TCM Event Series: Hitchcock's THE BIRDS

Earlier this month I wrote about my enduring fondness for what many consider to be Alfred Hitchcock's final masterpiece, The Birds (link to post HERE); a post reliant on memory, cable TV, and rewatching my 2000 DVD. But thanks to fellow blogger The Lady Eve's Reel Life and the kind folks at NCM Fathom Events, I was lucky enough to be given tickets to see the TCM one-night-only theatrical screening of the newly restored version of The Birds last night in Century City here in Los Angeles.

What a terrifically fun evening! Not only did it provide me and my partner a much-needed, mid-week date night (and, lucky me, he likes to hold hands in the movies and lets me dig my nails in his arm during the scary parts), but when they said they’d be presenting a digitally restored version of The Birds, they weren’t kidding around. The nearly 50-year-old film has never looked or sounded better. I know nothing of digital technology, but what’s been done to The Birds is akin to the burnishing of a gem. What was already great about it is better (the color and clarity of the images is almost breathtaking; the innovative electronic soundtrack more bone-rattling than ever) and what was once flawed now seems smoothed over to a high gloss (the crude edges and dodgy color-balance of 60s-era matte work and rear-projection looks to have been diminished).

Plus there was the added bonus of a pre-taped interview with star Tippi Hedren by Turner Classic Movie host Robert Osborne, along with footage of interviews with Suzanne Pleshette and Rod Taylor from past TCM productions. For the die-hard Birds fan, not much new is revealed in these brief interviews, and the tone of Hedren’s segment is decidedly more polite than what has since come to light about her relationship with Hitchcock; but there’s always at least one tid-bit to add to the lore, and I do get a kick out of Pleshette’s down-to-earth frankness, Taylor’s spot-on Hitchcock impersonation, and Hedren’s enduring class.

As for the screening itself? Just spectacular. I had such a ball seeing such a familiar film in an environment and under circumstances that made me feel like I was seeing it for the first time. All of us in the audience (many of whom, based on reactions, must have been seeing The Birds for the first time) just seemed to get caught up in the action. There wasn't any of that sort of palpable restlessness you can feel in an audience when a movie lags. I think I was the only one who even got up to use the restroom in the whole two hours (a "large" drink, I forgot, is roughly a gallon at the movies). If I noticed anything at all, it's that this wan't a particularly 'camp" crowd. Hardly any unintentional laughs were to be heard the whole night. These were devotees and I can scarcely remember being among a more rapt audience.

The first time I ever saw The Birds at a theater was perhaps over 15 years ago, and then that was with a scratchy print that jumped during the schoolhouse bird attack, leaving a gray-bearded old gentleman in front of me so weepily disconsolate his partner literally had to pat his back to calm him down. 

Seeing The Birds last night was something else again. It solidified for me the film's complete evolution from guilty-pleasure to revered classic. As the ageless Tippi Hedren says, "The Birds has a life of its own."

Alfred Hatchplot's "For The Birds" starring Tipsy Headrinse
MAD Magazine parody (image courtesy of ScarlettStreet)

Copyright © Ken Anderson

THE BIRDS 1963

Like most people my age, the first time I saw The Birds was when it had its broadcast television premiere on NBC back in 1968. Then only 10-years-old, I had never seen an Alfred Hitchcock movie before, but he was familiar to me, if not by reputation, then most certainly by that corpulent profile featured so prominently on his weekly anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I knew he was a film director but my strongest impression was of his being “The fat Rod Serling,” or “The scary Walt Disney”; a household-name TV host in the vein of Dick Powell and Loretta Young whom I associated with suspense programs like The Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond, and Thriller.

