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Beyond a shadow of doubt movie3/16/2024 Hitchcock’s sixth in America, but his first to shed gothic shadings and spies for something more perverse, the film quickly shuttles between two ends of a nearly telepathic link shared between adolescent Charlie (Teresa Wright) and her namesake, urbane uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten). Enter Shadow of a Doubt, which invades the domestic drama wearing a mirthless smile. I don't regret having seen it, but there isn't exactly anything to recommend here.“Hitchcock’s first indisputable masterpiece … Remains one of his most harrowing films, a peek behind the facade of security that reveals loneliness, despair, and death.” Dave Kehr, Chicago Readerįor all his associations with the warp and weft of criminal psychology, Alfred Hitchcock only rarely organized his films around the mind of a killer. And the film is entertaining, albeit in an extremely lowbrow sort of way. It's hard to say if her performance is uneven, or it's just the character. So what's good about this film? Fairuza Balk is interesting. In effect, he invites everyone to overact as much as they care to. He lets everyone wink at the audience and make cute little sideways comments to the camera. In fact, he has next to no ability to rein in his actors. Speaking of Brian Dennehy (who I like very much as an actor), he is not a good director. Not that I have anything against the AA, but it just smacks of recent conversion fervor. At one point, his character references his time being sober as being virtually the exact same as Dennehy himself. The origin of this is embarrassingly close to the life of director/star Brian Dennehy. Then there's the shameless Alcoholics Anonymous propaganda. One of the lowest scenes is a retread of the old "death as an aphrodisiac" cliché. Scene after scene is right out of the cheapest, lowest quality pulp fiction. The judge's lines are inappropriate and unrealistic. The script of "Shadow of a Doubt" is bad.
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