Ultimately, the teenage brother would disappear entirely from the script. Instead, young Charlie got a kid sister and an even younger brother—the better for comedy. Hitchcock also decided to eliminate young Charlie’s scapegrace boyfriend, “a John Garfield type,” according to McDonell. Instead, a police detective would nurse a crush on young Charlie. (“A commercial concession, really,” Hitchcock later told Charles Thomas Samuels.)
The Hitchcocks’ notes had hinted at an incestuous relationship between the niece and uncle—“her being attracted to him”—creating tension between the mother and daughter. Now, in Hitchcock’s work with Wilder, safer “twinship” motifs emerged—like the doppelgängers of German expressionism. Wilder wrote the relationship (“We’re like twins,” Uncle Charlie tells his niece, “you said so yourself”), while Hitchcock’s camera visually linked the two Charlies: introducing Uncle Charlie, lying on his bed, before he flees police and leaves for California; then showing young Charlie posed similarly on her bed, her mood suddenly lifted by the premonition that Uncle Charlie is about to reenter her life.
The script gradually took on the feeling of a dark parable—darker even than Saboteur. Uncle Charlie became an American Satan—and another Hitchcock villain who uncharacteristically spoke “on the nose,” in his unsettling showdown with young Charlie in a Main Street tavern:
“There’s so much you don’t know. So much. What do you know, really? You’re just an ordinary little girl living in an ordinary little town. You wake up every morning of your life, and you know perfectly well that there’s nothing in the world to trouble you. You go through your ordinary little day, and at night you sleep your untroubled, ordinary little sleep, filled with peaceful stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares … or did I? Or was it a silly, inexpert little lie? You’re a sleepwalker blind! How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses, you’d find swine? The world’s a hell! What does it matter what happens in it?”
This was Wilder at his best, strengthening a persistent Hitchcock theme: evil might dwell next door in Hitchcock’s world, or in one’s own household; there really is no sanctuary. Yet the director always stubbornly refused to philosophize, and whenever he was queried about the deeper meaning of Shadow of a Doubt (or any of his films), his replies were maddening. “There is moral judgment in the film,” Hitchcock said. “He’s [Uncle Charlie] destroyed at the end, isn’t he? The niece accidentally kills her uncle. What it boils down to is that villains are not all black and heroes are not all white; there are grays everywhere.”
On one occasion, interviewed for the New York Times in 1951, Hitchcock explained that most of his films, even Shadow of a Doubt, were basically chases. “The chase makes up about 60 per cent of the construction of all movie plots,” he mused. He added that Hamlet could probably be considered a chase, “because Hamlet is a detective.”
“Wouldn’t Macbeth be a chase,” the interviewer asked, “Macbeth being the evildoer who is pursued by fate?”
“Well, yes,” Hitchcock said, retreating, “but the moment you make fate the pursuer you’re getting a little abstract.”
By the end of May, Hitchcock and Wilder had thirty promising pages. “Each step is complicated plotting and of course that gets denser and more complex as it goes on,” Wilder wrote his sister. “But I like it.” They interrupted work, flying north to scout out the town of Santa Rosa. Gordon McDonell had originally situated “Uncle Charlie” in the San Joaquin Valley, but Hitchcock had settled on this place in Sonoma County, about fifty miles north of San Francisco. Shadow of a Doubt would become the first of several Hitchcock films set near his northern California home.
Santa Rosa was then a sleepy hamlet, population 13,000, built around a central square. Working at Universal had already afforded Hitchcock a new measure of freedom, and now the war created an unexpected advantage: the U.S. government had placed a ceiling of five thousand dollars on new set-building costs. Making a virtue of necessity, Hitchcock convinced his amiable producer that they could shoot much of Shadow of a Doubt on location in Santa Rosa, saving on sets while displaying a picturesque town straight out of Norman Rockwell. Hitchcock was excited, looking forward to “reverting to the ‘location shooting’ of early movie days,” according to Universal publicity.
“Beautiful countryside,” he told Hume Cronyn later on. “Miles and miles of vineyards. After the day’s work we can romp among the vines, pluck bunches of grapes and squeeze the juice down our throats.”
