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Teresa Wright, Shadow of a Doubt by Virginia Campbell People who are not Hitchcock buffs often don't know Shadow of a Doubt, but, thanks in no small part to its precision acting, it's easily as great as other Hitchcock films to which "masterpiece" status is more colloquially granted. the two leads, Joseph Cotten as the debonair but deadly "Uncle Charlie," a murderer on the lam who retreats to a small town to hide out within his unsuspecting sister's family, and Teresa Wright, as his adoring niece "Charlie," play such a tense, flawless duet together that the story vibrates with layer on layer of meaning. The film deals in everything from plain old when-will-they-realize? suspense, to themes of intertwined good and evil, to Freudian issues of emotional incest. "We're not just an uncle and a niece," Charlie says to Uncle Charlie, after whom she's been named by a mother who insists the two share similarities, "...we're sort of like twins." Obviously Hitchcock masterminded the delicate interaction of Cotten and Wright's performances, but he benefitted from especially conscious complicity on the part of his actors. (If you think the finely-tuned script deserves most of the credit, a glance at either of the anemic remakes will disabuse you of that notion.) In a role a mere ingenue could have sunk the movie with, 23-year-old Wright holds her own opposite the more experienced Cotten, who she understood had a part that allowed him to be electrifying. As Uncle Charlie shifts pathologically between unctuous warmth and malevolence, Wright has young Charlie always observant, eager to understand and be influenced by the source of her inspiration. The sensitivity Wright gives Charlie's absorption makes us watch her as carefully as we watch Uncle Charlie's machinations. PAGE 1 | 2 |
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As Charlie evolves from the winning restlessness that makes her receptive to Uncle Charlie ("I don't like to be an average girl in an average family"), Wright gracefully serves the idea that the girl's awakening to her uncle's true nature is the awakening to her own as well. (The two are, after all, "twins.") Charlie, of course, has a good heart, but Wright complicates the goodness by showing how she emulates Cotten's imperious edge, and even displays his bipolarity. A key scene that is Wright's quietest and best has Cotten telling Charlie he's going to stay, since no one will believe a word she says against him. In a voice that has changed from its girlish timbre to a lethal soft-spokenness borrowed directly from Uncle Charlie, young Charlie tells him: "I don't want you here. So go away, I'm warning you. Go away or I'll kill you myself. See, that's the way I feel about you." Brilliantly, Wright puts not even the faintest exclamation point at the end of that statement. Wright's scaled-down approach pays off perfectly on Hitchcock's terms right to the end, when, after her uncle has tried to kill her and she's had to kill him, she comments, "He couldn't have been very happy, ever." The remarkable generosity of the line itself underlines Charlie's goodness, but Wright delivers it with a grim wistfulness that suggests the cost at which goodness has triumphed. No wonder Shadow of a Doubt was Hitchcock's personal favorite of all his films. What did you think of this performance? Sound off in the Movie Forum. PAGE 1 | 2 |