Contributor: Meher Tatna

Director Alfred Hitchcock considered Shadow of a Doubt his finest film and confirmed it many times in interviews with François Truffaut, Mike Douglas and Dick Cavett. In Laurent Bouzereau’s 2000 documentary Beyond Doubt: The Making of Hitchcock’s Favorite Film, Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia, says the reason is that “he loved bringing the menace into a small town, into a family that never had any bad things happen to them.”

The film is still considered one of the highlights of Hitchcock’s storied career. It was his first film set in small-town America as he typically previously worked on British stories. For this one, he worked with renowned playwright Thornton Wilder on the script, best known for his play “Our Town” about small-time Americana. (Wilder got a separate card screen credit saying “We wish to acknowledge the contribution of MR. THORNTON WILDER to the preparation of this production” in addition to the screenplay credit he shared with Sally Benson and Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s wife.)

The film was mostly shot on location in Santa Rosa, California with a couple of scenes in Newark, New Jersey for a particular reason. It was made in the middle of WWII and a government restriction by the War Production Board that controlled and redirected resources to the war placed a ceiling of $5,000 on new materials used for sets. The total bill for sets came to $2,979 according to a Time magazine article published on January 25, 1943.

An old weathered house rented from a Santa Rosa resident, a Dr. C.M. Carlson, was used as the family’s home. Trying to be helpful, the good doctor repainted the house a bright white much to Hitchcock’s horror, and the crew had to ‘season’ it again to make it look like a middle-class home of a family. Local landmarks were used in scenes, and the townspeople of Santa Rosa were cast as extras for $5 a day. The little girl of the family, Ann, is played by a local, Edna May Wonacott, who had never acted in a film before.

Screenwriter Gordon McDonell was sent to Hitchcock with an idea for a movie by his wife Margaret who headed David Selznick’s story department. He pitched Hitchcock his story which was based on a real serial killer, Earle Leonard Nelson, who carried out his killing spree in Hanford, California in the 1920s, strangling the landladies of the boarding houses he lived in. (McDonell would go on to win an Oscar nomination for Best Original Story for Shadow but would lose to William Saroyan for The Human Comedy.)

In the movie, Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten) flees New Jersey to his sister’s family in Santa Rosa when he finds detectives on his trail suspecting him of the serial killing of three women. He is embraced by his sister Emma (Patricia Collinge) and brother-in-law Joseph (Henry Travers) and their children Charlie (Teresa Wright), Ann (Wonacott) and Roger (Charles Bates) in a joyful family reunion. Charlie, named after her uncle, is particularly delighted that he has come to visit and tells him they share a special telepathic kinship. Uncle Charlie brings everyone expensive presents; Charlie gets a ring with strange initials engraved inside it.

The detectives track down Oakley and pose as survey-takers, flattering Emma into agreeing to interview the family. When Oakley loses his temper and flatly refuses to participate, Charlie’s suspicions of his odd behavior are corroborated by one of the detectives, and she gradually figures out that the beloved uncle is not whom he seems to be. A shocking speech delivered at the dinner table is particularly upsetting to her when he says, “The cities are full of women, middle-aged widows, husbands dead, husbands who’ve spent their lives making fortunes, working and working. And then they die and leave their money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the wives do, these useless women? You see them in the hotels, the best hotels, every day by the thousands. Drinking the money, eating the money, losing the money at bridge. Playing all day and all night. Smelling of money. Proud of their jewelry but of nothing else. Horrible, faded, fat, greedy women… Are they human or are they fat, wheezing animals, hmm? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?”

Charlie also finds out that the initials of one of the victims are the same ones on her ring.

Eventually, Oakley comes to know that Charlie suspects him, and the suspense ratchets up as he deals with the knowledge that his niece is torn between exposing him or letting him go and sparing her mother’s inevitable heartache.

Cotten is particularly well-cast as a charming young man who wins over everyone he meets, revealing his diabolical side only in flashes and unnerving his family and the audience. Wright as the young niece who loses her innocence as her world crashes about her gives a very fine performance. She gets top billing over Cotton despite the fact that this was only her fourth film, but she was Oscar-nominated for each of her first three, The Little Foxes (also starring Collinge who was also nominated), Mrs. Miniver (she won Best Supporting Actress), and The Pride of the Yankees, the latter two nominations in the same year, 1943.

Hume Cronin makes his motion picture debut in the film as the young, somewhat slow neighbor who has a running bit with Joe, the father, about the perfect murder, lending humor to the story.

Hitchcock is reported to have said that the film gave him “one of those rare occasions where you could combine character with suspense. Usually, in a suspense story, there isn’t time to develop character.” He worked on the script closely with Wilder, writing a lot of the dialogue himself, taking pains to show the unraveling of the relationship between uncle and niece. He even named the mother character after his own mother, Emma, who was dying in England, unable to visit her because of wartime restrictions. And his famous cameo comes about 15 minutes into the film as a card player on a train holding a perfect hand, his face hidden but his person unmistakable.

Dimitri Tiomkin, in his first collaboration with Hitchcock, scored the film, using Franz Lehar’s “Merry Widow Waltz” as a sort of leitmotif, twisting the melody to underline the tensions onscreen. He would go on to score Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder and I Confess as well.

The black-and-white photography is striking in the movie, particularly the use of light and shadows, and Hitchcock’s signature visuals are apparent from the start. The cross-hatch shadows thrown on Oakley’s body by the sun through the window bars in his seedy hotel; the close-ups of the actors’ faces at key moments; the smoke belching out of the train that brings Oakley to town foreshadowing the doom he brings with him, the shifting shadow cast by the train on the platform has the same effect; the staircase shots beloved by him, one of which shows Oakley at the top of the stairs looking down to the open front door where Charlie stands looking up at him, her shadow on the ground in front of her, horror on her face. Or another where Charlie falls on an outside staircase, filmed through the slats of the banisters.

The absurdities in the story are only apparent after the fact. The police detectives don’t even know the face of the killer, yet they follow Oakley across the country. Charlie’s suspicions are only aroused when the uncle clumsily tries to hide a newspaper article about the killer – she would never have made a connection if he hadn’t tried to hide it. Oakley flashes his money around with no one questioning how he earned that much – he makes a grand show of depositing $40,000 (half a million in today’s money) in the bank where Joe is employed.

The film was rapturously received by critics, Bosley Crowther writing in the New York Times on January 13, 1943: “You’ve got to hand it to Alfred Hitchcock: when he sows the fearful seeds of mistrust in one of his motion pictures, he can raise more goose pimples to the square inch of a customer’s flesh than any other director of thrillers in Hollywood.” But it didn’t do well at the box office, its reputation enhanced only through the years.

Shadow of a Doubt was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1991 for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It has a 100% approval rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website.

The film was restored by funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in partnership with The Film Foundation.