shadow of a doubt opening scene analysis

In particular, she doesn’t want to end up living like her much-loved mother, Emma Newton, whom she sees as mired in housework and trivia. She longs for excitement, romance, and something to give meaning and some magic to her life. In Shadow of a Doubt, an attractive teenage girl, Charlotte Newton, lives in the idyllic small American town Santa Rosa, California, but she is bored by the humdrum nature of her family life.

In fact the film has some odd strengths and weaknesses that cause viewers’ reactions to vary.

Over the course of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, the idea of an ordinary middle-class person suddenly thrust into unusual and threatening circumstances is standard fare for Hitchcock, but Shadow of a Doubt is rather different from Hitchcock’s other popular thrillers. In this story the ordinary life of a typical small-town, middle-class family is disrupted by the intrusion of a beguiling but sinister visitor. Particularly with his Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the shooting for which was begun in the latter part of 1941. But as with many foreign filmmakers who came to the US, Hitchcock soonĮvinced his fascination for the peculiarities of American culture, Alfred Hitchcock shifted to the US to make films in 1939, but his earliest American-made films still had mostly English settings.

Shadow of a doubt opening scene analysis