Movie Night With Urbaniak: Shadow of a Doubt

Here’s my problem with Hitchcock, and the problem is all mine and not at all Hitchcock’s. When I was in film class back in high school, they showed me Psycho first and pointed out Hitchcock’s brilliant editing, his modernist, sophisticated camera movements, his cruel, ironic detachment and his morbid black humor. This, they said, is Good Hitchcock, and I, the good little student, nodded and wrote down all that, and watched other Hitchcock movies and wisely noted where he employed his brilliant editing, his modernist, sophisticated camera movements, his cruel ironic detachment and his morbid black humor. And so, when a Hitchcock movie had a deficit of any of these things, I consigned it to a list of “Not Good” Hitchcock. I would watch a movie like Sabotage and impatiently wait for the thrilling bomb-on-the-bus sequence, because that’s what I had been taught Good Hitchcock was “about.”

So let me just take this moment to say: God damn you, you stupid fucking film teachers, why would you teach the work of a director like that?
 
That would be like teaching film students the Coen Bros by saying “No Country For Old Men is the Coens at their best, it’s full of silences and suspense and minimalist camera movement,” and then pity the poor hapless generation of film students who then encounter The Big Lebowski and dismiss it as a minor work because it doesn’t have any of those things.

A few years ago, I was watching North by Northwest for the fifth or sixth time and, out of the blue, I suddenly noticed something new: Eva Marie Saint is really sexy. How had this plain-as-day fact of the narrative slipped by me before? Because it had nothing to do with what I had been taught was “Good Hitchcock,” and so I had spent the scenes of Eva Marie Saint’s seduction of Cary Grant looking at, I don’t know, the rear-projection plate probably.

I even went through a long period of time where I felt that Hitchcock maybe wasn’t all he was cracked up to be, that perhaps maybe his movies were only “about” moviemaking itself, that he was just a clever technician with nothing “real” to say about humanity. I’m happy to report that I am wrong in this assessment.

What rescued Hitchcock for me? Well, you’ll never guess, but the answer is screenplay analysis. All I needed to do was set aside the brilliant editing, modernist camera movements, etc, and concentrate on the story being told through analysis of the screenplay, and Hitchcock suddenly became a completely different director. Because, after all, the screenplay is what a movie is, the director is nowhere without it, even though my film teachers, in their auteurist fervor, had taught me the exact opposite.

So Urbaniak and I watched Shadow of a Doubt and yakked about the acting. Most of the cast is very fine, and the leads are quite wonderful. Their performances are informed by the 40s style of acting, but are still rooted in an emotional truth, which is crucial for this movie to work, because let’s face it, it’s actually a very small movie, set mostly in a house in a small town (the same town The Man Who Wasn’t There is set in, although I have a hard time figuring out why the Coens made that decision). Two key performances are off, in the room’s opinion — Macdonald Carey gives an absent, vague, glib performance as a detective looking for Uncle Charlie and Urbaniak un-fave Hume Cronyn is technical, showy and didactic as the nosy neighbor (Cronyn’s role becomes much more watchable when one imagines Bob Balaban in the part instead).

Early in the movie, a black train porter walks through a train compartment and delivers a few expository lines to an offscreen Joe Cotton. Urbaniak and I noted the dignity and composure of the actor and joked that he was probably a huge figure in the black American theater, had probably played Shakespeare and was probably a leader of black American actors, but this is the only kind of role he could get in Hollywood movies. Imagine our non-surprise when it turned out our instincts were exactly correct: Clarence Muse was a polymath actor/writer/composer, activist and leader of black American actors, and almost all of his Hollywood credits involve him playing a character named Porter.

So: about that screenplay.  Charlie Newton, the protagonist of Shadow of a Doubt, is a small-town girl with big dreams.  She wants to escape the bounds of her parochial, complacent small-town life, and just in time her favorite Uncle Charlie Oakley comes to visit.  Now then: note how the protagonist of Shadow of a Doubt is, essentially, passive.  Charlie longs for excitement, but she’s not doing anything to actually leave town.  Instead, she’s going to ask her favorite uncle to come stay — “That’ll shake things up!” she bubbles.  Little does she know that Uncle Charlie is already on his way, because he’s lying low trying to escape some detectives who are trailing him.  Because Charlie’s favorite Uncle Charlie is, in fact, a serial killer, a charming rogue who likes to woo wealthy widows and then slaughter them like cattle and steal their money.

The first two acts of Shadow of a Doubt move along at a brisk clip, but there is very little explicitly “Hitchcokian” about them — no ironic detachment, no modernist camera moves, no brilliant editing.  Why?  What’s the matter, was Hitchcock not inspired?  Well, no, thanks a lot, stupid film teachers.  Shadow of a Doubt is shot the way it is (or isn’t, depending on your point of view) because it’s a very internal story about a protagonist who isn’t even in pursuit of anything.  The story is, simply, a girl who’s just nuts about a guy who she thinks is the bees knees, and who, through Act II, starts acting a little weird, to the point where she thinks maybe this wonderful guy isn’t quite so wonderful.  At the end of Act II, a mere 60 minutes into the movie, the scales fall from her eyes and she realizes the wonderful guy is the exact opposite of wonderful, and the remaining 45 minutes or so (kind of long for a third act, but not so’s you’d notice) are a suspense-ridden chess game of Uncle Charlie trying to act innocent while trying to kill Charlie, and Charlie trying to get the goods on Uncle Charlie so he’ll leave town. 

So if you’re looking for directorial brilliance, try this — make a movie about a passive protagonist, where the narrative hinges about the way she feels about a guy, shoot it all with a minimum of tricks, and have it turn out to be a riveting suspense classic.