The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (best finance books of all time TXT) 📕

a nice, normal family. The film tells the gothic tale of a suave thirty-something serial killer named Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten) who has earned himself a small fortune by fleecing and murdering wealthy widows out on the East Coast. When the police pick up his scent, Charles flees to Santa Rosa, the uneventful Californian town in which he was raised, to stay with his older sister, Emma Newton, and her wholesome family, a Norman Rockwell painting made flesh. He is hero-worshipped by another Charlie, his eighteen-year-old niece, played by Teresa Wright, who thinks her uncle has been sent by some mysterious force of the universe to enliven her family’s mundane life and bring them closer together. Only when two undercover detectives arrive in town does she discover her uncle’s murderous secrets. Once Uncle Charlie learns that the girl is on to him, he attempts to kill her, first by suffocation, then by having her fall down a flight of stairs. On the day he leaves town, he tries to push the girl from a moving train, but in doing so he accidentally kills himself.

By dragging his villainy right across the living room rug of his own family home, Uncle Charlie might be Hitchcock’s most diabolical creation. Cotten is creepily brilliant in the role, projecting a dark charisma that makes us warm to this psychopathic misanthrope who snuffs out human lives as though they were candles. His sister, her husband, and their children are simple, unsuspecting people whom he seduces much like he seduced the women he murdered. He lavishes gifts on his family, but these are all things that corrupt their purity, symbols of his dissipated life: he brings alcohol to their abstemious dinner table, and invests a huge sum of money at the tiny bank where his sister’s husband works—every cent of it pilfered from the dead. His brashest attack on familial goodness is the relationship he cultivates with his niece, the innocent girl with whom he shares a name. We first meet young Charlie as she lies on her bed, the same bed she gladly gives to her uncle during his stay. In a private moment in the kitchen, Uncle Charlie looks unswervingly into the girl’s eyes and slips a ring on her finger, a present, he says, bought especially for her, though it’s actually a trophy wrenched from the finger of a woman he killed. The suggestion of incest is never explicit—Hitchcock enjoyed flirting with taboos more than embracing them—but the tension between them makes the two Charlies Hitchcock’s most unsettling doubles.

Shadow of a Doubt is usually identified as the moment Hitchcock discovered America, cinematically speaking, after four years of living and working there. It was the first time that he made what reads as a truly American film, locatable in American society. An alternative title could have been A Nightmare on Main Street, a Hitchcockian twist on a modern American artistic tradition, in the vein of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, and the man who wrote the screenplay, Thornton Wilder, who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his work of experimental theater, Our Town. Hitchcock and his collaborators researched the setting for the film assiduously, drilling into minute details, and they decided to film the majority of the production on location in Santa Rosa, at a time when very little filming took place away from Hollywood studios. When Wilder finished his draft of the script in June 1942—en route to performing military service—Hitchcock called in another writer, Sally Benton, to provide a modern edge to the town. According to the patter of what became one of Hitchcock’s most frequently told stories, he told Wilder that while he loved the script, their Santa Rosa was “like a town without neon signs.” It was Hitchcock’s intention to capture something of the unpalatable truth about small-town America, creating the perfect stage on which to set his fairy tale of domestic darkness.

A murderer in the family. Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright in Shadow of a Doubt.

As much of a milestone as it was in terms of building Hitchcock’s reputation in Hollywood, Shadow of a Doubt is a point of continuity between the two halves of his career. For all that he talked about his terror of police and our collective nightmares about murder, mayhem, and the bomb under the table, the most insistent theme of his work is a seemingly happy home cruelly torn asunder. It’s the connective tissue between The Lodger and The Birds, The Manxman and I Confess, Young and Innocent and The Paradine Case, and both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much. It’s also the substance of The Wrong Man, starring Henry Fonda and Vera Miles. Hitchcock developed the film from an article he read in Life magazine about the true story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero (known as Manny), the victim of a case of mistaken identity who was sentenced to prison for a spate of robberies he did not commit. Although he was eventually set free when the real culprit was identified, the stress took an immense toll on Balestrero’s family, leading his wife, Rose, to a breakdown and a rupture in their marriage. The case fascinated Hitchcock, who decided to shoot the film as though a dramatized documentary, building the story solely on the facts and basing the dialogue on interviews with those involved. Throughout research and writing, Hitchcock stressed that depicting Rose’s mental decline would be the hardest and most important part of the script to perfect. As Manny, Henry Fonda’s anxious bewilderment is unerringly convincing. But it’s Vera Miles’s performance as Rose that provides the emotional center of the film, the chilling awfulness of seeing a family unravel when subjected to a sudden, arbitrary assault from the vicious universe outside the front door.

The terror to which Hitchcock subjected his ordinary families may be rooted in his own experience. The sudden loss of his father at the end of 1914, and the instant changes in his family’s circumstances,