I probably will see "Her" tomorrow afternoon, but, truth be told, I'm a little bit done with the Oscars, except for watching them for the outfits. Even if aged, I am a girl, and it's all about the dresses.
We watched "Shadow of a Doubt", Hitchock's film, on Saturday night, and I really think it's one of his best. His wife, Alma Reville, stated that it was Hitch's favorite. We've always been interested in it for personal reasons: our older daughter was born in Santa Rosa, the setting, and our older son and his wife now live there. In fact, the house where the movie was filmed is nearby their place. More than that, which I agree would not move you to rent it, is that it is probably the scariest and best acted of his films before Psycho. The cast is tremendous, with Joseph Cotten as the villain, Teresa Wright as his niece and veteran stars of the era, including Hume Cronyn, adding greatly to the fleshing out of an ordinary town, that, when you scratch the surface, reveals that nobody is really that normal.
Cotten plays a spoiled younger brother whom his older sister worships. He's vaguely in business back east, and drops in every few years, sends presents, and makes himself tantalizing in his absence. His niece, the oldest of three children, just graduated from high school, is named after him: Charlie, and she idolizes him. As he visits, having been chased out of an eastern city by detectives, his dark shadow reveals itself to Charlie, as she is now a young woman and notices discrepancies. She gradually sees, with the help of a young detective played by MacDonald Carrey, that her uncle is evil, but she is afraid such knowledge would crush her mother, who dotes on him, so she keeps her secret.
As tense and absorbing as this main plot is, with an amazing turn by Cotten, it is the viewer's realization that every person in this ordinary family (emphasized by the ruse that the detectives perpetrated that they are interviewing and photographing a typical American family) is anything but ordinary that carries the humor and irony of the film. The father is absorbed with his friend Herb in discussing how they could murder each other without being caught. These conversations are overheard by the children, and gruesome in the extreme. The mother is so fragile that everyone treats her like a person one inch from a nervous breakdown, and her hysteria is bizarre. Charlie is bored but lethargic, overidentifying with her mother, and fearful clearly of becoming her if she marries. Anne, the middle child, is obcessed with books and stories to the point of detachment, and her braininess is funny but irritating. She is oblivious, yet, when she refuses to continue to sit by her uncle at the dinner table, like the dog who barks, you wish somebody would listen. The baby of the family, a boy about seven, is the most obviously normal, but in such a family, what will be his phobias and obcessions as he ages?
Uncle Charlie may be a person who murders women for their money, but the family has within it the darkness that is present in all of us, and perhaps, in certain circumstances, takes a only gentle tipping to descend into madness. Much is made of a childhood accident of Uncle Charlie, when he was hit by a streetcar and almost died. Before he'd been a reader and quiet and gentle, but afterwards, as his sister describes, he became wild and overly energetic. But in Hitchcock's world, even a reader can be sinister, as are the father and his friend. What secrets lie in the heart of a sleepy American town? You begin to wonder.
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