Shadow of a Doubt (43)

Director of Photography-Joseph A. Valentine

Wolfman (41)

Saboteur (42)

Rope (48)

The Merry Widow Waltz

after ring inscription discovered the first time w/i film proper we get merry widows

waltzing couples

the waltzers connect the two Charlie's

"The image is never placed. If the scene of dancing is real, surely its world must be long

past, viewed through a screen of nostalgia. If the scene is only a vision, whose vision is

it? The film's opening raises the questions of who or what commands the camera and

what motivates the presentation of this view. Shadow of a Doubt begins by declaring

itself enigmatic, even before it announces that its projected world harbors a mystery

within it. Charles's mystery is from the outset linked to the author's gesture of opening his

film as he does." Rothman page 179 William Rothman's Hitchcock: The Murderous

Gaze, Harvard 1984

"The dancing couples image specifically resonates with the picture of the lost idyll in The

Lodger's flashback" Rothman page 179

Joseph Newton (Father): Well the bank gave me a raise last January.

Young Charlie: Money! How can you talk about money when I'm talking about souls?

The one right man to save us.

“This tilt down to the money: this camera movement does not disclose the thoughts on

which Cotton is dwelling. Why is this man rolling in money lying in bed in broad

daylight in a seedy rooming house? Where has all the money come from and why is he so

indifferent to it? In introducing him in this manner—rather, in withholding a proper

introduction, in presenting him to us as unknown—the camera's autonomy is asserted, its

enigma declared. Charles's mystery, the mystery of the authors designation of him, and

the mystery of the camera’s gesture are linked" Rothman, page 181

He awakens to darkness like a vampire. (The idea that Charles is a kind of vampire runs

through the film. The issue of whether you can be photographed for example relates to it

and when Charlie is told part of the truth about her uncle by Saunders, Graham walks

ahead with Ann, who is told to occupy herself by telling the story of Dracula.)

Rothman Page 182

Uncle Charlie reveals violence to audience tosses shot glass against sink

UC knocks over water glass to distract Young Charlie from uttering "Merry Widow"

JOE: "I don't believe in inviting trouble" UC tosses hat on bed

CHARLIE: Can't we have a little peace and quiet without dragging in poisons all the

time?

Uncle Charlie, you're hurting me—your hands!

"In a gesture whose audacity matches Charles's own, the camera twists elegantly to the

left spanning the cityscape and finally settling on Charles himself in profile. Fully come

to life, he surveys the scene with amusement and contempt as he puffs on his cigar. Again

Hitchcock has declared a bond, itself enigmatic, between the camera and this figure, the

bounds of whose power and theatricality we find ourselves unable to survey" Rothman

page 183

"That's right, Santa Rosa, California" conjures

He heard me! He heard me!

It's my brother you know, my younger brother. The baby. Yes, of course a little spoiled.

You know how families always spoil the youngest!

camera dollies to the left to separate Momma Emma with her news of the murderous

brother from her children

cameo

Skeptical Gazes

Uncle Charlie you're awful, everyone can hear you.

now directed toward Jack Graham

At first I didn't know you. Why Uncle Charlie, you're not sick!

I remember you sort of. You look different.

Emma. Don't move.

:18:31

Standing there,

you don't look like Emma Newton.

:18:33

You look like Emma Spencer Oakley of

46 Burnham Street, St Paul, Minnesota.

:18:37

- The prettiest girl on the block.

- Charles.

:18:39

Mama, nobody got off the train

but Uncle Charlie.

:18:43

- Let me look at you.

- There was only us meeting somebody.

:18:45

- To think you could take the time off.

- There was only one bed made up.

:18:49

- It's so wonderful to have you here.

- Emmy, Emmy, don't cry.

:18:52

And imagine your thinking

of 46 Burnham Street.

:18:55

I haven't thought of that

funny old street in years.

:18:57

I keep remembering those things.

All the old things.

:19:00

(Joe) Emmy, how's he look?

Same old Charles, eh?

Seduces family by playing the blood relation card

JOE: She's not crazy. Smartest girl in her class at school. Won the debate against the East Richmond High

School single-handed. She's got brains.

UC: (Chuckles) Not for you to read. Forget it. Good night, young

Charlie.

CHARLIE: Good night Uncle Charlie. Pleasant dreams.

UC: Emmy, women are fools. They'd fall for anything.

spatial relationship—quite apart

We're not just an uncle and a niece. It's something else.

CHARLIE: I can't explain it. But you came here and Mother's so happy

and... I'm glad that she named me after you and that she thinks we're

both alike. I think we are, too. I know it. Oh, it would spoil things

if you should give me anything.

UC: You're a strange girl, Charlie. Why would it spoil things?

CHARLIE: Because we're not just an uncle and a niece. It's something

else. I know you. I know that you don't tell people a lot of things.

