"Your father's method of relaxation": (Alfred) Hitchcock's Shadow of a doubt.

Shakespeare's Henry V is two plays, one of which, the grimly unglamorous expose of the sordid reality that really lies behind the "pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war," subverts the other, the conventional patriotic Boys' Own Paper play, to such an extent that in order to preserve the patriotic reading a director (whether of film or of theatre) must simply cut away the doubts and questionings, the seediness and disillusion, and present the resultant castrato as the "real" Shakespeare. This is exactly what Laurence Olivier did in his abominable film; and even Kenneth Branagh (who didn't have the excuse that "there's a war on") balked at some of King Henry's more sadistic threats.

Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) presents an analogous case, with the difference that the two "parts" or aspects of the film are so perfectly integrated that no neatly ruinous surgery could be performed. Made when there was indeed a war on, the film looks at first glance (and in 1943, no doubt, on subsequent glances also) as though it is a vindication of American small-town values against the vicious moral emptiness of the psychopathic intruder, a serial killer. Or, in more general terms, it looks as though it is a vindication of decent "democratic" values concerning the family and the wider community against the attack being mounted on them by the S.S. and the Knights of Bushido. The family and the community of Santa Rosa are, one might very well feel, presented warmly and affectionately though not, of course (for this is Hitchcock country), without touches of wry humour, sufficient to suggest that the film is not taking these very ordinary people to be saints or heroes: the screenplay is partly by Thornton Wilder, author of Our Town, that middlebrow classic, and he also made a special "contribution"--unspecified--to the producton.

The film's opening economically establishes a contrast (or so it seems) between, on the one hand, the bleak city landscape with its long cantilevered bridge, the kids playing in mean streets, the noisy lodgings where Charlie/Joseph Cotten(*) is lying on the bed next to his bedollared bedside table, his nosy landlady and, with a wonderful crane shot, the urban waste land through which he escapes from the detectives, and, on the other hand, the prosperous, leafy, bustling, caring community of Santa Rosa, with its orderly citizens crossing pedestrianly at the behest of an avuncular policeman--a town into which, to the joy of Charley/Teresa Wright, Uncle Charlie is to erupt at the very moment when she's about to summon him--a naive Faust about to bring a Mephistopheles whose menace she can't even begin to imagine.

Yet this contrast between the fragmented non-community and the integrated one is more apparent than real. Santa Rosa's problems begin where most problems begin--in families. No film can ever have concerned itself more continuously, almost obsessively, with The Family. Our first glimpse of the Newton family's life is when (after a brief glimpse of Charley lying on her bed in the same posture as her uncle) the `phone goes and the twelve-year old Ann, lost in her book, unwillingly answers it, showing an odd absence of affect about receiving a telegram and no interest whatever in taking it down, though telegrams in a small town in California in 1943 must have been rare enough, especially in a family where the father doesn't even own a wrist-watch. Young Ann has obviously fled from life to books, and receives her father's slightly tentative kiss, when he gets home from work at the Bank, with a certain steely resolve, as if it were a `flu shot (marvellous direction here). Then Charley, when he goes up to say hello, at once starts anatomising their family--it's just "gone to pieces ... nothing happens ... no conversation, just talk." The script here, and Teresa Wright's admirable acting, leave us poised in doubt as to whether her feelings are just youthful angst (and one wonders whether she is at college, working, or just waiting for a man) or whether she is unknowingly enunciating some deeper truth, of which the rest of the family remain unaware ... save that her mother (Emmy/Patricia Collinge) constantly and with moving brilliance registers a deep woundedness about which we find out little till a few moments from the end. (Cf. Collinge's performance in The Little Foxes.) Yet after the father's response to his younger daughter and to his wife, we can't help feeling that perhaps this "average American family," as it will later be called with consummate irony, is--though not violent or overtly abusive--abysmally dysfunctional.

It is plain, when Uncle Charlie arrives from a train which is belching funereal smoke, that his niece has a kind of relationship with him that she does not have with her parents or siblings: the joy with which she darts along the platform to greet him as he strides towards her is nearly erotic in its intensity, especially because of the way the shots are intercut in a way usually reserved in films for the meetings of separated lovers. Charlie in fact functions as something of an erotic object through the film--not only to his niece but also to his landlady, to the ladies he meets later at the Bank, and above all, of course, to his sister Emmy, whose relationship with her husband Joe is such that the film might just as well have been called Shadow of a Marriage, as Emmy reveals near the end when she hears her brother is going away, in the poignant words to the effect that when you marry "you sort of forget you're you ... [you become] your husband's wife." Charley's early diagnosis of family life is in the end shown to have been not only the outcome of idealistically impractical adolescent dissatisfaction but a sign of shrewd psychological instinct.

