She is in love with her Uncle Charles (Joseph Cotton), her mother’s brother. She comes up the back stairs, still in her coat, and enters Charlie’s room, and only then does her father step through the threshold. Although not explicitly forbidden in the Production Code that governed the content of motion pictures during this time, it’s interesting that the father does not enter his daughter’s bedroom-in fact he hovers at the doorway as if an invisible barrier existed-until his wife returns home. The camera is at bed level the angle assumes her line of vision, not his. I simply give up.Ĭharlie: Have you ever stopped to think that a family should be the most wonderful thing in the world? And that ours is just going to pieces?Īlthough the scene is played so as to encourage us to identify with the father’s kind-hearted bemusement at Charlie’s teen-angst “thinking,” the shot is framed from her position. I’ve come to the conclusion that I give up. Joseph: What’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?Ĭharlie: No, I’m perfectly well. In this scene, Charlie’s father Joseph (Henry Travers) has come home from work, to find Charlie in her bed, moping: It’s the off-kilter tone, the weird silences, the uneasy sense that there’s no cure for the evil black heart of both films.Ĭharlie (Teresa Wright) is a 1943-version of Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) in Blue Velvet, all pent-up angst waiting for an exterminating angel to set her free. It’s not only that both films probe, with a mixture of excitement and wonder and terror, dark truths behind the bright façade of American leafy-boulevard suburbia.

The first time you saw David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, you knew that Shadow of a Doubt (released when Lynch was three-years-old) was the film he would have made had he been born in a different era. This week, I examine Shadow of a Doubt, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1943):

This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible.

Til two shadow of a doubt