I don't either. I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there's

something nobody knows about.

UC: Something... nobody knows?

CHARLIE: Something secret and wonderful and... I'll find it out.

UC: (Chuckles) It's not good to find out too much, Charlie.

CHARLIE: But we're sort of like twins. Don't you see?

We have to know.

UC: Give me your hand, Charlie. (Places ring on finger)

CHARLIE: Thank you.

UC: I've never been photographed and I don't want to be.

EMMY: Oh, Charles, how can you talk that way?

I had a photograph of you. I gave it to Charlie.

UC: I tell you, there are none.

EMMY: I guess you've forgotten this one. Get it, Charlie.

You sure you don't remember?

UC: Of course I don't ever remember being photographed.

Burnham Street.

EMMY: Mm-hm. It was taken the Christmas you got your bicycle.

- Just before your accident.

CHARLIE: Uncle Charlie, you were beautiful!

EMMY: Wasn't he, though? And such a quiet boy. Always reading.

Papa shouldn't have got you that bicycle. You didn't know how to

handle it. He took it right out on the icy road and skidded into a

streetcar. We thought he was going to die.

CHARLIE: I'm glad he didn't.

EMMY: He almost did. He fractured his skull, and he was laid up so

long. And then, when he was getting well, there was no holding him.

And it was just as though all the rest he had was too much for him

and he had to get into mischief to blow off steam.

He didn't do much reading after that, let me tell you.

It was taken the very day he had his accident.

A few days later when the pictures came home, how mama cried.

She wondered if he'd ever look the same. She wondered if he'd ever be

the same.

UC: What's the use of looking backward? What's the use of looking

ahead? Today's the thing. That's my philosophy. Today.

EMMY: If today's the thing, then you'd better finish your breakfast

small town JC Penney's

Joe often framed-trapped

uniformed soldier to Charlie's left

soldiers in front of 'Til-Two Cocktail Longue

soldier count

why we fight

Flirting

The discrepant tone shift

UC frightening speech followed by Soldiers laughing-discrepant tone shift

There is a spectacular stylized crane shot at the crucial moment in Hitchcock’s Shadow

of a Doubt (1943) when young Charlie (Teresa Wright) finally learns the truth about her

beloved, but murderous Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten). A crane shot is achieved by a

camera mounted on a mechanism adapted from farm and building construction

machinery known as a crane, which can extend vertically several feet to several stories.

Helicopter or other air flight-mounted cameras can accomplish "super-crane" effects as

well. In general an ascending crane shot away from an object, person, or scene can confer

to viewers a sense of effortless, privileged superiority, escape, or alienation. It often

serves as closure or poignant commentary inviting contemplation at the ends of films. A

descending crane shot toward an object, person, or scene can confer to viewers a sense of

increasing observation and interest accompanied, nonetheless, by a certain detachment.

As is the case with all stylized techniques and devices, their significance is always

dependent on the context within which it is used. Due to the expense, the use of crane

shots often requires a big budget.

In the library reading room young Charlie has been scouring a newspaper article

indicting her Uncle who, the previous evening, had prevented her from reading the

incriminating piece with the diversion of tearing up the newspaper to construct a barn,

and later that evening forcibly prevented her by violently twisting her wrist. Hitchcock

cuts from a choker close-up (extreme close-up from the neck to top of the head or closer,

conferring intensity of emotion, etc,) of young Charlie’s face to a close-up of her hands

centered over the Santa Rosa newspaper removing the ring Uncle Charlie gave her. The

film then is cut to her point of view showing an extreme close-up insert shot of the ring as

she rotates it in order to read the inscription, comparing the initials on it, "B.M.,"

(allegedly an inside Hitchcock toilet humor joke), to those of a recent victim of the

“Merry Widow Murderer” listed in the article. She comes to the grisly realization that she

is wearing the ring of a woman her Uncle recently killed! We are returned to the

previous close-up of her hands. As she clasps the ring in her right hand and exits the

reading room deep in thought or in a daze, the camera begins to pull or zoom back while

simultaneously ascending up a great distance via a crane-mounted camera as Dimitri

Tiomkin’s soundtrack begins its bittersweet, slightly tragic melody. As young Charlie’s

exit is nearly complete we lap dissolve to Uncle Charlie’s recurring image of gentlemen

and ladies waltzing and Tiomkin’s score changes to Franz Lehar’s "Merry Widow

Waltz." This brief scene dissolves to Uncle Charlie strolling on the sidewalk in front of

his niece’s family home presumably scrutinizing for additional incriminating information

today’s edition of the local newspaper as Charlie’s young siblings run past him on either

side. The result of the zooming out and ascending crane shot shows young Charlie’s

image getting smaller and smaller as the "forbidden knowledge" of her beloved Uncle’s

true identity sinks in. The effect of this scene depicts the formerly naive girl gaining

knowledge and participates in classic Western culture’s iconography and ideology of

"falling from grace," as did Adam and Eve in Genesis.

