was shadow of a doubt alfred hitchcocks favorite film

He never tired of quoting Oscar Wilde’s line, “Each man kills the thing he loves.” For Hitchcock was no less powerfully drawn to an incompatible vision. Hitchcock found himself unwilling or unable to abandon himself to the genre’s Emersonian outlook, which was already beginning to suffer repression in Hollywood-as in the nation at large-by the time David O. In turn, the brilliant thrillers Hitchcock made in the few years remaining before his departure for Hollywood followed the lead of The 39 Steps by aligning Hitchcock thrillers with American romantic comedies-but only up to a point. The 39 Steps followed the lead of It Happened One Night, the monster hit that marked 1934 as the beginning of the period when the Emersonian worldview was ascendant in Hollywood, by concluding with the union of a man and woman that holds a hope of being a relationship worth having. Hitchcock was profoundly attracted to the moral outlook-rooted in the American Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau-that enabled the Hollywood movies of the New Deal era to achieve their rare combination of popularity and seriousness. William Rothman – author of Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze and Must We Kill the Thing We Love?: Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock While Young Charlie slowly and painfully begins to discover the truth about her beloved Uncle, her mother, deliciously played by Patricia Collinge, hangs glutinously upon his every word. We perceive the insidiously urbane protagonist, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton), largely through the eyes of his double, the restless, spirited Young Charlie (Teresa Wright), who summons him to rejuvenate her boringly mundane familial existence.

Loosely remaking his third film, The Lodger, Shadow of a Doubt is the first Hitchcock work to fully embrace the American idiom thanks to a felicitous collaboration with Thornton Wilder: The small town ironies of Our Town’s unrealized dreams seamlessly harmonize with Hitchcock’s morbidly dark comedy. His perennial theme of menace and perversion lurking beneath the veneer of middle-class civility and decorum is realized here with pitch-perfect precision. Shadow of a Doubt was Hitchcock’s favorite of his films and it's not hard to see why. Richard Allen – Author of Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony and editor of the Hitchcock Annual

Was shadow of a doubt alfred hitchcocks favorite film