What Emma (Patricia Collinge) feels for her little brother, Charles (Cotten) is heartfelt and simple once Charlie figures out what her uncle is, the most-cited reason for not turning him in to the police straightaway has to do with preserving Emma’s peace of mind. (In terms of humor, Wright plays straight with Henry Travers and Edna May Wonacott the former is goofy and the latter sassy.) Only Cotten’s moody handsomeness is able to match her for drama at any point. Carey doesn’t have the screen presence to play on Wright’s level even when she’s playing naive and a little too girlish, Wright has something of a corona about her that makes Carey look infirm. As a romantic partner for Charlie Newton, he is sadly inadequate. As a figure investigating Charles Oakley (lol), he’s more or less necessary to clue a kid in on her uncle’s misdeeds. Indeed, the movie certainly suffers from the prejudices of the time – a young woman just has to find a fella – and it feels like Hitchcock and company have little use for Detective Jack Graham. The strongest passion in the movie is certainly not whatever Charlie (Wright) and Jack (Carey) hastily and unconvincingly put together, nor is it even the second strongest passion. In short, Shadow of a Doubt is concerned with the incestuous bonds of family: how they are made, how they are upheld, and what it takes to break them. Shadow of a Doubt has much less to say about the relationships between husbands and wives, but it places that energy on brothers and sisters, uncles and nieces. Rear Window and Vertigo both keep watch (quite literally) on domestic violence and the awkward lines in family settings between nastiness and outright wickedness of family dynamics. But Shadow of a Doubt has an eye on the same kind of ugliness that the no-doubt-about-it classics from the ’50s indulge in. There are more macabre movies, like Lifeboat and Rope, and more tense ones, like Saboteur or Suspicion. Shadow of a Doubt is almost certainly Hitchcock’s best picture of the 1940s.
Starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Macdonald Carey
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