She hasn’t seen him in quite some time but looks to him as something like a kindred soul. Before she ever lets her imagination run, however, young Charlie has a strange obsession with her Uncle. If we didn’t already know for sure that Uncle Charlie was guilty of something, we might be able to doubt her suspicions of him and write it off as the crazy fantasy of a young character with too much time to think. The young Charlie is a bored daughter of an affluent family in a quiet town where everyone knows each other.
Why does she see the world, namely Uncle Charlie, the way she sees it? Shadow of a Doubt is a character study presented as a psychological thriller, only with the typical Hitchcock thrills washed away. We see her flaws almost immediately, and we begin to study her. This gap makes it so that we look at young Charlie with more objectivity. This creates a gap between her and the audience unlike in Suspicion in which we were meant to feel exactly what Fontaine felt. Soon his niece (Teresa Wright), also named Charlie, will grow suspicious of him, but given that we already know this, our point of view is not the same as the younger Charlie. This prologue sets the story in motion but also strips away most of the mystery surrounding Charlie’s past. Soon he will venture out to quiet Santa Rosa, California to stay with his sister’s family. The movie opens with Charlie on the run from a couple of mysterious men who have it out for him. The male hero, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton) is very clearly guilty, but of what we don’t know. Hitchcock gets his way with Shadow of a Doubt. If Hitchcock had his way, Grant would be revealed to be the sociopath Fontaine suspects him to be throughout the film. Despite Cary Grant’s insane character, one clearly meant to be a little unhinged, the end of the movie is intended to be a happy union between Grant and Fontaine. In the first film, studio involvement necessitated that the male hero be just that, a hero. In the former, Joan Fontaine begins to worry that the man she married, played by Cary Grant, has murder on his mind, and in this film a young woman’s infatuation for her uncle turns inside out as she suspects he is a serial killer. They are similar films, following one character’s increasing paranoia that someone they love is a monster. Shadow of a Doubt, like Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), is about the deconstruction of myth, to some extent.
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