Shadow of a Doubt

Admittedly it was a little difficult to pay really close attention to the typical Hitchcockian traits in the movie because I was so disturbed by the overwhelming, almost suffocatingly “perfect” family life the main characters had. I watched to movie with a small group of friends and I certainly was not the only one who noticed how absurdly wide the mother's and Charlie's smiles were. It honestly looked painful. I did notice, however, that none of the central female characters were blonde. And I do not believe I heard anything about brandy, either, though there seemed to be a lot of fuss made over wine. One thing that was repeated was that the house number was number thirteen.

I am glad I watched the movie with other people, though, because they picked up on things I would not have. For instance, that there never seems to be a finished conversation. Everyone always seems to cut off each other and the subject is changed before the conversation is truly finished. It was not until my friend pointed this out to me that I started realizing how amazingly often it happened. As in, pretty much every conversation. When we were discussing it afterwards, another friend said that an English teacher, (commenting on a book that had similarly disjointed conversations,) once told her that this was a sign of a dysfunctional family. So maybe, even though Charlie's family looks so perfect, they are, in actuality, dysfunctional. Which makes sense when you think about the fact that the father is constantly discussing the perfect way to get away with murder; or that the mother is a little dense and seemingly out-of-touch; or that the little sister acts twice her age. And I hate to be the type that makes a comment like this one, but even considering that Charlie is Uncle Charlie's namesake, the two share a disturbingly intimate relationship. Having to consider that Hitchcock believes one can derive more about a person by watching them than by listening to them, one has to see the kind of looks that Charlie gives her uncle, or vice-versa, or that the two tend to be much closer, physically, than any other pairing in the entirety of the movie.

But setting the disturbing relationship aside, overall, this one was definitely not my favorite Hitchcock movie. The only thing that saved it was that my friends and I eventually dissolved the event into a Rifftrax moment. I was kind of upset that I disliked a Hitchcock film. But I suppose I cannot like them all. . .