A similar effect to Hitchcock’s “falling from grace” shot of young Charlie is found in

Don Taylor’s BBC film of Sophocles’ Oedipus (1984).

At the crucial moment of anagnoris, Aristotle’s word for recognition, when Oedipus

(Michael Pennington) has received from the Theban Messenger/Shepherd (Gerard

Murphy) the final incriminating detail about his birth, his identity, and therefore, his

crimes against his Father, his Mother-Wife, and siblings-offspring, Don Taylor’s choker

close-up of Oedipus is replaced by a long shot achieved by a camera on a crane. All at

once Oedipus looks small and vulnerable; he has gained the knowledge he has been

searching for the entire play, and precisely at that crucial moment he is visually depicted

as having fallen. The camera on the crane then proceeds to zoom down and in on him

into another close-up. Although the movement of Taylor’s camera toward his subject is

in the opposite direction of Hitchcock’s movement away from his subject, it can be

argued a similar effect is achieved. At the moment of painful recognition we see

characters “fall.” The experience of being denied the close-up of Oedipus we have

become accustomed to in this very tense scene, jars and shakes us.

The familiar becomes defamiliarized by this effect, what Bertolt Brecht called the

“alienation effect” (verfremdungseffekt). A technique borrowed from the Russian

Formalists, Brecht hoped audiences would see things anew by breaking, for example, the

“fourth wall”. In the theater the fourth wall is that invisible line between actors and

audience. Everything that happens behind that imaginary line is virtually real for the

duration of the performance. It is the social convention we all accept as explained by

Coleridge’s dictum: “the willing suspension of disbelief.” In traditional proscenium arch

theatrical productions, that line is never to be crossed in order to maintain the illusion that

what happens behind it, on stage, is “real.” Out of a fear of breaking this “fictive reality,”

one of the cardinal rules of stage acting prohibits the actor from looking directly into the

eyes of the audience members, and film acting continues that tradition by forbidding

direct eye contact with the camera. Rules are made to be broken at times, and certainly

this rule is negated when a stage actor delivers a “dramatic aside,” a character’s inner

thoughts voiced out loud by the character for the audience to hear, but not the other

characters on stage. Sometimes asides are voiced by characters who also meet the eyes

of the audience. A particular bond is established between any character who shares such

intimacy with the audience. To the query by his loutish Uncle and new Stepfather

Claudius, Hamlet sarcastically replies: “[Aside] A little more than kin, and less than

kind.” The aside serves a double function of announcing with Hamlet’s first line in the

play his alienation from the court’s phoniness and intrigue, and it forges a bond of

sympathy between the struggling adolescent and the audience. Comedic characters in

film will break the rule and look directly into the camera when the film’s realist premise

has already been thrown into doubt by other impossibilities and ridiculous occurrences.

Both the dancing gopher and the hapless assistant groundskeeper, Carl Spackler (Bill

Murray) of Caddyshack look directly into the camera, which connects them as lowest

“members of the food chain.” The gopher and the “doofus” are so subterranean,

however, they come out the other side and are afforded a certain privilege: Carl

unwittingly saves the day for Danny by vibrating the ball into the cup via plastic

explosives intended to exterminate the gopher, improbably allowing him to win the

$80,000 match while the gopher remains indestructible. Ferris Bueller (Matthew

Broderick) often addresses the camera directly when he delivers his occasional diary

entry-like comments on the action in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) as does the

Narrator (Ed Norton) and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) in Fight Club (1999). By

purposefully breaking the fourth wall, an artwork immediately calls attention to itself as

an artwork, and by doing so invites a meta-contemplation of itself by the audience and a

distance, an alienation from the audience. Brecht’s experience of audiences captivated in

trance-like enthrallment at Nazi rallies made him realize the power of the theatrical

spectacle and its potential danger.

Charlie doesn't look quite herself.

my Uncle's awfully neat and fussy

you were never much for helping

lead a life of luxury

Wife's brother from the East. New York man.

from "Fathead"

Since Jonathan Drew’s choker close up dating from 1927, none of the fatheads look

directly into nor confront the camera so the viewer can contemplate their state--none that

is except for “Uncle Charlie” and Norman Bates (to whom I will return.) Uncle Charlie

(Joseph Cotton Shadow of a Doubt 1943) shares his name (more than likely thanks to

American contributor Thornton Wilder) with the common, age-old baseball euphemism

for a curve ball, a pitch that “separates the men from the boys” in professional baseball

since its path deviates from the more or less straight trajectory of a fastball and is difficult

to hit. Uncle Charlie is the deviant, misogynistic thief and murderer who has never been

the same since his boyhood bicycle accident. As he delivers his chilling monologue in

monotone at the Newton dinner table about all those bourgeois widowed women who are

“Horrible, faded, fat, greedy women,” there is a spectacular push in (dolly in) that results

in a fathead choker close up of who the audience, but not the Newtons, already know is a

violent fugitive murderer. His telepathic niece Charlie interrupts him off camera,

claiming: “But they're alive! They're human beings.” The fathead close up remains on

Joseph Cotton as he turns to look directly into the camera to form a truly disturbing

visage. He argues for a pogrom against all such women: “Are they? Are they, Charlie?

