Shadow of a Doubt
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Movie Reviews of Shadow of a Doubt
Movie Review: "Shadow of a Doubt" Weak Hitchcock
Summary: 2 Stars
Alfred Hitchcock said that this was his favorite among his films but, after having seen it for the third or fourth time, I still cannot see why. Hitchcock often stated in interviews that his greatest enjoyment in making films was the working out of the details beforehand and that he often wished he didn't have to actually make the picture. This film and some of his others, particularly in the writing and acting departments, clearly demonstrate that.
Joseph Cotten's performance as "Uncle Charlie" is wooden and even the dinner conversation about the fat widows "eating the money and drinking the money" of their dead husbands lacks conviction. Patricia Collinge, superb in "The Little Foxes" of 1941, is merely annoying here given the inane lines she is burdened with. Henry Travers and Hume Cronyn "humorously" and endlessly discussing different types of murder is silly. Worst of all are the fatal performances of the two child actors portraying Teresa Wright's younger sister and brother who manage to drag down every scene they appear in. All these are things Mr. Hitchcock should not have allowed to get away from him, especially when one considers the excellence of earlier pictures such as "Rebecca" and "Foreign Correspondent".
The scenes involving the missing newspaper page, Teresa Wright's race to get to the library before it closes and her close call with asphyxiation, all intended to generate great suspense, tend to fall flat. This picture betrays the same weaknesses as "Saboteur", made the year before for the same studio. The same weaknesses in acting and writing also show up, but to a lesser extent, in "Spellbound", "Rope", "I Confess" and "Stage Fright" the last of which is saved only by the droll performance of Alastair Sim.
Alfred Hitchcock really comes into his own in the early 1950's beginning with "Strangers on a Train" (1951) and ending with "The Birds" (1961) -- films which comprise a body of work that has deservedly won praise from movie-lovers throughout the world.
Movie Review: Before the beginning of his classic works
Summary: 2 Stars
Shadow of a Doubt has the benefit of being written by Thornton Wilder, based on a real story, and starring Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright, so why is it so dull? Just one year earlier Wright shined in "Pride of the Yankees" and shortly after this film she would win everyone's heart for her role in "The Best Years of Our Lives." Cotten was a mainstay in Orson Welles' players, had just finished "Citizen Kane" and "The Magnificent Ambersons," and was at the top of his game. So what went wrong? Difficult to know. For one thing, the masculine hero, Macdonald Carey, is relatively weak. So we're left with Wright, who was a great actress, but as the heroine and prime mover, she's not awe inspiring (Hitchcock would find his tough female stars years later in Tippi Hedron, Grace Kelly, and Doris Day).
(BTW - Wright got her big break in the Broadway production of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town". Wilder was the writer for this film and convinced Hitch to use Wright. The film itself was, according to Hitch, a negative image of Wilder's "Our Town" so the placement of Wright in both was ironic)
Hitchcock is an acquired taste, and many of his signature techniques that worked so well in other movies are missing here (e.g., the unusual photographic angles, the average day things that take on a menacing purpose). Indeed, Hitchcock only begins to show his great form in 1944's "Lifeboat" and then in the 1950s ("Rear Window", "Dial M for Murder", "The Man Who Knew Too Much") when, IMHO, his best films were made.
In summary this is an interesting film from the point of view of Hitchcock's development as a director, but as a stand alone film, it really doesn't have much to recommend it. When it opened it received mixed reviews and did poorly at the box office.
BTW - Hitch appears 18 minutes into the film as a card player on a train.