Tuesday, July 1, 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm
Instructor: Ray Saraceni, Ph.D., Eastern University
In 1939, fresh off successes like THE 39 STEPS and THE LADY VANISHES, Alfred Hitchcock left the United Kingdom to take up permanent residence in the United States. While the American studio system offered him more generous financing, a larger technical toolbox, and a cache of star performers, the question remained—would Hitchcock, with his macabre and mischievous wit, his dark view of human nature, and his voyeuristic gaze, succeed in making Hitchcock films in sunny Hollywood?
SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943) provides an answer in the affirmative. Set in Santa Rosa, California, the film explores an almost archetypal collision between innocence and (murderous) experience, when the apparently idyllic life of a supposedly average American family is suddenly upended by the arrival of the charismatic but sinister Uncle Charlie (an unsettlingly malevolent Joseph Cotten). Charlie seems to be on the run from the law, but he may have other motives for dropping in on his sister’s family—most intriguingly, a fascination with and affinity for his young niece, also named Charlie (Teresa Wright), who clearly feels drawn to her uncle in mysterious and unnerving ways. A tale of repressed desire and pathological violence—of doppelgangers, caprice, and innocence unmasked—SHADOW OF A DOUBT, as Hitchcock himself liked to say, brings “murder back into the home, where it belongs.”
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