The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alfred Hitchcock · a film · 1943 · about 108 minutes · screenplay by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson and Alma Reville, from a story by Gordon McDonell
Mode
Suspense thriller set inside a family picture; small-town comedy, moral education and study of a double in one structure
Mythos
The double, built: two Charlies, one good and one corrupt; the devil come to Eden with gifts, and the vampire who lies on beds by day and feeds on widows, evoked
Phase
Five movements, from two beds across a continent and a train under black smoke to a struggle at a train door and a eulogy heard through church doors
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 108 minutes, for Universal; produced by Jack H. Skirball, photographed by Joseph Valentine, music by Dimitri Tiomkin, edited by Milton Carruth; shot in large part on location in Santa Rosa
Register
From a family supper and two neighbours’ game of murder methods to a bar on the other side of town and a garage filling with exhaust
Scale
One family of five and the mother’s brother; a town’s bank, library, church and police; two detectives and a manhunt
Governing Proposition
A girl restless with her family in a small California town telegraphs her uncle and namesake, and he arrives by train, bringing gifts. He is the man two detectives are following across the country, a killer of rich widows, and she is the one who comes to know it. The wager of the film is that evil can be shown as the family’s own best-loved member, seated at its table in daylight, and that the suspense of a girl’s knowledge, once the audience shares it, can carry more than the suspense of who is guilty.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a man lying on a bed. In a rooming house in an eastern city Charles Oakley, played by Joseph Cotten, lies on the bed with money on the floor beside him, while two men stand in the street below. Then the film crosses a continent to Santa Rosa, California, where a girl lies on her bed in the same posture: Charlie Newton, played by Teresa Wright, named for her uncle and restless with her family. Each decides to reach the other, and the telegrams cross. Before either has seen the other, the film has made them one being in two places, and the girl says early that the two of them are alike.
Universal released the film in January 1943, in black and white, at about 108 minutes. Alfred Hitchcock directed it from a screenplay by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson and Alma Reville, on an original story by Gordon McDonell; Jack H. Skirball produced it, Joseph Valentine photographed it, Dimitri Tiomkin wrote the music and Milton Carruth edited it. Much of it was shot on location in Santa Rosa, work unusual for a studio thriller of 1942. Patricia Collinge and Henry Travers play Emma and Joseph Newton, the girl’s parents; Edna May Wonacott and Charles Bates her sister and brother, Ann and Roger; Hume Cronyn the neighbour, Herbie Hawkins; Macdonald Carey and Wallace Ford the detectives, Graham and Saunders.
The train comes into Santa Rosa under a column of black smoke, and the uncle, carried on as an invalid, walks off it well. The inheritance the film enters is double: the American small-town picture and its family comedy, with the Americana Wilder brought from Our Town; and Hitchcock’s own thriller, which a year earlier, in Suspicion, had set a possible killer inside a marriage and flinched. The turn is to put the killer at the family table as its most charming member, to give his guilt to the audience early, and to set the nightmare in a real town by daylight. It was made as a mid-budget picture, on its director’s proven path, and the stake was modest.
Movement II
The guest brings gifts, and the house fills with them. For his niece there is an emerald ring, and inside it are engraved initials that are not hers. He tears a story out of the newspaper and folds the page into a paper house, and the torn page is one the girl will go looking for. A waltz runs through her head and she cannot stop humming it; the film lays waltzing couples across itself in dissolves, and by repetition the sentimental Viennese tune becomes a figure of dread. He goes to the bank and jokes there about embezzlement, and he gives a talk to the women’s club.
On the porch and at the supper table Joe and Herbie play their game: each plans the other’s murder, by poison or by blunt instrument, the detective magazines Joe reads supplying the methods. It looks like comic relief, and it is the town’s innocence of what sits at its table. One law holds the film together from here to its end: murder is a game to those who have not seen the world as the uncle has, and a practice to the one who has. Two detectives arrive at the house posing as men making a survey, and the visit makes its point at length; the detective plot is a container the film fills more than an instrument it uses.
Under the comedy the film builds its double. The uncle and the niece share a name, have lain in matching shots on matching beds, and reached for each other by telegram; the ring, given by him, carries an undertone of betrothal that makes the likeness dangerous. Around the double other patterns gather: the devil come to Eden under black smoke, bearing gifts to a garden town with its library, church and bank; the vampire who lies on beds by day, feeds on widows and lives on the waltz of an older world. They are evoked rather than built, and the double carries the myth alone. The particulars stay hard: Ann’s books, Joe’s magazines, a bank’s petty cash.
