................................... 43-4 Schulz, Charles M...................................................81 Scream....................................................................102 Searchers, The..........................................................31 Secret Agent.............................................................13 Secret Beyond the Door...........................................59 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky.........................................57

Silence of the Lambs, The......................................100 Sinatra, Frank..........................................................69 Sleep My Love..........................................................59 Smith, Tiffany Leigh......................................... 69-70 Snelson, Tim...........................................................74 Sonoma County................................................78, 81 Spoto, Donald.........................................................25 Sterritt, David..............................................23, 25, 92 Stoker..................................................32, 99-100, 108 Stranger, The............................................................99 Strangers on a Train................................................13 Strangulation................................................. 60-1, 85 Straumann, Susan...................................................19 Studlar, Gaylyn........................................................72 Sullivan, Jack...........................................................47 Suspicion............................................................59, 67 Taylor, Elizabeth.....................................................32 Temple, Shirley.......................................................32 This Land Is Mine....................................................65 Thomas, Julia Adeney......................................68, 69 ‘Til-Two bar.......................13, 15, 20, 23, 29, 35, 38, 41, 43, 60, 62-4, 67, 75, 86-7 Tincknell, Estella....................................................26

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Shadow of a Doubt Tobe, Renee.............................................................20 Touch of Evil............................................................61 True Blood................................................................27 Truffaut, François...........................................95, 108 Twilight....................................................................27 UFA Babelsberg Studios........................................20 Universal Pictures...................................................26 Vampires/Vampirism........ 23, 27-8, 29, 41, 99, 108 Vertigo......................................................................32 “V-Girls”..................................................................74 Vicky Cristina Barcelona......................................101 Waldman, Diane...............................................55, 68 War Production Board.....................................65, 78 Warner Bros............................................................71 Watch Along the Rhine...........................................65 Weis, Elisabeth........................................................21 Westbrook, Robert B..............................................70 Whitney, Sara E......................................................60 Wilder, Thornton (see also Our Town)................18 Williams, Tony......................................................102 Winsten, Archer.....................................................77 Wizard of Oz, The...................................................46 Women Can Take It................................................77 Wood, Michael..................................................67, 90 Wood, Robin.................................. 23, 25. 26, 62, 69 Wuthering Heights..................................................54 You..........................................................................102 Young and Innocent................................................13 You’ve Got Mail.......................................................38

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