Tippi Hedren as Melanie Daniels
(always loved how "naturally" she holds that cotton swab to her head)

Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner

Jessica Tandy as Lydia Brenner

Suzanne Pleshette as Annie Hayworth

Veronica Cartwright as Cathy Brenner

Sir Alfred

My fondness for what in syndication was called The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (“The Unlocked Window” episode scared the hell out of me then and is still the one I consider the best of the series) combined with the kid-friendly, “Creature Features” accessibility of its title, made The Birds must-see television as far as I was concerned. And indeed, in spite of seeing it on a small black and white set with all those commercial interruptions, my first experience of The Birds was an appropriately terrifying one. Sure, Tippi Hedren’s lacquered San Francisco socialite inspired, no, make that invited, giggles, while Rod Taylor’s lantern-jawed “Let the men handle it!” heroics was a horror film cliché already wearing thin (if I had a dollar for every time a woman is told to go make coffee before, during, and after a disaster…), but for sheer tension and hands-over-my-eyes thrills, I couldn't have asked for a better introduction to the cinema world of Alfred Hitchcock.

A class act in every way, The Birds was the first horror film I ever saw that didn't have the feel of the bargain-basement about it. Beautifully photographed, breathtaking special effects, suspense deftly metered; The Birds is simply a marvelous example of a thriller that understands how much an audience enjoys being taken on a thrill ride. Nowhere near as mean-spirited as some of Hitchcock’s other films (his Frenzy is one of the ugliest, most misanthropic films I've ever seen), I liken the experience of watching The Birds to being a participant in an adult version of the old “peek-a-boo” game one plays with an infant: I may get scared when the film goes “Boo!”, but I delight in the jolt and I sit there in gleeful anticipation of the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

And should Hitchcock’s predilection for fake-looking sets and feeble rear-screen projection mar this stylish enterprise with the cheesy-looking scene or two (I still can’t get over that sequence on the hill overlooking the children’s birthday party - it looks like a set from a high-school production of Brigadoon); or Evan Hunter’s script occasionally defy the normal patterns and rhythms of human speech; The Birds ultimately more than makes up for it in the near-genius technical rendering of the bird attacks and the kind of virtuoso storytelling that’s becoming all-too-rare in films today.

Throughout its evolution from late-career Hitchcock embarrassment, to affectionately derisible camp classic, straight on through to its current revisionist acceptance as a masterpiece of suspense and terror, The Birds has never once ceased being a favorite of mine.

Torch-Carryin' Annie has to listen to the Effortlessly Elegant Melanie make inroads with 
The Man That Got Away

I've not devoted much space on this blog to writing about some of the more popular and well-known films that rank among my favorites (for example: The Godfather, The Wizard of Oz, and Citizen Kane). This having to do with a sense that these titles are somewhat oversaturated subjects of cinema analysis and a nagging uncertainty that I have anything new to add to the dialog. On that topic, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds certainly fills the bill (a little ornithological humor there…heh, heh), what with everybody from François Truffaut to Mattel® to Camille Paglia weighing in on the film over the years. But after a recent glut of cable TV airings and one particularly laugh-filled evening watching the movie at home with my partner, I’ve decided that The Birds is a movie too near and dear to my heart not to be included in this, my internet film diary.

The plot of The Birds is so well-known it doesn't even require summarizing. The fan and casual viewer is just invited to settle down and enjoy the ride, perhaps indulging in a little "Spot the Hitchcock trademark" as the film unspools. I think all of them are present: the icy blonde, the suggestive banter, the sinister brunette, the precocious child, the female in eyeglasses, the glib discussion of murder, the domineering mother, the victimized female.

If that's not to your liking, you can ponder non-pertinent, yet nagging elements like: that scary portrait of Mitch's father (he doesn't look like a man who "had the knack" of entering into a kid's world). Or maybe the huge discrepancy in age between Mitch and his sister, Cathy (the wonderful Veronica Cartwright, stealing scenes even then!). Or why those two little moppets being traumatized at the diner aren't in school.  And while you're at it, ask yourself why Annie Hayworth's class is the only one held in that big old schoolhouse. Don't they have teenagers in Bodega Bay?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