Movement III
At dinner the uncle speaks of the widows, rich women whose husbands are dead, and the camera tracks slowly into his profile as he talks, until the face fills the frame and he turns toward the lens. He calls them “fat, wheezing animals”, at a table where his sister sits, and the girl protests that they are alive. It is the film’s most exact rise, and its making carries it: Cotten holds charm and contempt in one face, and the dolly does what no line could. Collinge’s Emma, who married and became her husband’s wife, listens to the brother she loves describe women like her grown old and rich.
The girl runs to the library against closing time, finds the story the uncle tore out, and reads it at the long table: a man wanted for the murder of widows, and among the victims a name whose initials are the ones engraved inside her ring. The camera rises away from her, up and back, until she sits small and alone in the dark room. This is the form at its sharpest. Knowledge makes her small in a world that has grown larger, and because the audience has known since early on, the shot does not reveal his guilt but shows what knowing it does to her. Change the form to a mystery and the film loses what it knows.
What it knows can be stated. Evil does not come to the family from outside: it is the family’s own best-loved member, and the family’s innocence is a way of not knowing that only its youngest adult loses. Young Charlie learns it, and learns too that the knowledge cannot be shared, since to protect her mother she must keep his secret and let him go. Beneath it runs Emma’s loss, a girlhood she sees in her brother and no longer has. The film does not hold its truth steadily to the end. It frames the girl’s knowledge with a romance, and lets the uncle’s view of the world be answered by nothing but her horror.
Movement IV
He takes her to a bar on the other side of town, the ’Til Two, where a girl from her school waits tables, and in a booth there he gives her his account of the world: a place of swine behind house fronts. Valentine’s night exteriors make the bar a second town under the first. The speech is given in full voice, and nothing in the film argues with it; the girl answers only with horror. The film lets his misanthropy stand unrefuted and defeats it only by plot, which is one reason its disclosure stops short of what it reaches for.
Graham, one of the two detectives, tells her who her uncle is. Then the case is closed from outside: the other suspect, followed in the East, is killed by an aircraft propeller, and the official case ends there. The death is told rather than shown, and it is a device, brought in from beyond the town for the plot’s convenience. Graham’s courtship of the girl is largely procedure, and his proposal in the garage adds little the stairs had not. These are the places where the parts are permitted rather than compelled, and they are not few: the spine holds, but the joints show.
Now the girl alone knows, and the uncle knows she knows. The back step gives way beneath her. Later she is shut in the garage with the car running, and the space fills with exhaust. Murder is attempted inside the home, among the family’s things, in one held space, and the garage is among the film’s few summits. Around these attempts the film stays bright small-town comedy, and the dread rises through it only at intervals. At the farewell party the girl wears the ring openly: the evidence has become her weapon, and the uncle is to leave.
Movement V
He leaves by train, and the girl is on it with him. At the open door of the moving train, with another train approaching, he holds his niece, and in the struggle it is he who falls. The struggle is played against a rear projection that shows its seams, and Tiomkin’s score underlines what the image has already said. Then the church: the town mourns its benefactor, and the eulogy is heard through the doors. Outside on the steps the girl stands with Graham, who offers her a consolation about the world that the film neither endorses nor refutes. The town has honoured the murderer, and she alone knows what it buried.
The film has carried a long criticism. Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol’s book on Hitchcock (1957) set out its doubling; Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films (1965) and Hitchcock’s conversations with François Truffaut (1966) returned to it. The questions stay open: whether the consolation on the steps is meant or ironic, whether the film attacks the family or defends it, how far the ring makes the girl’s love a courtship. The readings cluster on the double and the family. Its reach came late and narrowly: it was remade as Step Down to Terror (1958) and for television in 1991, and Park Chan-wook’s Stoker (2013) takes its uncle, his name and his niece. It survives whole, in its one version, continuously present for eighty-three years.
