Alfred Hitchcock | Shadow of a Doubt / 1943

a horrifying waltz

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Anna Reville (screenplay), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Shadow of a Doubt / 1943    

 

Over the past few years, I have come to realize that what interests me most about the films of Alfred Hitchcock is not simply that he is a brilliant director who produces some of the most dazzling images ever seen on film, but that he and his scriptwriters have a great interest in narrative structures—what we might describe in fiction or poetry as genre. This is nowhere more apparent than in his 1943 masterwork, Shadow of a Doubt.

     Hitchcock couldn’t have chosen more brilliant writers for this project. In addition to his wife, Anna Reville, who worked closely with him on many of his films, the film was scripted by one of the major American playwrights of the day, Thornton Wilder, writing just a few years after his classic Our Town, and by a figure who knew small-town America perhaps better than anyone, Sally Benson, whose Kensington Stories were the basis of Meet Me in St. Louis (a film which appeared the following year, and which she must have been working on during the shooting of or soon after Shadow of a Doubt); Benson later wrote film scripts such as The Farmer Takes a Wife and Anna and the King of Siam. The abilities of these three to present a near-perfect portrait of small-town USA matched Hitchcock’s evident belief that evil, revenge, and murder coexisted always with innocence, love, and kindness.

     The film demonstrates this theory in many ways, particularly in the comic episodes between Joseph Newton, father of the loving family at the center of the work, and his friend, Herbie Hawkins, who, at the very table where they will soon dine with a real murderer—Joseph’s brother-in-law Charlie—plot the imaginary murders of each other.

      But the important focus of this film is on Joseph’s daughter, also named Charlie, a young woman, who, like most awakening teenagers, is absolutely bored by and frustrated with the family life into which she has been born. She is desperate for adventure and, in a highly intuitive act of frustration, visits the telegraph office to send her uncle Charlie, after whom she was named, a plea to come for a visit.

     The audience already knows that this somewhat sinister figure is on his way at that very moment, and has just notified the family, through the same office, that he is soon to arrive. The coincidence is a haunting note in this otherwise normal-appearing world, for it becomes quickly clear that uncle and niece have more than their name in common, that indeed they are mysteriously intertwined with each other, the bond between them being much stronger than family blood and affection. We sense almost from the beginning that their relationship is a bit perverse, and Hitchcock and his writers take the story far deeper than any sexual attraction might allow, putting it on a level that is archetypal at the very least and almost mythic in its scope. As the young Charlie tells her uncle upon his arrival: “I know everything about you. You can’t hide anything from me.”

     In short, we quickly sense in this film that these two, in their intricate interconnectedness, stand apart from the world they inhabit. They are a sort of Yin and Yang, female and male, young and old, innocent and evil, light and dark (although, in this, reversed from the Chinese model), truthteller and liar, believer and skeptic, one living in the present, the other in the past.

     At the celebratory dinner for the uncle, young Charlie reveals that she cannot get a tune out of her head in connection with her uncle: The Merry Window Waltz. As in Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, shown in theaters the year before, the authors and director of Shadow of a Doubt take that theme as an emblem, almost, of their structure. The music and the accompanying waltz (montaged over the family center of the kitchen as young Charlie and her mother are about to serve dinner) becomes a sinister prefiguring of character action: the two Charlies, locked in another’s arms, are doomed to dance until one or the other is dead!

     A gift of a ring from her uncle—again signifying the symbolic “marriage” between them—sends the intuitive young girl into a spin as she discovers a name engraved within and quickly connects it with the page her uncle has torn from the newspaper. A quick trip to the library teaches this apt pupil information one hopes no child should ever have to learn: that the man to whom she is bonded, so to speak, is a murderer—The Merry Widow Murderer!—a name taken from the fact that he preys on elderly widowed women.

    From that horrible moment of discovery to the end of the film, there is no turning back for this young, fresh, and believing girl, so touchingly portrayed by Teresa Wright; in her young dance of life and death she must endure and discover all the dark hate and evil of her uncle’s being, just as he will recover (or at least claim the recovery of) some of the values of youth he has lost.

     Until this moment, Uncle Charlie has been exhausted, unable to sleep; now suddenly his niece falls into a deep sleep from which she awakens only the next evening. What she must now face is the plotting of a real murder—her own—just as her father and friend mockingly playact murder and detection. Detectives indeed have already shown up at the Newton house, again masquerading as people who, like the uncle, are searching for the average American family. Once more, young Charlie sees through their deception, but as Uncle Charlie begins the attempts to murder her—a step of the back staircase of the house has been sawed through—and her uncle exposes her to his disgusting view of life, she is nearly desperate to keep the detectives near her.

     The ring her uncle has given her is stolen; the symbolic “marriage,” in short, is annulled. But the very fact that she now has no real evidence of his guilt, and her realization that accusations against her uncle would destroy her sentimentally inclined mother and forever change family life only force her to continue the appalling waltz. She too must now plot, recognize lies and greed in those around her. Nearly killed in her uncle’s second attempt to murder her, she is forced to steal, recapturing the ring to assure the older Charlie’s departure from their lives.

     As Uncle Charlie is seen retiring to the train for a voyage away from the family, some may feel relief, but the astute viewers perceive that the dance is not quite over. Forced to remain on the train after it has pulled away from the station, the young Charlie must accept her partner in one more galop as, arms around her in dance-like position, her uncle attempts to push her off the train. Youth has no choice but to struggle against age and destroy it. Her uncle leaning out from the car is decapitated. If not in actuality, at least within the myth of the film, she has now also committed murder. She has been forced, to ensure her survival, to experience all the evil that he so horribly insisted was the condition of life.

    In the awful last scene of this painful film, as the young Charlie stands outside the church wherein her family and the community piously mourn the loss of her uncle, reveals her new social and metaphysical position. She has had her adventure, but she can never truly return to the innocence, love, and protection of her childhood home again.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2005

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2005) and My Year 2005: Terrifying Times (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006).