We’ve all seen it or heard stories: A woman walks past a man -- man makes a comment (usually vulgar) about her attractiveness. Said woman ignores both comment and commenter only to find herself the object of a stream of hurled invectives from the man, all blatantly contradicting his earlier “compliments.” Standard operational procedure in misogyny: man places woman on fetishized pedestal only so he can knock her off of it. In many ways, The Birds plays out like the world’s most expensive and elaborate ugly-guy revenge fantasy against beautiful women (a mantle taken up several decades later by Joe Eszterhas with the craptastic Showgirls). There are times when it feels as if Hitchcock devised the entire multi-million production for the sole purpose of mussing Tippi Hedren’s meticulously sculpted coiffure.

Haters Gonna Hate
When it comes to disapproving glares from strangers,
Melanie Daniels doesn't have any fucks to give

Not since an excitable James Stewart ran obsessively roughshod over Kim Novak’s shopping spree in Vertigo can I recall a movie preoccupying itself so all-consumingly with a woman’s appearance. The first hour or so of The Birds is a virtual valentine to all things Tippi. Hitchcock records her in loving closeup, ogling long shots, and to the adoring exclusion of all else that’s going on around her. And when she’s not being subjected to the camera obscura equivalent of a wolf-whistle, The Birds makes sure it captures every leering, appraising gaze she draws from the males she crosses paths with.

But of course, the glamorization/objectification of leading ladies is nothing new. What makes The Birds the perverse and ultimately camp-prone curiosity it is, is the degree of enthusiasm with which the film approaches the task of dismantling all that it has so meticulously set up. Hedren’s Melanie Daniels is involved in each of the film’s recorded bird attacks and seriously gets the worst of it in the by-now-classic finale, but the movie doesn't ask that we relate to her character so much as hope that each successive attack will knock a bit of the starch out of her.

By the end, when the self-assured, independent, and superciliously smug Melanie Daniels from the early scenes has been reduced to a cowering, needy, child/woman, I have the nagging feeling that the film (Hitchcock) views this as some kind of triumph. As if Melanie needed something to jolt her out of her smug self-assurance, and her breakdown has ultimately reawakened her humanity and made her more worthy of compassion. While there’s no arguing that Melanie was a bit of a pill before, was it really necessary to strip her of all of her spirit to make her into a sympathetic character?

PERFORMANCES

It sounds very ungallant of me to say so, but a great deal of the enjoyment I’ve derived from The Birds over the years has been at Ms.Hedren’s expense. To be fair, it must be said that it’s difficult to tell whether I'm responding to the limitations of the actress herself or the made-to-look-ridiculous-on-purpose character of Melanie Daniels. 

Venus in Furs
Melanie Daniels' high-style glamour is made to look absurd when contrasted
with the more practical environment of Bodega Bay

I've always been fascinated by Tippi Hedren's hands in this film. Her tapering long fingers and ostentatiously elegant gestures involving a pencil, cigarette, or telephone cord make for some of the most unintentionally sensuous footage Hitchcock has ever shot.

In either event, it's nice to report that the years have been kind to both Hedren and The Birds. Looking at the film today, one is made aware of how difficult a role it must have been, and I find myself admiring Hedren's performance more and more. She is limited, to be sure, but in several scenes (such as Melanie's first encounter with the suspicious Annie Hayworth) Hedren displays a marvelous subtlety. If you don't believe me, try watching the French dubbed DVD of The Birds (if you're like me, you already know most of the dialog, anyway). You'd be surprised how significantly Hedren's performance improves when her thin American voice (her greatest drawback) is replaced by a sonorous Gallic one.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

After all these years, the scene of the bird attack at the Tides Cafe is as powerful as the first time I saw it. It is one brilliant, breathtaking piece of filmmaking! I tell you, no amount of expensive CGI wizardry is ever going to take the place of simple creativity and knowing how to use the visual medium of film to tell a story. I hate bandying the word "genius" about, but Hitchcock hit it out of the ballpark with this sequence. For me, it beats the shower scene in Psycho. (Although this scene never made me need to sleep with the lights on.)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

If in this post I sound guilty of succumbing to the kind of revisionism that spins vintage cinema straw into nostalgia-laced gold, it's only because I've been around long enough to have taken note of what I perceive to be a certain downward trajectory in films. In the independent/foreign-film-influenced days of my youth, it was generally assumed that movies like The Birds were on their way out, and it was fashionable to mock their solid, old-school (read: Establishment) professionalism. 