Among its director’s films on this desk, Vertigo stands at 9.0 and Psycho at 8.7: the form and depth of the one and the swerve and reach of the other are of a different order from this film’s. Rear Window stands at 8.4, North by Northwest at 8.0 and Notorious at 7.7; Citizen Kane, which moved the cinema of this film’s decade more, stands at 9.0. Shadow of a Doubt holds a family fully, from its supper table to its porch, and a town through it; its making bears weight in the scenes that matter, and one law runs from a neighbour’s game to a struggle at a train door. It made its turn inside a modest picture, on its maker’s proven path, and moved its field slowly. What it leaves is a girl on church steps, knowing what the town has honoured.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The crossed telegrams are required: they fix the two Charlies as one being before either meets the other, so that the girl’s later knowledge is self-knowledge. The emerald ring is required, its engraved initials first the evidence and later a weapon, worn openly at the farewell party. The torn newspaper gives the library its cause, and Joe and Herbie’s game of murder methods carries the dinner scenes. The joints show, and in more than one place: a second suspect killed by an aircraft propeller in the East closes the official case for the plot’s convenience; Graham’s courtship is largely procedure, and his proposal in the garage adds little the stairs had not; the survey men make their point at length. The spine holds at the threshold, with those parts permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: evil does not come to the family from outside but is its own best-loved member, and the family’s innocence is a way of not knowing that only its youngest adult loses. Young Charlie learns it, and learns that it cannot be shared: to spare her mother she keeps his secret. Beneath it, Emma sees in her brother the girl she was, and his prey are women like her grown old and rich, “fat, wheezing animals” at her table. What holds the figure is the film’s hand on its own truth. His misanthropy is answered only by a girl’s horror, the romance frames her knowledge, and the last words go to a detective’s consolation on the church steps, which the film neither endorses nor refutes: the disclosure is made and then half withdrawn.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The register is domestic, warm and often comic, and dread rises through it at intervals. The rises are exact: the train coming into Santa Rosa under a column of black smoke; the camera moving into Cotten’s profile at dinner as he speaks of the widows, until the face fills the frame; the crane at the library, rising away from the girl at the long table until she is small and alone in the dark room; the waltz, sentimental and Viennese, turned to terror by repetition; the garage filling with exhaust. What holds the figure is frequency. The middle of the film is bright small-town comedy for long stretches, the summits are few and short, and the last of them, the struggle at the train door, is played against a rear projection that shows its seams.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The double is built, and it bears weight from the first shots: uncle and niece named alike, lying on their beds in matched compositions, reaching for each other by telegram; the plot is the girl learning that her double is a murderer and refusing to become him. The ring, given by the uncle, adds an undertone of betrothal that makes the double dangerous, and the particular stays particular: Ann’s books, Joe’s detective magazines, a bank’s petty cash. What holds the figure is that the double carries the myth alone. The devil come to Eden, with the black smoke, the guest bearing gifts and a girl who eats the fruit of knowledge, and the vampire who lies on beds by day and feeds on widows, are evoked around it, not built.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The inheritance is double: the American small-town picture, family comedy and the Americana that Thornton Wilder brought from Our Town; and Hitchcock’s own thriller, which had already set a possible killer inside a marriage in Suspicion (1941). The turns are real. The murderer is the most charming figure in the film and the heroine’s double; his guilt is given early, so that the suspense is of a girl’s knowledge rather than of identity; the nightmare is set in a real town by daylight, in location work unusual for a studio thriller of 1942; and the law never catches him. What holds the figure low is the stake: a mid-budget picture for Universal, made on its director’s proven path of suspicion within the home, a year after the film that tried the same wager and flinched.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the girl and the killer are one person divided. The doubling is the instrument: every pair, the beds, the Charlies, the detectives, the suspects, the attempts, the church scenes, rhymes the good with the corrupt, so that the viewer reads the girl against her uncle in every scene and her victory is her refusal of the likeness. The early revelation of his guilt turns a mystery into a moral education, and the library crane is the form at its sharpest. What holds the figure is the share of the film that is container rather than instrument: the detective plot, with its survey ruse and its second suspect, is filled rather than used, and the romance with Graham obeys the studio’s form more than the film’s.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Evidence across eighty-three years. The film has carried a long criticism: Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol’s Hitchcock (1957), which set out its doubling; Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films (1965); Hitchcock’s conversations with François Truffaut (1966). The questions stay open: whether the ending’s consolation is meant or ironic; whether the film attacks the family or defends it; what the girl’s love for her uncle is, and how far the ring makes it a courtship; whether his view of the world is refuted or only defeated. The pairings multiply on return. What holds the figure is the shape of that yield: the readings, though at odds, cluster on the double and the family, and the film’s meaning was open at its first showing more than it has deepened since.