Shadow_Of_A_Doubt

Shadow Of A Doubt Shadow of a Doubt 1943 USA 105 mins Source: NL Prod Co: Universal Pro: Jack H Skirball Dir: Alfred Hitchcock Scr: Thornton Wilder, Alma Reville, Sally Benson Phot: Joseph Valentine Mus: Dimitri Tiomkin Cast: Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, Patricia Collinge, MacDonald Carey, Henry Travers, Hume Cronyn, Wallace Ford "... if you ripped the front off houses..." Shot mostly on location in the small Northern California town of Santa Rosa in the Summer of 1942, Shadow of a Doubt is Hitchcock's mischievious attempt to construct a superficially simple, morally ambiguous narrative around a complex web of genres, narrative templates, tones and styles. It is a film which ingeniously mixes the visual iconography and archetypes of horror, a nascent film noir and a Capraesque domestic comedy, and is widely regarded as Hitchcock's breakthrough Hollywood picture, his first film attempt to fully come to terms with both American culture and Hollywood cinema. As such it is a curious, knowing and prescient film, far from the grand-standing, detached, episodic set-piece spectacle of the North by Northwest-like Saboteur (1942) that immediately preceded it. By enlisting Thornton Wilder, the playwright of the Americana-soaked Our Town, as scriptwriter, Hitchcock was able to infuse what are, in some ways, film, one, hitchcock, family, american, hitchcock's, charlie, wilder, uncle, film's, simple, joseph, incestuous, horror, films, explicitly, emerges, doubt, dialogue, between, attempt, younger, young, wright, ways, town, throughout, though, thornton, teresa, symbols, stylistic, small-town, shot, shadow, sexual