The Clever Little Girl Who Knows Something: Shadow of a Doubt

Bored with her nice, domestic homelife with snooze worthy parents, Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright) yearns for adventure. So, she decides to send a telegram to the uncle she was named after, her mother’s brother Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten), when lo and behold, there’s already a telegram waiting from that same party. Good old Uncle Charlie’s coming to visit the family, and he wants to stay with them awhile. Isn’t that swell? The family could use a swift kick in the excitement pants.

Charlie’s younger sister Ann Newton (Edna May Wonacott) is too cerebral, too lost in her books to know what fun was if it came up and bit her. Youngest child Roger (Charles Bares) is too naval gazing, too young. Dad Joseph (Henry Travers) is a respectable businessman whose only outlet for enjoyment seems to be reading salacious mystery magazines and talking about how to really kill people with his coworker and pal Herbie Hawkins (Hume Cronyn). Mom Emma (Patricia Collinge) works way, way, way too hard and has no energy left for enjoyment. It’s all terribly prosaic, all terribly boring. Charlie wants romance!

She will get all she cares to when Uncle Charlie shows up. He’s a good-natured sort, all smiles and presents and wonderful, worldly stories. There’s something eerie about him, too. He watches people, studying them the way scientists study specimens they are about to stick on a board or maybe slice open. When Jack Graham (Macdonald Carey) and Fred Saunders (Wallace Ford) show up claiming to be newspaper men interested in doing a write up on the Newton family, Uncle Charlie demands not to be included, not to be photographed. As it turns out, Jack and Fred are not who they claim to be. They are actually policemen interested in Uncle Charlie, but why? Could he have something to do with crimes around the country? The more curious Charlie gets about her dear uncle, the more reasons she discovers to be wary, to be afraid. However, in director Alfred Hitchcock’s capable hands, there is always reasons to second guess those impulses and instincts in the delightful, eerie Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

As far as I am concerned, there are not enough Nancy Drew characters in suspense cinema. Earnest, thoughtful, clever, crafty, and genuinely good young women who find themselves drawn into mystery for its own sake and are compelled to see the things through to the end. These are women who are compelled to seek out answers. Typical suspense plots find women struggling against a fate that seeks them out. We get the sense they would prefer to let sleeping beasts lie and go back to their nice, normal lives. However, the characters I am referring to are ones who unearth a mystery and then grab it by the tail. Today’s movie under consideration gives us a beautifully written, wonderfully acted example of the character I want to see more of. Tomorrow, we will check out a more modern incarnation, the real brains behind the detective work of The Nice Guys (2016).

Joseph Cotten’s character sneers when he confronts his plucky young niece/investigator and delivers a highly charged monologue:

Uncle Charlie: You think you know something, don’t you? You think you’re the clever little girl who knows something. There’s so much you don’t know, so much. What do you know, really? You’re just an ordinary little girl, living in an ordinary little town. You wake up every morning of your life and you know perfectly well that there’s nothing in the world to trouble you. You go through your ordinary little day, and at night you sleep your untroubled ordinary little sleep, filled with peaceful stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares. Or did I? Or was it a silly, inexpert little lie? You live in a dream. You’re a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you’d find swine? The world’s a hell. What does it matter what happens in it? Wake up, Charlie. Use your wits. Learn something.

Dialogue from Shadow of a Doubt (1941), written by Thornton Wilder, Salma Benson, Alma Reville

In fact, she does know something. She has learned something, and she will follow the plot doggedly. Even when good sense tells her to turn away. She will go on until it is too late and her life is in danger. However, there’s more to the whole shebang than a simple mystery plot. Romance waits in the wings in the form of hunky Jack Graham, but he’s pretty much ineffectual so far as the suspense plot goes. He’s there and he probes and pokes, but he gets no answers, and he’s absent through much of the action. This is a story where Charlie gets herself in trouble and she must rely on her own powers to get out of it. For the most part.

What makes the movie really work is the playfulness which the screen story takes with our suspicions and doubts. For the opening two thirds, we are never quite certain just what Uncle Charlie is up to. It’s something illicit, but is he the killer the cops are searching for? Maybe, maybe not. He could just as easily be a bad businessman sought out by cheated partners or some kind of thief. Cotten plays the role with delicious layers, adding intrigue by the ladleful.

Teresa Wright sells the role of a teen who wants more out of life than security and stability. She sells us on the cleverness of the role, and she sells us on the earnestness of her character. She’s a delight to watch and to root for.

Cinematographer Joseph A. Valentine outdoes himself here. This is the second of several collaborations he made with Hitchcock, including 1942’s Saboteur and 1948’s Rope. He was also the cinematographer for The Wolf Man (1941), and there are a couple of dreamy, gothic horror moments here that benefit from that experience. The movie is generally an appeal to the sort of U.S. heartland, small town, Ma and Apple Pie life, and those exteriors and interiors are wonderfully lit and photographed. However, there is a hazily shot segment involving dancers turning to classical music, which floats through the piece like ghostly ESP. Then there’s the raw suspense of Charlie trapped inside a garage filling up with carbon monoxide … Well shot. However, the range of images is perhaps most striking in the opening of the film. Before we move into small city America, we are in a hard knock side of town. It’s a tenement building, where the camera finds Uncle Charlie prostrate on his bed, getting word from his landlady that a couple of men are looking for him. He responds to her distantly, as unconcerned about her or these strangers as he is by the cash that’s spread out on his nightstand and floor. For all intents and purposes, he could be the doomed Swede from Hemingway’s “The Killers” (filmed in both 1946 and 1964), awaiting his murderers… However, he’s not fatalistic at all, and after she’s closed his blinds, he rouses and makes good his escape. It’s a terrific use of light and shadow to draw out some character psychology: Here is a man nurtured by darkness instead of light, and only after a dose of the dark does he bother getting up and making his way.

Hitchcock made no small number of hits in his career. Here, he employs a wonderfully twisty story to always keep us guessing. His technique is flawless, his characters are well realized, the humor is delightful (in particular, the conversations between Henry Travers and Hugh Cronyn about the realities of murder are funny and fun; early renditions of the sorts of conversations fans have all the time online these days) and his scenes are perfectly lensed. This film is lightning in a bottle, in terms of terrific cast and the director is in top form.

Shadow of a Doubt is a potent cocktail of thrills and mystery, still captivating almost eighty years after it saw first release. A hell of a story told well and shot exquisitely. Hitchcock was working at the top of his game here, and though many a subsequent feature has garnered more perpetuating popularity, Shadow of a Doubt nevertheless ranks among his best films.

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Shadow of a Doubt is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD editions.

Tomorrow, we will take a look at The Nice Guys, a sadly overlooked gem of humor, mystery, and suspense from wunderkind writer/director Shane Black. It is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD editions. There’s also a book version available through the Hard Case Crime in eBook and paperback editions.

Writing for “The Clever Little Girl Who Knows Something: Shadow of a Doubt” is copyright © 2022 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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