Hitchcock, Wilder, Jack Skirball, and art director Robert Boyle toured Santa Rosa, meeting with city officials and roaming city streets. The local library, the train station, the telegraph office, the American Trust Company bank—all were postcard perfect. Hitchcock stopped in front of a private residence on McDonald Avenue, hailing it as the kind of house where young Charlie and her family would live. (Wilder disagreed, insisting that the large house suggested an income bracket above the station of young Charlie’s father, a bank clerk. They checked, and Wilder was right: the house belonged to a physician. But the reality didn’t matter to the director, and Hitchcock used the house.)
Researching reality always invigorated Hitchcock. Once back in Hollywood, he and Wilder plotted the remainder of the script with renewed zest.
“My god, I’m not only getting money, but I’m getting pleasure,” Wilder wrote at the end of a long day of work, at midnight in mid-June. “Seventy pages of the script went to the typist’s today—20 more tomorrow. It only has to be 130. Today and yesterday Hitch and I devised the ending. Honest, I think it’ll be an awfully absorbing picture.”
But the script wasn’t quite finished by the end of Wilder’s fifth week in Hollywood, when he had to head back east for army duty. When Wilder left by train on June 24, he was accompanied by Hitchcock and Skirball—the better to squeeze out the final pages. Somewhere between Los Angeles and New York the script was completed—and then Hitchcock did the unimaginable. He told the American dramatist he wasn’t completely satisfied with the script, that he wanted another writer to take a pass at it.
The structure of the suspense story was solid, Hitchcock explained, but the characters needed shoring up; they were too quaint. “I feel the script needs a polish,” the director told Wilder. “The only way I can describe it is that the Santa Rosa in our story is like a town without neon signs. Its history, its warmth, its people and characters—they’re all there. But I would like a tinge of the modern in it, just a little sharper here and there.”
Surprisingly, Wilder agreed with Hitchcock. He suggested Robert Ardrey, who had been his playwriting student at the University of Chicago; Ardrey’s first screen credit was 1939’s They Knew What They Wanted, a Carole Lombard-Charles Laughton picture set in the same wine-growing region as Shadow of a Doubt. But Hitchcock felt that Ardrey—who later switched to anthropology, writing the groundbreaking books African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative—was too solemn for the task.
Besides, eager to add humor to the script, the director already had a replacement in mind. After he and Wilder parted ways, he met in New York with Sally Benson, then in the midst of an annus mirabilis. Junior Miss, her collection of stories about the foibles of a twelve-year-old girl—and the Broadway play based on her book, which delighted Hitchcock when he saw it—were huge hits in 1941. Her short fiction was highly regarded for its skilled depiction of youth and its knowing satire; besides adding comedy and modern tinges to Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock wanted her to add freshness to his family portrait. Benson became the fourth writer from the New Yorker (where she also reviewed mysteries and occasional films) to be recruited by Hitchcock.*
At first Benson worked from New York, her pages integrated into the continuity by Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock. Then, just before the late-summer start of production, she came to California and spent two weeks writing on the set. “The rewrite greatly improved Wilder’s very rough draft,” according to film scholar Bill Krohn.
In the end, only four writers were credited on the screen: McDonell, Benson, Wilder, and Alma Reville. Being rewritten by Sally Benson—or a supporting actress, for that matter—didn’t alter Wilder’s favorable view of the experience; nor did it detract from Hitchcock’s opinion of Wilder. Indeed, the director gave Wilder an unusual citation, which ran in the credits just before Hitchcock’s own name: “We wish to acknowledge the contribution of Mr. Thornton Wilder to the preparation of this production.”
“[In America] I was turned down by many stars and by writers who looked down their noses at the genre I work in,” Hitchcock later explained. “That’s why it was so gratifying for me to find out that one of America’s most eminent playwrights was willing to work with me and, indeed, that he took the whole thing seriously.
“It was an emotional gesture,” Hitchcock said of the unusual credit. “I was touched by his qualities.”