In this shot from the opening scene of The Birds, the traffic signal indicates WALK, but on the right of the screen, you can see a strong-armed "extra wrangler" preventing a clearly befuddled little old lady from crossing the street and spoiling Hitchcok's introduction shot of his leggy star, the lovely Ms. Hedren. I told you I've watched this movie a lot. 

Jump ahead to the present day. We now have an industry run by lawyers and populated with techno-geeks churning out obscenely expensive comic book movies and CGI video games disguised as films for a subliterate demographic that bullies the boxoffice through their Twitter accounts. 

All of a sudden, old-fashioned things like story, character, pacing, and maturity seem positively revolutionary. I've always liked The Birds, but I never considered it a classic. I think that opinion has changed. I don't think there's a director working today who can pull off what Hitchcock does in this flawed masterpiece, I really don't. It's a movie both smart and silly that never once falls prey to what is near-standard in horror films today: stupidity. It takes its time, it gets us to care about its characters, and the power of the shock effects comes from our engagement in the narrative. The Birds is not Alfred Hitchcock's best film by a long shot, but its obvious skill, artistry, and simple entertainment value make much of what passes for motion pictures today look like chicken feed.

BONUS MATERIAL
A couple of terrific essays on Hedren and "The Birds" can be found HERE at the site of fellow blogger, Poseidon's Underworld.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

VERTIGO 1958

I guess it says something about a suspense thriller when you can watch it multiple times, long after the central mystery of its plot has been revealed, with no lessening of engagement or enjoyment. In the case of Alfred Hitchcock’s mesmerizingly bizarre Vertigo, the film itself is so unusual, its subject matter so psychosexually dark, I find myself forgetting the “surprise reveal” of the mystery altogether and just lose myself in what a perversely obsessive vision of romance a major Hollywood studio was able to get away with in the repressed environment of the late-'50s.

As one of five films owned by Hitchcock and removed from circulation in 1973 so his lawyers could better hammer out new deals for their television and theatrical distribution rights (the others being The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rope, Rear Window, and The Trouble With Harry), Vertigo wasn’t available for viewings of any kind, singular or multiple, during my high school and college years.
The deceptively simple suspense plot about a retired detective who falls in love and later becomes obsessed with the woman he's been hired to follow is one of the darkest and most self-revealing films in the Hitchcock canon.

Barely Hanging On
Vertigo is a film about a man's psychological spiral into the abyss

Considered neither a commercial nor critical success in its initial release, by the mid-'70s, interest in Vertigo had grown significantly. This is mainly due to the film’s unavailability and (most significantly) the youth-inspired / New Hollywood reevaluation of Alfred Hitchcock and his works. Spearheaded by the French New Wave and director François Truffaut’s by-now-classic 1967 book of interviews: Hitchcock by Truffaut, a generation of young film enthusiasts have come to regard Hitchcock (heretofore considered a professionally efficient, studio-system director of popular entertainments) as an auteurist maverick in the manner of contemporaries John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles.

This well-taken (if functionally naïve) position was readily adopted by me and most everyone else I went to film school with—the mean age of the collective student body betraying the fact that Vertigo was, to most of us, one of those films more praised in the abstract than actually seen.