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Released in 1943, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The intrinsic force is real: the film put the dark of the thriller inside the sunlit American family and town, and made the murderer a member of it, the most charming at the table and never caught. That reorganised where evil lives in Hollywood cinema more than how films are made. What holds the figure low is reach, delayed and specific, narrower than its director’s later films, in a decade moved more by others. A later line of small-town films is often said to descend from it; that descent is contested and is not credited here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Park Chan-wook’s Stoker (2013), which takes the uncle, his name and his niece; and two remakes, Step Down to Terror (1958) and a television film of 1991.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-three years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one version, and any restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous, in repertory, on television and on every home format, in teaching and in the study of its director; it is steady rather than the widest a film can have. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. A whole form and continuous presence across eighty-three years would have carried more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8. The surface, wartime Santa Rosa with its bank, library and radio, ages as period, not as fashion, since the film is about the American town of its moment, the war barely mentioned and nothing turning on a dated reference. The fabric, monochrome photography of its period, is the smallest charge.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in the set pieces: the matched openings, the dolly into Cotten’s profile, the library crane, the ring passed in the kitchen, the step that gives way, the garage held in one space. Joseph Valentine’s photography makes a real town welcoming and full of shadow. Cotten carries charm and contempt in one face, Teresa Wright a girl’s growth from boredom to knowledge, Patricia Collinge the film’s heart. What holds the figure is that the command bears weight in its set pieces more than continuously, and the charges fall where they matter: Macdonald Carey’s Graham is flat, the climax shows the seams of its rear projection, Tiomkin’s score underlines what the image has said, and the propeller death is told, not shown.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Joe and Herbie on the porch, planning each other’s murders by poison and blunt instrument as a hobby, and the uncle holding his niece at the open door of a moving train. One law governs both: murder is a game to those who have not seen the world as he has, and a practice to the one who has, and the town’s innocence is the condition of his safety. The survey men, the bank’s banter about embezzlement and the women’s club obey it, each a joke about what sits at the table, and the doubling applies it to form. The range is wide for a domestic picture. What holds the figure is strain: Graham’s courtship belongs to a cheerier film, and the second suspect’s death brings the law’s resolution in from outside the town.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 108 minutes holds. The family is held fully: two parents, three children, the mother’s brother, a mother’s girlhood and its loss. Consciousness is the girl’s, fully, and the uncle’s through his speeches only. The town enters as bank, library, church, women’s club, police and telegraph office, with a bar on its far side; money in the widows’ fortunes; the law in two detectives and a manhunt; gender in Emma’s lost self and the widows as prey; the sacred in a eulogy that honours a murderer. What holds the figure lowest is that every order is held through one family and one house: labour and the state are glimpsed, the war is at the margin, and history is the uncle’s nostalgia for the world before 1914, a line rather than an order.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Made at 7.9 and The Inner Law at 7.8. A film that survives whole in its one version after eighty-three years, continuously present in repertory, on television, at home and in teaching; a making that bears weight in the matched openings, the dolly into the uncle’s profile, the library crane and the garage, with Cotten, Wright and Collinge carrying the family; and one law, murder a game to the innocent and a practice to the one who knows, from the porch to the train door.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: the family held fully, and the town, money, the law, gender and the sacred present, all through one family and one house, with labour and the state glimpsed, the war at the margin and history a line. Above it, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 7.3: real turns made inside a modest picture on its maker’s proven path, and a reach that came late and narrowly. Then The Inevitable and The Sublime at 7.5, held by a propeller death, a procedural courtship and a ruse told at length, and by summits few and short in long stretches of bright comedy.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.5 against a threshold of 7.5, exactly. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.7, The Made at 7.9, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.7, The Unconcealment at 7.6, The Swerve at 7.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.3 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.3, and Pressure on Tradition, 7.3, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.6, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Shadow of a Doubt as released by Universal in January 1943, black and white, standard ratio, about 108 minutes, from the uncle on his rooming-house bed to the eulogy heard through the church doors: directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson and Alma Reville from an original story by Gordon McDonell, produced by Jack H. Skirball, photographed by Joseph Valentine, with music by Dimitri Tiomkin, edited by Milton Carruth, and shot in large part on location in Santa Rosa, California. No print, script or recording was consulted. One version circulates, and it is the one judged; any restoration is repair. The remakes, Step Down to Terror (1958) and a television film of 1991, are separate works and bear only on reach. Dialogue is described rather than quoted, save one three-word phrase whose words are certain. Facts that could not be verified, among them the city of the opening, the number of scenes, the director’s appearance in the film, a later essay by Robin Wood, the year of the film’s entry in the National Film Registry and its place in critics’ polls, are not given; the descent of later small-town films from this one is stated as contested.