Coming off his positive experience with Thornton Wilder, Hitchcock was in an unusually upbeat mood when he lunched with an emissary from Myron Selznick’s agency on July 9, shortly before filming began on Shadow of a Doubt. Sig Marcus reported back that Hitchcock was “most affable and pleasant.” Saboteur had already earned 170 percent of its gross, and a check for 10 percent was being processed as a bonus to the director. And now the head of Twentieth Century–Fox, Darryl Zanuck, was knocking on the door, eager to give Hitchcock a studio contract after he completed his Universal obligations.
Zanuck had met with Hitchcock several times since his very first visit to Hollywood, and wouldn’t give up on trying to find a niche for the Englishman. The stumbling block was always a matter of the right material—Hitchcock had his pet projects, Zanuck had his—but there also was the dodgier issue of creative control. An intelligent, sometimes courageous producer, Zanuck gave leeway to important directors, but he also kept a firm hand on the creative elements of his studio’s product.
Hitchcock was still pining for his Lodger remake, but Zanuck, after thinking it over, finally said a firm no. Even this news, delivered by Marcus, couldn’t deflate the buoyant director. Shadow of a Doubt amounted to a kind of American Lodger anyway, and despite the time, money, and emotion he’d invested in the idea of a remake, Hitchcock now announced he was ready to give up his interest in the property. He told Marcus he would be willing to sell his half share of the rights to any other producer, and urged him to mention the newly available project to Jack Skirball’s partner, Frank Lloyd. But Lloyd only sniffed, “No, thanks, that’s not for me—that’s something suited to the peculiar talents of Mr. Hitchcock.”
The Lodger seemed a lost cause. But Zanuck was bent on bringing Hitchcock to Twentieth Century–Fox.
While back east, before the script or casting for Shadow of a Doubt was final, Hitchcock was nonetheless shrewdly looking ahead. His friend Sidney Bernstein was in from London; when they met up (Bernstein finding his old friend “fat as ever”), Hitchcock agreed to travel to London later in 1943 and direct two films for the Ministry of Information.
With certain scenes of Shadow of a Doubt already clear in his mind, Hitchcock called in Universal’s newsreel division again, leading a crew to Newark, New Jersey, where he shot the opening sequence—though he still didn’t know who would play Uncle Charlie, the film’s central character. In June he had spoken with William Powell, the comic gentleman whom Hitchcock was still eager to lure into darkness. Powell had always hesitated before, but now Hitchcock’s string of successes helped convince him to say yes. However, MGM was feeling protective of Powell’s good-guy image, and the studio refused to lend him out, insisting he was all booked up.
As usual, David O. Selznick urged Hitchcock to borrow someone under contract to him. Joan Fontaine would make an appealing young Charlie, DOS said. Hitchcock agreed, and early script treatments even described the niece as a “Fontaine type.” By late May, though, the director had turned his eye to Fontaine’s older sister. Over dinner with Olivia de Havilland, Hitchcock regaled the actress with the story, and a hypnotized de Havilland said yes. But she had already signed to start shooting Princess O’Rourke for Warner’s in midsummer, and wouldn’t be available until September. Though he tried several times, Hitchcock never managed to work with de Havilland.
With shooting looming, Hitchcock was still without his Charlies, old or young. So Hitchcock shot the film’s Hackensack River backgrounds and other New Jersey setups with Actors’ Equity day players. He staged the Hemingway-inspired opening on a residential street, with two detectives staking out the boardinghouse where Uncle Charlie is cornered. Among the footage he captured was a series of high, haunting long shots over empty lots and dark deserted alleys: a bleak urban setting to contrast with the first image of Santa Rosa—an avuncular cop spreading his arms to shelter local citizens who are crossing the street.
To cover all contingencies, Hitchcock shot the sequence, showing Uncle Charlie multiple times, using “three different men: tall, medium and short,” as the director later told journalist Charles Higham. “So when Cotten was cast I used the shots with the tall man.”
Hitchcock’s tall man was Joseph Cotten, the Mercury Theater player whose debut in Citizen Kane had made him a household name. (Cotten had just finished his second Orson Welles film, The Magnificent Ambersons, which Hitchcock ordered up and watched before release.) A Virginian by birth, Cotten was a new addition to the Selznick stable; he boasted the refinement of William Powell without the latter’s permanent air of bemusement. Casting Powell might have given Uncle Charlie a different coloring and a certain shock value, but Cotten was a strong second for the character Wilder had described as in his mid-forties, “very well-dressed,” wearing “a red carnation in his buttonhole. His face is set in fatigue and bitterness.”