Jimmy Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson

Kim Novak as Madeline Elster

Kim Novak as Judy Barton

Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge Wood

As a kid, the full extent of my knowledge of behind-the-scenes motion picture personnel were the opposite-ends-of-the-spectrum names of Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock: two of the most visible and TV-familiar behind-the-scenes faces of the '60s Hollywood. With only the most cartoonish notion of what a director or producer actually did (I had, after all, seen all of the “Lucy goes to Hollywood” episodes of I Love Lucy), thanks to the TV anthology series Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I knew one thing: Disney meant funny, and Hitchcock meant scary. Hitchcock’s The Birds and the deeply traumatizing Psycho had enough of a “Creature Features”/ William Castle vibe about them to satisfy a young person’s notion of what a scary movie should be. But Vertigo (which had its network TV premiere in 1965 and reran consistently), despite Hitchcock’s name and the similar one-word title, was just too slow and kissy-faced to hold my interest.

For Bay Area kids in the '70s, scary movies
meant one thing and one thing only: Creature Features

Once it became clear that Kim Novak’s rigid hairdo wasn’t in danger of a crow attack, or that Jimmy Stewart wouldn’t be donning a dress or wielding a knife anytime soon, I gave up on trying to sit through it. By the time I reached my teens and public interest in Vertigo had renewed my curiosity, it was too late. I ultimately didn't get to see Vertigo until after it was released on DVD, restored and pristine, in 1999.

Alfred Hitchcock's much-analyzed "pure cinema" style is evident throughout Vertigo.
The dizzying spiral motif.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Contrasted with my youthful antipathy towards Vertigo, my adult response to the film was near-obsessive adoration. I immediately fell in love with its absorbingly intriguing plot and the descriptively cinematic methods Hitchcock uses to tell the story and reveal character. A trait shared by most of the filmmakers I admire is their fluency in the visual language of film. They don’t just allow their camera to record events: through lighting, angles, music, and editing, they employ techniques that help to shape the viewer's perception of what is happening and what the characters are feeling.
I’m not always persuaded by Hitchcock’s sometimes jarring shifts from visually striking location shots to patently fake-looking studio sets and process photography, but in a story as subjectively stylized as Vertigo, even artificiality works in the film’s favor.

(My partner, who doesn’t exactly worship at the altar of Hitchcock, thinks the director’s predilection for rear-screen projections and patently sound-studio outdoor sets recall the look of Disney’s live-action films. A running gag is for him to poke me in the ribs at any instance of obvious rear-projection or stagy outdoor sets in a movie and exclaim (in mock sincerity), “Oh look, Ken…a Hitchcock film!”)

Hitchcock was the best at using imagery to convey emotional states

PERFORMANCES

I’ve previously commented on my belief that movie star appeal (as opposed to actor appeal) is rooted in a performer’s ability to consistently project a distinctly intimate quality about themselves from film to film. To, in effect, imprint each role with their personality rather than lose themselves within a character.

I don’t know very much about Kim Novak’s personal life, but of all the '50s sex symbols, she has always struck me as one of the most sad-eyed and reluctant. She never appeared to enjoy the objectification that is the sex symbol’s stock-in-trade. Rather, much like the character she played in Picnic, Novak seemed to be somewhat shy, sensitive and desirous of someone to take notice of something about her beyond her beauty.

Vera Miles was initially cast in the Kim Novak role
but had to drop out of Vertigo due to pregnancy.
Hitch was not happy

It’s this quality Kim Novak brings to the dual characters of Madeline/Judy in Vertigo. A quality one might go so far as to say is exploited by Hitchcock, given how painfully tangible Novak makes Judy’s longing for Scottie to love her for herself.

As compelling as they are, I confess that I find the sequences where Scottie attempts to make Judy over in Madeline’s image particularly painful to sit through. I derive no pleasure from the subtle self-deprecation glimpsed behind Judy’s poignantly eager-to-please glances and nervous smiles as Scottie demands more and more of the real Judy to retreat into his fantasy. These scenes are so difficult to watch because those flashes of resigned sadness in Judy harken back to that dolefulness I’ve always perceived in Novak’s eyes in other films.

