Like her near contemporary, the pre-TV Donna Reed, Teresa Wright had such a core of goodness she could make you feel guilty about having bad thoughts in her presence. Her characterizations were distinctly American in that she played hope before reality; in her best films her focus is set not on what she recognizes as “wrong,” but what she would prefer to be right. In movie after movie she earned her surname. Despite the fact that she won an Oscar for 1942’s “Mrs Miniver,” it’s Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 film, “Shadow of A Doubt,” that really made the actress, and I wonder if Hitchcock loved what I loved about her: that little intake of breath before she said anything, and when she said most things it always sounded like a question–a child’s question: Why is the sky blue? Why do you love me?
As Hitchcock’s Charlie, a small town California girl who unwittingly welcomes evil into her home and then combats it, Wright spends most of the movie wondering what it was that made her Uncle Charlie–the man she was named for–so “wrong,” especially since she’s spent most of her life–the movie’s off screen movie–imagining he’s something else entirely. Charlie and Uncle Charlie regard the other as their twin. As played by Joseph Cotton, the late Southern born actor who was notable for his appropriation of black male style–generally impeccable dress, a slow, careful delivery, and outsider star status–Uncle Charlie is a model of beautiful repression; it’s only when he relaxes in his sister’s home, in Charlie’s bed, that he begins to “unravel,” and makes mistakes, and let’s his deadly secrets out–secrets Charlie is the first to recognize and be stunned by. But she will not run to her mother–Charlie’s sister–with these tales; Charlie the girl ends up being father to all the boys: stoic, truthful, real.
“Shadow of a Doubt,” is an American gothic horror story, very much on the order of “In Cold Blood,” a throwback to Hawthorne’s tales of the persecuted, the unforgiven. While “In Cold Blood,” say, is in part fueled by economics–the trap of poverty–“Shadow of a Doubt,” is, in part, about the evil of excess; Uncle Charlie has ill-gotten gain, money that could help elevate Charlie’s family out of the middle-class. (Charlie’s father works in a bank.) But what the family wants more than money or power is love. Once Charlie realizes the truth about her seductive uncle, she will not back away from it; she grows to despise the artifice of his charm and anything one might consider charming, which she equates with untruths, even though Charlie tells a fib to her two best girlfriends so she can go on a night on the town with a handsome detective. Charlie talks “real,” for the first time when she says: “We don’t need to play any games with it tonight,” as a way of letting her uncle know she knows he’s used her father’s newspaper to to disguise some relevant information–information Charlie eventually finds out for herself. But maybe she knew Uncle Charlie was bad all along; after all, they’re telepathic, she’s the light to his dark, the dark to her light.
For the most part it’s the women who are telepathic in the family. (The only exception is Charlie’s mother, brilliantly played by the Irish-American actress, Patricia Collinge. Like her Aunt Birdie in 1941’s “The Little Foxes”—Wright made her film debut in the same movie–Collinge’s “Shadow,” mother is too overwhelmed by hope and dashed dreams to see the big picture.) As things with Uncle Charlie deteriorate, Ann, Charlie’s younger sister, says she no longer wants to sit next to her uncle at dinner; she doesn’t like him, but she never says why. Neither does Charlie. Hitchcock shows family discord in hands–hands that are clutching, or pushing other hands away. Uncle Charlie wants to hold onto Charlie for dear life but her life and the lives of her family members are too dear for her to want to hold onto him. She’s a hero and, like most heroes, dismayed by anything but golden intentions and pure dreams.
Agnes Moorehead was perhaps the most remarkable of all the actors in the Mercury stable. Like many of the others, she had first worked with Welles onradio…In addition to the high spirits and technical skill of the other actors, she brought an extraordinary emotional depth and a transforming imagination to her work, which made each of her roles uniquely expressive; like the very greatest actors, she forged a mask that both liberated her and imprinted itself indelibly on the spectator’s mind. Welles took her to Hollywood with him, and in “Citizen Kane,” cast her in the small role of the mother of the young Charles Foster Kane. Noting the terrifyingly intense determination she brought to the part, allied to and expressed by the American Primitive gauntness of her appearance…he and [Greg] Toland shot her in such a way as to give her work maximum impact….There was in the actress a latent (and sometimes naked) neediness, a disappointment in herself and, especially, her physical appearance, that can often be the source of exceptional power. Her greatest admirers as directors–and the directors whom she most admired–were Orson Welles and Charles Laughton, and both of them had a particular protective affection for her beyond their respect for her work.
