With a known 22 killings to his spree of barely a year before he was caught and executed, Nelson is still considered one of the most prolific murderers in American criminal history. America’s first known serial sex-murderer of the 20th century, Nelson preyed on older landladies along the East Coast in the 1920s posing as a meek-mannered lodger before sadistically murdering and assaulting them. Scripted by playwright Thornton Wilder, the film’s narrative owes its heritage to real-life murderer Earle Nelson. Hitchcock builds tension by teasing the audience as to whether Charlotte will believe the truth in time to save her. Charlie fled his previous town after the police got too close, with suspicions surrounding him concerning a recent spate of murdered rich widows by the so-called “Merry Widow Murderer.” Uncle Charlie is particularly popular with his niece Charlotte (Teresa Wright).īut, as the exciting days of her uncle’s visit pass by, Charlotte becomes increasingly suspicious of his past, especially when an undercover detective (Macdonald Carey) warns that her favourite uncle may not be all that he seems. Shadow of a Doubt charts the increasingly tense visit of Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) to his sister’s (Patricia Collinge) family in a sleepy part of Santa Rosa. As suggested several times throughout his life, Hitchcock’s favourite Hitchcock was Shadow of a Doubt. It is fitting then that, over the years when quizzed about which of his 50 or so films was his personal favourite, the choice was one that concerned murder. As Hitchcock once put it: “a glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality.” Yet suave Uncle Charlie was arguably also an expression of its director’s inner persona.
Central to this celebrated, tense film is an alarming streak of pessimism, one inhabited brilliantly by Cotten’s unnerving and irredeemably nasty character. “The whole world is a joke to me,” claims Joseph Cotten as the villainous Uncle Charlie in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt.
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