Much has been written about Scottie's tortured character, but the character of Judy is equally forceful. A woman who allows herself to be made over not once, but twice, in the image of another man's ideal. The whole "makeover" fetish is a lamentable, psychologically abusive motif standardized in many areas of contemporary pop culture. There's the cliche of the buttoned-down secretary who removes her glasses ("Why, Miss Bracegirdle...you're beautiful!") or the woman with the tightly-pinned hair who suddenly wears it loose after being made "a real woman" by the hero. This redemption through transformation is expected in the fashion and beauty industries, and even romanticized and rendered "cute" in movies like Grease (what an odious message that film sends to girls). I think Kim Novak is marvelously affecting and heartbreaking in conveying the need-to-please/loss-of-self side of her character in Vertigo, and her performance is easily the best of her career.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

As a former resident of San Francisco, I have a weak spot for movies that make the city look like my idealized memories of it. The San Francisco of Vertigo was long gone before I ever moved there, but it’s every bit as picturesque.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”  - Frederico Fellini

Show me a filmmaker who denies his work has autobiographical subtext, and I’ll show you a filmmaker with good reason to try to convince himself of the lie. Back in 1971, Roman Polanski “doth protest too much” when critics took note of his Manson-esque depiction of slaughter in Macbeth. Similarly, Woody Allen took the same tact when the whole Mia Farrow/Soon Yi mess made the 42-year-old man/17-year-old girl romance at the center of Manhattan seem forever icky.

On its own merits, Vertigo is a near-perfect suspense thriller with a devastating tragedy at its center. The lovers are plagued by personal flaws and compulsions that induce them to act in ways that doom their union no matter how many times it’s played out. It’s a strange, deeply romantic film whose themes feel assertively antithetical to the kind of romantic myth typical of Hollywood films in the 1950s.

Top: In Vertigo, Hitchcock takes full advantage of the strange, spectral quality of the color green.
Below: The same eerie hue was used to equally chilling effect in the poster art for my favorite film of all time, Rosemary's Baby

What provides the film with its extra, voyeuristic kick is how closely Vertigo’s narrative hews to what has come to be known about Alfred Hitchcock’s personal obsessions and compulsions. Whether apocryphal or substantiated, the Hitchcock section of the library is loaded with tale after tale of his fixation on icy blondes and his controlling nature. Stories of his professional relationships with actresses Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren read like a character analysis of Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson.

I've never been much of a fan of Jimmy Stewart, but if Vertigo works at all, it's because of his movingly tortured performance. Cast against type as a somewhat unpleasant and haunted character, Vertigo seems to tap into a heretofore unexplored cruelty in the actor, which makes his Scottie so flawed and vulnerable. I've never seen him better.

It’s this personal overlay that gives Vertigo its eerie punch and makes it feel at times as if the film were a subtly confessional probe into the darkest corners of what we sometimes label desire.

Jimmy Stewart & Kim Novak were paired again in the 1958 comedy, Bell Book & Candle. Here they make a cameo appearance on the film's soundtrack album cover in this shameless bit of product placement from the Shirley Booth TV show Hazel. (Both produced by Columbia Studios.)

Vertigo is not my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie (that would be Shadow of a Doubt), but for me, it’s the film in which he most perfectly conjoins the elements of popular entertainment and art. It’s a hypnotically sensual film; cool, yet passionate, that has about it an inescapable air of sadness. Hitchcock is not the most impassioned of directors, but with Vertigo, he bravely explores the darker side of love in a way that feels both very humane and very private. Perhaps too much so for 1958 audiences?

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 = 20012

SHADOW OF A DOUBT 1943

Decades before David Lynch turned his twisted lens on small-town perversity in the masterfully weird Blue Velvet, Alfred Hitchcock had already taken what I consider to be the definitive look at the pernicious effect of evil on small town life in Shadow of a Doubt. You can keep your Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window — classics all— but for me, there isn't a Hitchcock film that compares with Shadow of a Doubt.

