ALFRED HOTCHCOCK FULL
In a canon full of femme fatales and murder victims, she stands out. As Charlie the Younger, Teresa Wright is Hitchcock’s most vulnerable heroine, but she is also his smartest and most capable, as seen in her slow investigation into her uncle’s activities.
ALFRED HOTCHCOCK SERIAL
While Shadow of a Doubt contains the familiar Hitchcockian tropes of deceit and serial killing, the lack of urban environments, international espionage, and steamy sexual tension gives the film a real edge. Charlie (Teresa Wright) is utterly bored with her life in suburban California until her rebellious Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) – her namesake – turns up, with reports of murder following him from the big city.
Here, the suspicious protagonist is a teenage girl. Just three years after Rebecca, Hitchcock perfected his dark, suspenseful style with Shadow of a Doubt, but the film has one quality that is rather unique in retrospect.
That award, of course, went to Selznick while Hitchcock had to make do with the first of his five Best Director nominations. It certainly convinced the Academy, who honored the film in 11 Oscar categories, and awarded it Best Black & White Cinematography (for George Barnes’ gothic gloom) and Best Picture.
But in their place is a masterful piece of psychological suspense, as Joan Fontaine’s unnamed protagonist is hounded by the memory of her new husband’s (Lawrence Olivier, fresh off his turn as Heathcliff in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights) dead, former wife. Typical Hitchcock flourishes, like adventurous thrills and humor, are missing. Rebecca, adapted from the Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name, is no different. By 1940, this legendary producer had made his name by creating lavish adaptations of literary epics, such as Anna Karenina, A Tale of Two Cities, and the high-grossing, Oscar-nabbing Gone with the Wind. While Hitchcock is held up as one of filmmaking history’s true auteurs, his first Hollywood feature is, in many ways, a studio film, as it was his first picture directed under contract to David O. Indeed, the genius of Hitchcock’s career can be rather overwhelming to behold.
But there’s something about a Hitchcock film – the dry wit, the recurring themes, the willingness to experiment with the art form – that is undeniably distinctive. As with any crackpot critical theory, auteurism becomes a little masturbatory and inaccurate when applied generally, and its dismissiveness towards other aspects of the creative process is downright ungenerous. The French New Wave critics picked Hitchcock as a prime example for their auteur theory, a way of reading films that highlights the creative authority of the director over all other influences. His body of work – not to mention his rotund body itself – is both immense and iconic, full of tense thrillers, psycho-dramas, and adventure flicks that were not only wildly popular at the time, but inspired both critical re-evaluation and whole new generations of filmmakers in ensuing years. Whenever geeky film conversations turn to the topic of the greatest British directors, a few answers frequently crop up: Charlie Chaplin, David Lean, Nicolas Roeg, and Michael Powell are just a handful of a list of potentials, but there is one man whose impact on film history outclasses almost all contenders: Alfred Hitchcock.īorn on the cusp of the 20th Century, Hitchcock came to define entire genres of cinema in a career that spanned over 50 years and over 50 films.
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