i know without a shadow of a doubt when i walked in

(Indeed that element of unreality does add to the expressionistic feeling that is a peculiar attraction of the film.) Second, there is a question concerning what narrative perspective the film is taking. First of all, there are so many implausible and unrealistic elements to the story that one wonders if one is in the middle of a kind of Shutter Island (2010) type dream world. So the story concerns the confrontation between Charlie’s seductive, but ultimately evil, charm and Charlotte’s benevolent innocence and decency – perhaps the kind of fare appropriate for a country enmeshed in a war with moralistic overtones.īut there are curious aspects to this story as it is presented. Unfortunately, however, it soon becomes obvious to the viewer (and only later to the local residents) that Charlie is a psychopathic murderer on the lam from the authorities. When she learns that her adventurous, but little seen, uncle Charlie Oakley will be paying a visit to this parochial cocoon, she feels that her dreams for excitement have been answered.Ĭharlie is a stimulating and charming fellow who is much beloved by his older sister (and Charlotte’s mother), Emma, who named her daughter (“Charlie” is her nickname, too) after him. In particular, she doesn’t want to end up living like her much-loved mother, Emma Newton, whom she sees as mired in housework and trivia. She longs for excitement, romance, and something to give meaning and some magic to her life. In Shadow of a Doubt, an attractive teenage girl, Charlotte Newton, lives in the idyllic small American town Santa Rosa, California, but she is bored by the humdrum nature of her family life.

In fact the film has some odd strengths and weaknesses that cause viewers’ reactions to vary. Over the course of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, the idea of an ordinary middle-class person suddenly thrust into unusual and threatening circumstances is standard fare for Hitchcock, but Shadow of a Doubt is rather different from Hitchcock’s other popular thrillers. In this story the ordinary life of a typical small-town, middle-class family is disrupted by the intrusion of a beguiling but sinister visitor.

Particularly with his Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the shooting for which was begun in the latter part of 1941. But as with many foreign filmmakers who came to the US, Hitchcock soonĮvinced his fascination for the peculiarities of American culture, Alfred Hitchcock shifted to the US to make films in 1939, but his earliest American-made films still had mostly English settings.

I know without a shadow of a doubt when i walked in