Hitchcock to the left : Holding all the Aces

As a thriller, it has a simplicity of plot that is near-irresistible: A beloved uncle with a dark secret (Joseph Cotten) visits his family in a small northern California town. A secretive, closed-off person whose misanthropic nature contrasts starkly with the open friendliness he displays to insinuate himself into the lives of his distant family and the townsfolk. It isn't long before Charlie reveals himself to be a true figure of evil; his presence threatening to disrupt the conventional lives around him. His true nature also initiates a shattering coming-of-age for his adoring niece (Teresa Wright).

Santa Rosa, California

If you can imagine Vincente Minnelli's small-town valentine, Meet Me in St. Louis crossed with Orson Welles' noirish thriller The Stranger, then you have a pretty good idea of what a delightfully sinister mélange Hitchcock concocts in Shadow of a Doubt. (Both Thornton Wilder of Our Town and Sally Benson of Meet Me in St. Louis worked on the script for Shadow of a Doubt).

Teresa Wright as Charlotte Newton

Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley

Macdonald Carey as Det. Jack Graham

Patricia Collinge as Emma Newton

Henry Travers as Joseph Newton

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I've always been impressed by Alfred Hitchcock's ability to balance humor and terror in his films. It always seemed like such a dangerous risk to take...potentially sacrificing mood or suspense for the sake of interjecting some bit of levity...but his films always carry it off. Almost always. The humor in Frenzy and Family Plot verges on the painful.
In Shadow of a Doubt the humor on display is of the gentle type derived exclusively from the characters. To great effect, Joseph Cotten's self-serious, misanthropic sociopath (how's that for a description? Reminds me of Wood Allen's line: "I'd call him a sadistic, sodomistic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.") is contrasted with the practical and sweet Teresa Wright and her decidedly dotty family. Each is lovably offbeat in some very real way, and their harmless eccentricity lends them an endearing vulnerability in the face of Cotten's poisonous view of mankind.

"Really Poppa, you'd think Momma had never SEEN a phone! She makes no allowance for science. 
She thinks she has to cover the distance by sheer lung power!"

The Newton Family: If cast today, the parents look too much like grandparents

PERFORMANCES
I've always liked how Joseph Cotten never seemed to be too taken with his own good looks. He played both villains and romantic leads with such a refreshing lack of ego that even his monsters were likable.

Charlie- "The whole world's a joke to me."

As good as the entire cast of Shadow of a Doubt is, it's the work of Teresa Wright that towers over the rest. A stage-trained actress Oscar nominated for her first three film roles, Wright gives one of those performances that makes the film unimaginable without her. She is a wonderfully natural presence in the film, very contemporary in her acting style and apparently incapable of having a false moment on the screen. I can't think of another actress from this era who exudes such a down-to-earth quality. While so many of her contemporaries spoke in that stagy, mid-Atlantic dialect that telegraphed "acting!" Wright seemed not to be playacting at all. Her performance under Hitchcock's direction is one of her strongest.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Years before he would succumb to stylistic self-consciousness, Shadow of a Doubt shows Hitchcock in full control of his gifts as a master storyteller. The film is sharp and compact and zips by at an entertaining and very suspenseful 108 minutes. Indeed, in this era where a film like Sex and the City 2 can eat up more than two hours with a virtually non-existent plot, or Quentin Tarantino can actually lose his way when confronted with a running time of less than 2 ½ hours (Death Proof is like the work of a gifted 10 year-old let loose with a camera), Shadow of a Doubt looks like nothing short of a miracle. There isn't a wasted frame, superfluous scene, or self-indulgent moment in this tightly-structured film that economically achieves its desired effect without skimping on character development or plot detail.

The almost psychic connection between Charlie and his niece Charlotte (Little Charlie), rendered cinematically.

Uncle Charlie- "We're old friends, Charlie. More than that. We're like twins."   

