Hitchcock gives us a crime drama wrapped in a family reunion.\u00a0 Charles Oakley, played by Joseph Cotten, is being investigated by the police in the northeast United States as one of two suspects in the \u201cMerry Widow\u201d murders.\u00a0 Three wealthy widows were strangled by an acquaintance.\u00a0 Charles sends a telegram to his married sister, Emma Newton in California saying he wants to come visit her and her family.\u00a0 Emma is married to Joseph Newton and they live with their three children Charlotte (Charlie), Ann and Roger. Emma dotes on her baby brother and in her eyes, he can do no wrong.\u00a0 Her husband Joseph (played by Henry Travers) works at the local bank and is a quiet man who, along with his neighbor Herbie Hawkins (played by Hume Cronyn) enjoys reading and discussing the murders committed in detective novels. Ann and Roger are small children who intersect with the main story only obliquely.\u00a0 But Charlie is a high school graduate who feels stifled living in the small town of Santa Rosa.\u00a0 She is named after her mother\u2019s brother, the legendary Uncle Charlie.\u00a0 And right before word of Uncle Charlie\u2019s arrival reaches them, she has been bemoaning the boredom that is their life and has decided to send a telegram to Uncle Charlie and ask him to visit them.<\/p>\n
When Charlie hears that her uncle is coming to stay with them, she is overjoyed.\u00a0 She takes the coincidence of his plans and hers as fate and is sure that his presence will add excitement and life to her stultified family.\u00a0 But strange things begin happening and Uncle Charlie\u2019s presence becomes a strange mystery for Charlie to solve.\u00a0 He surreptitiously rips a page out of the family\u2019s copy of the newspaper and when she tells him that she knows he did it he reacts violently and wrenches the paper from her hand, hurting her in the process.\u00a0 When the next day two men request and get permission from Mrs. Newton to interview and photograph the family as part of some national survey, Uncle Charlie berates her for her foolishness and tells her that he refuses to be interviewed or photographed.<\/p>\n
The survey takers are actually police detectives Jack Graham and Fred Saunders attempting to get a photo of Uncle Charlie to allow witnesses to identify him.\u00a0 Jack asks Charlie if she would show him around town as part of his survey and she agrees.\u00a0 During their walk Jack reveals to Charlie what they are really doing and that if the identification is positive, they will arrest Uncle Charlie.\u00a0 Charlie is in a panic.\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t know what to believe but all the strange behavior of her uncle leads her to believe that it could be true.\u00a0 She runs to the library and finds the newspaper article her uncle was hiding.\u00a0 It is a description of the Merry Widow murder case.\u00a0 One of the women who was murdered turns out to have the same initials as the inscription in a ring that Uncle Charlie had recently given her.<\/p>\n
She confronts him and tells Uncle Charlie that the police are getting ready to arrest him.\u00a0 She reveals what she found out about the ring and throws it back at him.\u00a0 Uncle Charlie begs her to let him escape and spare her mother the shock of knowing her brother is a murderer.\u00a0 She agrees.\u00a0 But before anything else can happen news comes that the other suspect in the murders was killed trying to escape capture.\u00a0 Now the detectives are no longer after Uncle Charlie.\u00a0 We also learn that Jack Graham is in love with Charlie and tells her that he will return to ask her to marry him.<\/p>\n
Uncle Charlie decides that he will stay in Santa Rosa but now he comes to the conclusion that Charlie knows too much about him.\u00a0 He plans to have her die by an apparent accident.\u00a0 In the first event she almost breaks her neck when an outdoor stair step breaks off under her foot and she barely catches hold of the handrail.\u00a0 Later on, she finds that the step had been sawn almost through.\u00a0 Next, Uncle Charlie arranges for her to go into a garage where a running car motor had filled the building with exhaust fumes and the key was removed from the ignition so the engine could not be stopped.\u00a0 And just as she tried to exit the garage the door slammed shut and was jammed tight so she couldn\u2019t escape.\u00a0 Luckily Herbie Hawkins happened by and heard her cries and allowed for her rescue by, of all people, Uncle Charlie.\u00a0 He deftly kicked the shim from the jammed door and put the key in the ignition as he turned it off.\u00a0 Then he carried the unconscious Charlie into the fresh air where she revived.<\/p>\n
Now convinced that she had to get Uncle Charlie to leave she used her uncle\u2019s absence at a party to find the ring in his room.\u00a0 Seeing it on her finger Uncle Charlie announces that he would be leaving the next day for San Francisco.\u00a0 But while seeing him off at the train Charlie is maneuvered by him onto the departing train and by sheer brute strength, he drags her over to an open door on the end of a train car and prepared to throw her off the train as soon as its speed is sufficient to kill her.\u00a0 But at the last second Charlie wrenches herself free and in doing so causes Uncle Charlie to lose his balance and fall off the train directly onto the tracks of an oncoming train.<\/p>\n
In the next scene Uncle Charlie\u2019s funeral is going on in the church and Charlie is outside explaining to Jack Graham why she didn\u2019t turn her uncle in to the police.\u00a0 They both agree that they will keep Uncle Charlie\u2019s secret away from the people of Santa Rosa.<\/p>\n
Most critics think that Shadow of a Doubt is one of Hitchcock\u2019s best works.\u00a0 I tend to agree.\u00a0 Allowing Charles Oakley to give his feelings about society in general and about his victims at the family dinner table and during a fraught conversation with his niece at a seedy dive bar hits the right notes in this strange juxtaposition of normal family life and antisocial psychosis.\u00a0 The tension between Charlie\u2019s desire to spare her mother and even in a sense her uncle from the consequences of his crimes and her horror at what he actually was see-saws the movie right to the end.\u00a0 There are many nice touches from the supporting cast.\u00a0 I especially enjoy Hume Cronyn and Henry Travers arguing over the advantages and disadvantages of poisoned mushrooms over blunt force trauma as a murder weapon.\u00a0 It shows that Hitchcock had already embraced his reputation for graveyard humor and didn\u2019t mind letting the audience in on the joke.<\/p>\n
And it was fun to see Joseph Cotton as a psychotic killer.\u00a0 Cotton always seems to show up as the honest, likable hero.\u00a0 It must have been a relief for him to get to play a monster for once.\u00a0 He was very good.<\/p>\n
If you are a fan of Hitchcock and haven\u2019t seen Shadow of a Doubt do yourself a favor and see it.\u00a0 And even if you\u2019ve never seen a Hitchcock film, I can highly recommend this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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