Are they human, or are they fat, wheezing animals? Hm? And what happens to animals

when they get too fat and too old?” Recall that this image in its original big screen

projection carries an enormous punch—brass instruments clashing.

Horrible, faded, fat, greedy women. Are they human, or are they fat, wheezing animals? Hm?

William Rothman describes Uncle Charlie's obsessively fiddling with the cork on the

bottle of champagne at the dinner table as a kind of childish autoeroticism, and cites the

following sequence in the 'Til Two bar into which he drags Charlie: "CHARLES: I'm not

so old. I've been chasing around the globe since I was sixteen. Guess I've done some

pretty foolish things." We get a "cut to Charles's hands twisting the napkin, from

Charlie's point of view," as Uncle Charlie says: "Nothing serious. Foolish." Hitchcock

then cuts to Uncle Charlie, "looking down, a little boy's sheepish grin on his face."i At

that bar, this adult child fathead unveils his pathologically deviant nihilism: “Do you

know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you'd find

swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?” Uncle Charlie

represents Hitchcock’s first evil main character, whose adolescently bleak worldview and

murderous modus operandi can be traced to the eponymous hero of Goethe’s

bildungsroman, The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774). The potentially homosocial

triangular desire rehearsed in that novel points to a 20th

Century quasi-Freudian back

story funding nearly all of Hitchcock’s psycho fatheads. Moving beyond a refutation

and/or celebration of Freud’s theory on oedipality, arrested development, and

homosexuality,ii suffice it to say that by Sigmund Freud’s death in 1939, Hollywood was

deep in thrall of the thinker whose dream logic was a perfect match for its movie

practitioners and merchandisers. The troubled lover of Freudian theory who fell the

hardest was undoubtedly Alfred Hitchcock.

The Hollywood system represented by working for Selznick. Selznick's attention to detail

is fully the equal of Hitchcock's but their goals are completely opposite. Selznick aspired

to productions so impressive and so compellingly lifelike, that their audiences would be

given no cause to meditate on the film's merely human author. Plausibility and

production values were equally essential criteria in Selznick's efforts to achieve his goal,

which required the effacement of all signs that would remind the audience and had access

to the events of the film only through a mediator.

Page 175

i Hitchcock "inscribes a sexual signifier . . . . the bottle—Charles holds it in his hands,

which obsessively play with the cork—is accorded a prominent place in the frame, one

that underscores its clear schematic significance: it is the stand-in for Charles's penis."

Rothman, 215, 218. ii See for example Paul Gordon’s Dial M for Mother: A Freudian Hitchcock. (Fairleigh

Dickinson University Press Madison N.J. 2008)

The Hollywood system represented by working for Selznick. Selznick's attention to detail

is fully the equal of Hitchcock's but their goals are completely opposite Selznick aspire to

production so impressive and so compellingly lifelike that their audiences wouldn't be

given would be given no cost to meditate on the films merely human author. Plausibility

and production values were equally essential criteria in Selznick's efforts to achieve his

goal which required the effacement of all signs that would remind the audience and had

access to the events of the film only through a mediator Rebecca I believe turned out to

be a Selznick film that is also a Hitchcock film but this means that Hitchcock six years

and putting one over on the individual and Selznick was satisfied that what you produce

was his crowning accomplishment and

Rothman Page 175

Extended dialogue scenes played in film straight, all but unknown in Hitchcock's British

films, become increasingly important and his American work. By incorporating them into

his films, Hitchcock elaborates modes of presentation that allow the camera at the same

time to mask and to declare itself (these modes include what I have called shot reverse

shot form and the reframing mode). The dialectical relationship of film and theater is

given a new twist. (Emphasis added) Rothman p182

This conjuring once more we sense and attuned this between Hitchcock and Charles

The American father but are we to take shadow of a doubt for Ann's kind of literature or

Joe's page 184 and one former criticism might be appropriate to it then to both Ann’s and

Joe's positions. Graham is a documentary Photographer

And Ann’s literature is dedicated to romantic love as opposed by her father's

understanding of literature and his practice of literary criticism if wedlock is holy in

Ann’s literature and in her fathers it's a condition that motivates murder. could we take

shadow of a doubt for Ann's kind of literature or Joe's?

Rothman 185