The strains surface flagrantly during the dinner for the beloved guest on the evening of his arrival. After Charlie has given Joe a watch, and Charley the fatal ring, the dinner is interrupted by the arrival of the next door neighbour Herb/Hume Cronyn, who lives alone with an invalid mother and spends such leisure as he has in discussing with Joe (a great reader of crime magazines) different methods of committing murder. Toadstools, blunt intruments, poison in the coffee, drowning in the bathtub--all figure in their chats throughout the film. Here again there is a certain ambiguity: very likely the first audiences, eager to be entertained, would have laughed at the preoccupation of two mature (in one sense) men with such grisly matters, and taken them as evidence of Mr. Hitchcock's well-known ghoulish sense of humour, but already by this early stage we should be starting to wonder whether the open violence associated with Charlie (and obliquely with the War) isn't restricted to the urban East but only too present in pleasant Santa Rosa, festering beneath the comfortable bourgeois surface--whether indeed violence isn't an integral part of what the film sees as the human condition. Later, Joe doesn't seem in the least appalled by what happens to the supposed Merry Widow murderer when he's cornered back East--he's walked into a plane's propellor and is identifiable only by his clothing, a fact that Herb brings out with cool relish. The only time Joe does register genuine shock is when, in front of the bank-manager, Charlie begins to make jokes about the probity of Banks, embezzlement, and so on (the manager is appropriately called "Mr. Green," but such is Hitchcock's skill that the Mr. Greens in the audience would doubtless have been much amused by him). The following morning Emmy brings Charlie his breakfast in bed and produces a photo of him taken just before the "accident" which changed him utterly. In my judgment this film has two weak points, both of them, interestingly, connected with the origins of Charlie's violence--one personal, the other (towards the end, and to be discussed later) concerned with the general violence in the film's world. The first is the attribution of Charlie's career as a serial killer to a mere physical mischance--the cannoning of a bike into a streetcar, a concussion. One may say now: but this isn't 1943, we know better ... but was that good enough, even then? Or is it only the doting Emmy's explanation, the only kind she (and doubtless most of the audience then) could understand? I remain unsure.

When the detectives arrive, posing as pollsters in a National Public Survey of the typical American family, Emmy gives a wonderful performance (and so in a different sense does Patricia Collinge) as the Typical American Housewife who has substituted social mores for personal being and fulfillment and who can give the impression--not wholly false naturally--of really enjoying the role she has learned to play. (The scene about beating the eggs for the cake and so on may seem exaggerated now: but it was spot-on for then. Younger readers will have to trust me here!) But of course human life would be easier if we could distinguish papering over cracks from binding up a wound--an irony somehow beyond irony that becomes apparent only after several viewings.

When Charlie, his secret finally out (certainly to Charley because of the newspaper clipping she's found in the library, and possibly--if he really is the culprit--to the detectives) delivers his verdicts on the world he inhabits, they are damning ones; and no doubt it was easy enough, 55 years ago, to dismiss them as being, like Hitler's, the maniacal if coherent ravings of a psychopath. First, at another "family" dinner to which he has contributed a bottle of what Emmy calls "sparkling burgldy," he comments on the difference between small-town women and the middle-aged women in cities who, "by the thousand," spend their time with their deceased husbands' money, drinking it, eating it, playing bridge with it, smelling of it ... faded, fat ... greedy (I paraphrase and condense to save space). And when Charley objects, voicing the spectators' feelings, "They're alive, they're human beings," her uncle, in one of the most profoundly chilling lines in cinema, asks: "Are they ...?"

It is chilling because it crystallises so much of the film's basic misanthropy--not merely misogyny: men don't get off lightly either--and is delivered so much from, as it were, the film's centre that we can't dismiss it as "morbid" or "abnormal": we have too recently seen Mrs. Green and Mrs. Potter, not to mention Herb and Joe and Mr. Green, to be able to say that. Santa Rosa and the values it seemed to embody starts to crumble away before our eyes.

Uncle Charlie's other diatribe is all the more shocking because it's directed not at his murdered rich widows, for whom he presumably felt nothing at all, but at his supposedly beloved and eponymous niece. She flings out of the house after an episode I have so far described piecemeal: a dinner, Charlie's condemnation of rich widows, the arrival of Herb who embarks on another discussion of murder-methods ("your father's method of relaxation," says Emmy, with a humour so unconscious as to be practically catatonic) and Charlie's furious outburst. Uncle Charlie accompanies her down the street, they go into a night-bar, "Til Two" (the emerging GIs reminding us of the War, the flatvoiced downtrodden waitress of the down-side of American smalltown life), and Charlie, after trying to sweet-talk Charley into feeling kinship, twinship, with him, turns on her, contemptuously saying: "You're just an ordinary little girl living in an ordinary little town ... You go through your ordinary little day and at night you sleep your ordinary little sleep filled with peaceful stupid dreams ... Do you know that the world is a foul sty? Do you know that if you ripped the fronts off houses you'd find swine?--what does it matter what happens in it? Wake up!"