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

My absolute favorite parts of Shadow of a Doubt are the scenes chronicling Teresa Wright's mounting disillusion with her idealized uncle, Joseph Cotten. The psychological authenticity of her behavior and reactions are so keenly observed and subtly performed. It's marvelous to me that the screenwriters had the sense and took the time to really let Wright's awakening to her uncle's true nature be an integral part of the film's second half.

Everything is Suspect: Charlotte watches her uncle's powerful hands twisting a napkin.

Filmmakers today, afraid of losing the short attention-span of their audience, never seem to understand that unless you devote enough time to the psychology of your characters, no degree of plot twists or action scenes can generate interest in the outcome of a film. The most gripping moments from Shadow of a Doubt come from the scenes where the loss of idealism in Wright's character is something we can literally see. The defeated body language, the hardening of the voice, the way you can tell that she mourns for her previous state of ignorance. It's a masterful performance.

I love how Wright's once-free physicality around Charlie gradually grows awkward, and how she can't seem to stand looking at him. There are these great fleeting moments when you can see her studying him when he's not looking, searching for a betraying trace of the evil she knows is there but somehow missed.
The post-library dinner table scene is, from a psychological standpoint, one of the most emotionally true, discomfiting scenes of mounting family discord in modern cinema. It's in this scene that Teresa Wright really shines. Scarcely an actress today could handle the complexities of that scene (Ok, maybe Natalie Portman or Cate Blanchett...).

Charlotte notices a mysterious inscription inside of a ring her uncle just gave her.

As I've stated, Teresa Wright gives a stellar performance here, but kudos go to the team of writers who were smart enough to mine the dramatic possibilities in a young girl being forced to confront the ugliness of the real world. They could have played up the police/manhunt angle for the obvious action potential, but the film benefits greatly from keeping its focus on what the characters are going through rather than the chase and the procedurals of police work.

Though the term is bandied about a lot these days, Shadow of a Doubt has a deserved reputation as a Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece. A solid entertainment and suspenseful drama, but what resonates for me is that at its core it is a cunningly perceptive treatise on nostalgia and the romanticism of the past.

Charlie: "I keep remembering those things. The old things. Everybody was sweet and pretty then, the whole world. A wonderful world. Not like the world today. Not like the world now. It was great to be young then."

These words, spoken by a character embittered by what he sees as the corruption of good around him, are no truer then than they are now. Every age thinks the age past is the ultimate age of innocence. If you look on YouTube you can even read comments by people lamenting the state of the world today and denoting the '70s, '80s, and even the '90s as a "kinder, gentler time." As a man past middle-age, I find myself caught in that inevitable "curmudgeon zone" where everything about the world today seems somehow inferior (as is evident from my comments about contemporary filmmakers) and my past seems endlessly cheerier and innocent. Now mind you, the innocent and cheerier time I look back at with such rose-colored glasses are the '70s. And we all KNOW that the '70s were anything but innocent.
But that's what I mean, the world of the past is always soothing to our minds and we go to great lengths to recreate it as we wish to remember it. No matter how far from the truth it may be.

Hume Cronyn (right) making his film debut as a neighbor obsessed with the details of crime and murder.

The small-town life depicted in Shadow of a Doubt is a vision of America that never existed except in our minds and perhaps on our TV screens and in our movies. It takes a special kind of myopia to be able to (or need to) see the world in such a narrow fashion. To paraphrase Dickens, history has always been a combination of the best of times and the worst of times. The world is never all good, nor is it all evil. Shadow of a Doubt artistically shakes us out of our fantasies and reminds us that remaining in a state of ignorance is not the same as remaining in a state of innocence. Charlotte Newton has her eyes opened to some of the darkness that exists in the world, but seeing the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, is just a part of growing up.

On Uncle Charlie's twisted opinion of the world: "It's not quite as bad as all that, 
but sometimes it needs a lot of watching. It seems to go crazy every now and then."

And wasn't it Norman Bates in "Psycho" who said, "We all go a little mad sometimes" ?

Something Wicked This Way Comes:
Uncle Charlie arrives.

Copyright © Ken Anderson