NFR Project: 'Shadow of a Doubt' (1943)

 

NFR Project: “Shadow of a Doubt”

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock

Scr: Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville; Story by Gordon McDonell

Pho: Joseph A. Valentine

Ed: Milton Carruth

Premiere: Jan. 12, 1943

108 min.

“Love and good order is no defense against evil.”

This is director Alfred Hitchcock describing the theme of this, his favorite film. The story of a murderous man and his young niece is subtly, deeply disturbing, a straight-up rejection of the normal veneer of everyday life. As such, it is one of Hitchcock’s most subversive films.

Hitchcock, renowned for his mystery and thriller films, chose to set his film in one of the most normal of small towns. The Newton family is shown as the most normal of families, consisting of mother (Patricia Collinge), father (Henry Travers), and three children, the oldest of which is the young lady “Charlie” (Teresa Wright). Into their lives steps the charming and moneyed mother’s younger brother, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten).

He is on the run from the police, we know not why. He has gifts for the entire family, including a ring for Charlie that bears someone else’s initials on the band. Two men arrive in town, calling themselves journalists. They are determined to get a picture of Uncle Charlie, which they do by subterfuge. Eventually one of the men confides in young Charlie – they are on the track of the “Merry Widow Murderer,” a man who has made a career out of strangling and robbing wealthy widows. They suspect Uncle Charlie is their man.

Young Charlie, shocked, begins to discern clues that point to Uncle Charlie. One night at family dinner, Uncle Charlie goes on a tirade about the unworthiness of rich women to live. Young Charlie, upset, runs out of the house. Uncle Charlie follows her, drags her into a bar, and convinces her to say nothing. He admits that he is one of two suspects in the murders, but denies that he is the man the police are looking for. Young Charlie agrees to say nothing.

The other suspect is killed, and police scrutiny of Uncle Charlie relaxes. However, he begins to make attempts on young Charlie’s life – as she knows too much. Young Charlie threatens to kill him if he doesn’t leave town, and he agrees. He lures her into his train compartment as the train is leaving. He then grabs her and hauls her out onto the platform between cars, intending to throw her off the train to her death. At the last moment, she pivots and thrusts him off into the path of another train, killing him. Uncle Charlie is mourned by the community, and young Charlie determines to keep her knowledge of his crimes a secret.

Hitchcock utilized a brilliant script, written in part by the great American playwright Thornton Wilder. Uncle Charlie’s guilt is slowly revealed, and largely circumstantial . . . but young Charlie’s trepidation grows and grows, until she is forced to destroy him to save her own life. There is a theme of twinning here – the two Charlies share the same name, and it’s implied that there is a special connection between them, a connection almost incestuous. Uncle Charlie is the dark doppelganger of young Charlie – a beloved relative who also happens to be a depraved monster.

Meanwhile, the rest of the family, and the entire town, are completely oblivious to Uncle Charlie’s guilt, fooled by his charm and seduced by the big bankroll he brings to the local bank. He is a model of respectability, but actor Cotten gives Uncle Charlie an ever-so-faint air of menace, a sense that he is not quite right in the head – which only young Charlie can discern.

Throughout the film, even we in the audience are unsure whether Uncle Charlie is really a murderer, until literally the last minute of the film. The idea that evil can stalk the daylight peacefulness of a typical American town leaves the viewer with a feeling of helplessness and dread. If good old Uncle Charlie can be a murderer, who else is there around us who can conceal themselves under a veil of normalcy?

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Stormy Weather.

NFR Project: 'The Ox-Bow Incident' (1943)

 

NFR Project: “The Ox-Bow Incident”

Dir: William A. Wellman

Scr: Lamar Trotti

Pho: Arthur C. Miller

Ed: Allen McNeil

Premiere: May 21, 1943

75 min.

Westerns, for the first 40 or so years of their existence, were shoot-‘em-ups, adventures primarily for kids to watch. They featured a hero, a villain, a girl in danger. They consisted of chases on horseback, gunplay, fistfights. Good always triumphed in the end.

Then along came The Ox-Bow Incident, the first Western that could be dubbed adult, or psychological, or noir. It’s adapted from the 1940 novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Clark was noted for his ability to take the Western genre and infuse it with adult sensibilities, psychological complexities, and moral ambiguities. This film is faithful to the novel, dealing with issues of justice and morality while painting the West as not an escapist destination, but as a hard, cruel landscape populated by flawed characters.