Here again it is easier to dismiss Charlie's philippic as psychopathic than to stand back--for this is a work of art--and consider if there's anything in what he says. Is he, one wonders, doing much more than expressing (if with horrible violence) what his niece herself was complaining about near the start of the picture? No, neither Santa Rosa nor her parents' marriage are quite the "foul sty" he has described, but, as the intendedly loving relation of two people who have brought forth three children, two of whom are alienated, and the wife despairing, the husband inadequate ... how much better is it? Doesn't the film's point of view approximate so much more closely than is comfortable to Uncle Charlie's that to see him as a mere interloper bringing disruption into a loving and settled community (as in The Night of the Hunter or the earlier version of Cape Fear) is to rotate Hitchcock's disorientating moral vision through 180 [degrees] ?

I haven't yet mentioned the detective with whom, sent to Santa Rosa to track down one of the two suspects in the "Merry Widow" murders (the other is, as I've mentioned, eliminated by a propellor back East), Charley falls in love. Jack Graham/MacDonald Carey is such a Grey Hole of a character that one wonders why Hitchcock cast him in the role. In a conventional reading of the film, he would be the straight, "normal" guy who replaces Uncle Charlie in Charlie's perhaps slightly confused, not to say twisted, affections: and that is not a silly reading. Yet when one looks at his performance, and more especially when one studies young Charley's responses to him, that interpretation seems--as so much does in this self-deconstructing film--to run counter to its Director's purposes. Take the scene in the garage, where Jack confesses he loves her (and, incidentally, where it is "established" that the garage door is prone to shut suddenly and get stuck for no apparent reason). Was there ever a more inept declaration? Even Charlie's laughter at Jack's joke about her young sister is, for once, artificial in a way not entirely attributable to her embarrassment at the approaching proposal (again one suspects an exquisite piece of direction here, but this is shaky territory). And here we come to a fundamental difficulty in and with this film: its refusal to face its own most disturbing insights: a problem that becomes increasingly insoluble as we proceed. For there is one impulse in the film that is Uncle Charlie-that wants to shatter not merely the comfortable world of Santa Rosa but its own assumptions; yet there is another that wants to reassure itself that, contrary to what Charlie says, the world is not "a pig-sty," and the people in it, despite its own horrid insights, not swine, just ordinary humans (the film hopes there is some distinction).

Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that, as the end approaches, the film seems to decline more and more into the kind of smalltown conventionality which, at its start, Charley was condemning so restlessly: it cannot afford to face its own deepest intimations, so Charley has to be paired off with a man like Jack who, though "good" and "right" etc., seems to represent the human possibilities of a guinea-pig--though they must surely be preferable to the possibilities with which Uncle Charlie, despite his much more penetrating insights into the realities of middle-American life, confronts us as a murderous psychopath, and who certainly offers no possibilities whatever of human growth.

Running out of space, I leave aside Uncle Charlie's two attempts to murder his niece--both seem clumsy, the first ludicrously so (what fit young woman was ever killed by falling through a weak step all of five feet above the ground?--and Charlie Oakley is supposed to be a professional murderer!). I leave aside too the gradual moral growth of Charley as she finds out for sure about her uncle and inexorably forces him to leave Santa Rosa. I want to end with a brief discussion of what Jack Graham says about Charlie after, trying to murder his niece in a somewhat more practical manner, he has himself been cut in half by an oncoming train. At the funeral, and ironically counterpointed with the voice of a conventional clergyman intoning platitudes even less applicable than usual, Charlie speaks some scarcely less conventional words of mourning while holding Jack's hand-"He thought that the world was a horrible place.... He said that people like us had no idea what the world was really like." And Jack replies: "Well, it's not quite as bad as that ... but sometimes it needs a lot of watching--it seems to go crazy every now and then."

This is the cold, nay chilling, comfort with and in which Shadow of a Doubt leaves us. To "go crazy now and then" was in 1943, and is now, less than no explanation of the Uncle Charlies of the world, any more than is Emmy's explanation--a childhood concussion. Perhaps I am influenced here (to speak personally) by my recent reading of Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil (Random House 1998), in which Rosenbaum analyses in great detail not merely the explanations, but also the types of explanations, that historians, psychologists, political theorists, and many other specialist writers, have produced in order to "explain" Hitler. Rosenbaum's final conclusion seems to me to be that there is and could be no explanation of such a phenomenon, of such a creature,--that such a mind and the deeds it brought forth are utterly beyond comprehension and therefore beyond explaining. I have to say that is the cheerless feeling with which Shadow of a Doubt, where it concerns Uncle Charlie, leaves me, though I have to confess that at moments, when I look in the shaving-mirror ...

(*) N.B. Without any textual warrant, and solely for the sake of simplicity and ease of reference, I have throughout referred to the Uncle as "Charlie" and the Niece as "Charley."