“Shadow of a Doubt” has a good deal of the peculiar, almost revolting emotion movie director Alfred Hitchcock tries to capture by suggesting that the most ordinary circumstance may turn up something sinister—the census takers at your door may be part of a widespread plot, the next time you cross the street somebody may push you in front of a truck. Hitchcock threatens your very possible world with the impossible so often in this movie that at the end, in addition to the emotion mentioned, you are not sure of anything.
This feeling of ambiguity is introduced immediately, though obscurely, after some accompanying music has worked the “Merry Widow Waltz” into a terrifyingly psychotic state and Joseph Cotten is seen wondering if the two men outside have anything on him. Mr. Hitchcock has contrived to give them the vague air that may belong either to gangsters, Nazi spies or murderers, just as undefined in activity and character and mission as Cotten himself. So that, as Cotten slowly unwinds himself, leaves the house and walks toward them, you expect something catastrophic. Later Cotten takes his questionable identity to Santa Rosa, California, to visit his sister Emmy’s family. Here he arouses progressive feelings in Emmy’s daughter, Teresa Wright, of adoration, hope, perplexity, doubt, fear and terror, and an appreciable amount in you.
The movie depends largely on the ability of Joseph Cotten to project horror within his passive, old-world-gentlemanlike behavior, and on Teresa Wright’s giving her role the eerie, half-suspended disquiet of adolescence. But there is often an unfocused quality in their acting, especially Cotten’s, which loosens the tension a good deal, though Miss Wright has two lyrical love passages, one mystic and latent with Cotten, the other awakening with Macdonald Carey, in which her beautiful projection of the innocent’s perceptiveness and terrible unguardedness creates much the same feeling as do Elizabeth Bowen’s heroines. In contrast to the two leads, Patricia Collinge gives a sharp, clear tenseness to a character less important in the action. Since she has this ability, however, her performance tightens many of the scenes, and she can turn on that abrupt, bubbling laugh as often as she wants to for me. The young upright American that Carey portrays lacks the prettiness the role usually gets and has instead a restrained, believable sensitiveness; and though Cotten is quite slow and rather awkward, he does have a rich, ingeniously used voice.
Unfortunately, Mr. Hitchcock’s people here tend to resemble figures on a Saturday Evening Post cover or actors in a stock-company production of Tarkington. Not that they are made silly or have to say silly things; but rather that the treatment of the family and friends is corny and superficial, lacking insight and seriousness. They are homespun, clean, gentle people, but they do nothing, say nothing and inflict nothing that is telling. His comic characters, Pa and Herbie, the detective-story fans, are disappointingly obvious and a long way from the satirical sketches of the English days. What flavor they have—and especially the children—comes probably from Sally Benson and Thornton Wilder, the writers. There is one odious, moral bit with what is supposed to be the American high-school girl gone bad—fallen to waiting on tavern tables.
The direction of the people in an environment is more like it. In photography (Joe Valentine), pace, costume, everything is very unlike Hollywood and more like Santa Rosa, California. It is Hitchcock’s ability to make these scenes—the street, the library at night, people strolling in warm California evenings and on the lawn before Sunday dinner, the family meeting the train—seem so real that it is like the unaware awareness of living. His English movies always had some of the most perceptive, unglossed photography anywhere, and here he took his company away from the studio on one of those unheard-of, breath-takingly pioneer excursions by Hollywood into an American town.
Hitchcock has adapted Orson Welles’s realistic dialogue techniques—the three-dimensional kind where a voice floats on and on from somewhere else while the people on the screen are talking, and the incoherencies of several conversations going at the same time—so expertly that it fills in for some lack of event.
Hitchcock shows here that sensationalism is not necessary to every part of a movie if the details of ordinary activity are examined for their fullest suggestiveness. His most expressive moments are the sudden switches in emotion in midstride of an activity: the abrupt change in the pace of a walk or the tone of a voice, the sudden hurrying of people into position. As a result he is producing movies of high quality. As for his famous horror and suspense, they are here, and better than in any other of his American movies so far.
February 8, 1943