But to arrive at their bracing notion that in the United States the ‘mainstream’ itself is composed of aberrations, Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson and the Hitchcocks (the filmmaker and his indispensable partner, wife Alma Reville) created their extraordinary screenplay from a story idea by Gordon McDonnell. One of Hitchcock’s two finest films of the ’40s (the other is Notorious, 1946) suggests novels by Booth Tarkington, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters-authors who grappled with American loneliness and aberrant behavior. The ‘average American family’ in Shadow of a Doubt, the Newtons of Santa Rosa, California, are but a façade of emotional strength and mental health, built by affectionate love and nostalgia, behind which we find two delightful children and their undelighted elders: a sister self-described as being “in a rut,” aimless and discontent a father who is unable to assert himself in the household’s mini-matriarchy a mother and wife who sees herself only as an appendage to others and Uncle Charlie, her younger brother visiting from New York, who “has secrets” and hides from the police, for unbeknownst to the others he is a serial killer, the ‘Merry Widow Murderer.’ Relatively rare in a ‘rootless’ society predicated on individualism, family life-so much more central in Britain-might at best help defend one against this loneliness, when indeed family itself didn’t instigate or exacerbate the loneliness instead. Armed with the antiestablishmentarianism he had brought over from England, which would assist in his becoming a soft-spoken prophet against American materialism and mammonism, Hitchcock observed also a terrible loneliness in the States-a theme that would eventually lead to his masterpiece, Psycho (1960). His fifth American film but only the second whose action unfolds in the States (whereas Saboteur, 1942, the first, begins in California and ends in New York, Shadow begins in New York City and ends in California), it already reveals his grasp of his newly adopted country’s social and moral landscape a BankAmerica tower looms over the heart of the small town where most of the film is set. To the end Shadow of a Doubt remained Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite among his sixty-odd films.
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