Cotten was eager to work with Hitchcock, but he worried about playing a man “with a most complex philosophy, which advocated the annihilation of rich widows whose greedy ambitions had rewarded their husbands with expensive funerals.” He asked for the director’s advice. How did the character think and behave? Off they headed to talk about it over lunch at Romanoff’s, with Cotten behind the wheel. (Hitchcock was still playing his old I-don’t-drive game: “Matter of fact, taught my own wife and my daughter to drive,” he told Cotten, “but inside my own private driveway. Whenever I see a policeman, I simply go all to pieces.”)
Cotten wondered what would go through the mind of a habitual criminal like Uncle Charlie when he spotted a policeman. Fear? Guilt? “Oh, entirely different thing,” answered Hitchcock, warming to the subject, though even in private he was more likely to be flippant than deeply philosophical. “Uncle Charlie feels no guilt at all. To him, the elimination of his widows is a dedication, an important sociological contribution to civilization. Remember, when John Wilkes Booth jumped to the stage in Ford’s Theater after firing that fatal shot, he was enormously disappointed not to receive a standing ovation.”*
After parking the car, Hitchcock suggested they stroll along Rodeo Drive. He told Cotten to let him know when he spotted a likely murderer. “There’s one with the shifty eyes,” Cotten said, “he could very well be a murderer.” “My dear Watson,” Hitchcock countered, “those eyes are not shifty, they’ve simply been shifted. Shifted to focus upon that pretty leg emerging from a car.” With that, the director’s glance shifted too, as his camera might in a film, anatomizing his target. “The rest of Claudette Colbert,” Cotten noticed, as he wrote in Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, followed “the pretty leg to the pavement.”
A light went on in Cotten’s head
. “What you’re trying to say is, or rather what I’m saying you’re saying, is that a murderer looks and moves just like anyone else.”
“Or vice versa,” Hitchcock dryly returned. “That completes today’s lesson.”
They proceeded to Romanoff’s, where Hitchcock ordered a steak and the actor an omelette. (“Never ate an egg in my life,” Hitchcock dead-panned. Well, he amended himself, “I suppose eggs are in some of the things I eat, but I never could face a naked egg.”)
As Cotten drove the director home afterward, Hitchcock mentioned—almost as though he had just thought of it—his plan to use a snippet from Franz Lehar’s well-known “The Merry Widow Waltz” as a leitmotif in the film. A recurring image of spinning dancers, underscored by this familiar melody, would subtly remind the audience of Uncle Charlie’s true nature (the press has dubbed him “the Merry Widow Murderer”).
Getting out of the car at St. Cloud Road, Hitchcock offered Cotten one last bit of serious advice. “I think our secret is to achieve an effect of contrapuntal emotion. Forget trying to intellectualize about Uncle Charlie. Just be yourself. Let’s say the key to our story is emotive counterpoint; that sounds terribly intellectual. See you on the set, old bean.”
The actress finally cast as young Charlie also received a director’s pep talk—though of a different sort. Gracious-mannered, soft-spoken Teresa Wright, a Goldwyn contract player, had been nominated for an Oscar for her screen debut as the young daughter in The Little Foxes. Just as important, however, may have been understudying Emily in the Broadway production of Our Town; Thornton Wilder had rhapsodized over her sensitivity as an actress. With Olivia de Havilland out of the running, Wright rose to the fore, and Sam Goldwyn agreed to loan her out to Hitchcock.
When Hitchcock met with Wright in late June, however, he didn’t audition or interview her; nor did he analyze the character she would be playing. With actresses he was more likely simply to tell them the story of the film, at great length—watching their reactions and reveling in his audience of one. “To have a master storyteller like Mr. Hitchcock tell you a story is a marvelous experience,” Wright said. “He told me everything, including the sounds and the music. When I went to see the film after it was all over, months after it was completed, I watched it and I thought, ‘I’ve seen this film before.’ I saw it in his office that day.”
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