In the movie, two saddle pals (Henry Fonda, Harry Morgan) ride into a Nevada town in 1885. They go to the local saloon and proceed to get drunk. Suddenly, a man rides in to town and announces that a local rancher has been murdered and his cattle stolen. The men of the town decide to form a posse and go after the perpetrators, despite the warnings of the kindly Mr. Davies (Harry Davenport). They are led by a self-righteous Army vet, Major Tetley (Frank Conroy).

The posse rides out, and is soon enveloped in darkness. Climbing up into the mountains, the lynch mob encounters three men camped out – a rancher (Dana Andrews), a Mexican (Anthony Quinn), and a befuddled old man (the reliable Francis Ford, brother of John). Based on circumstantial evidence, the posse decides that the three are guilty and are determined to string them up. Only seven men vote against the lynching; a sizable majority wants to kill the men.

Despite the men’s pleas that they are innocent, the hangings proceed. Almost immediately after, the sheriff rides up and announces that not only wasn’t the rancher killed, but that the real criminals were captured. Everyone is in shock, and they ride quietly back to town, where they all proceed to drink. Fonda reads the eloquent last letter of Andrews to his wife, and the two pals determine to seek her out and give her the news. They ride away down the dusty, empty street of the town.

Director William Wellman shoots most of the movie in near darkness. Light and shadow play across the faces of the characters as they debate, agonize, and anticipate the hangings. The mood of the film is grim and subdued; the posse’s bloodlust and disregard for the law is underlined. This gritty and uncompromising take on the Western confounded studio executives, but earned the film a Best Picture Oscar nomination. 

Many of Hollywood’s best character actors are on hand to fill out the ensemble, including the sinister Marc Lawrence as Farnley, the instigator, Jane Darwell as rancher “Ma” Grier, and Leigh Whipper as Sparks, an itinerant preacher. (Whipper was the first African-American to join Actors’ Equity; he plays a nuanced character not burdened by the stereotyped behavior that dogged Black actors at the time.)

The film is a tragedy, one that clearly delineates the causes of injustice and condemns “frontier justice” and the herd instinct that drives men to kill each other on nothing more than vague suspicions. This noir Western would inspire many more in the decades to come. The Western had finally grown up.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Shadow of a Doubt.

NFR Project: 'Meshes of the Afternoon' (1943)

 

NFR Project: “Meshes of the Afternoon”

Dir: Maya Deren, Alexandr Hackenschmied

Scr: Maya Deren

Pho: Alexandr Hackenschmied

Ed: Maya Deren

Premiere: 1943

14 min.

There is a long alternate, dimly seen history of film – a hidden history of the avant-garde. Coming from Stan Brakhage’s old stomping grounds, I have sought out and been exposed to more of it than most. Still, I was unfamiliar with this proclaimed “classic” of American avant-garde cinema.

It’s a beautiful example of the subjective purposing of camera language, combined with a desire to impart a rhyming set of images that fix in the mind with forbidding clarity. It’s a poem, not a story, as such completely subverting the narrative drive that underlies all mainstream movies. Meshes is compelling to watch, but you don’t know why; it reaches something in your subconscious. Film in America had rarely staged dream and vision so effectively, with such economy of means.

Wife and husband Maya Deren, originally Eleonora Derenkovskaya, and Alexandr Hackenschmied, later Alexander Hammid, both emigres, created this film in their own (ironically, Hollywood) home; it is shot silently with a dreamy feel. A woman wanders through a house. She encounters a flower, a key, a knife, a telephone. The camera switches from subjective to (supposedly) objective without warning.

The woman pursues a garbed figure with a mirror for a face, also holding a flower – but breaks off, over and again. The woman sleeps, she dreams: she splits into multiples. The beautiful Deren, expressionless like a medieval Madonna, sees, and is observed. With mirrored balls for eyes, she stalks herself with a knife, striding now on the beach, then in a furrow, then in the grass, then onto a city sidewalk. This explosion is followed by the vision of a man seeing to woo her. The screen bursts open. Deren repeats actions, gestures, symbols, gestures, varying them slightly each time.

She ends up dead. Or is that a dream? What the hell is going on? The viewer has to supply their own answers as a set of confusing images are thrown at them.

The film resembles the early work of Cocteau, Man Ray, Leger, and others – but Deren, who asserted that hers was the lion’s share of the creative effort, denied having seen them. She creates her own unique filmed poetry, and it’s assured, and watchable. It inspires confusion and stimulates thought. At the same time.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Ox-Bow Incident.