![]() ![]() She's pleased and surprised to discover that Uncle Charlie has written a telegram of his own, announcing an extended visit. She decides to write a telegram to her namesake, her Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten, veteran of multiple Orson Welles films and plays), and ask him to come for a visit as a way of rejuvenating things. She feels the family is stuck in a rut, going through the motions, trapped in its particular roles. Also, both men have some of the best facial expressions in film history.Ĭharlie is feeling a little down at the film's beginning. The two men, in some of my favorite scenes, debate the best ways to murder each other without getting caught. ![]() Meanwhile, Joseph is obsessed with murder, of both the true-crime and detective fiction varieties, an obsession he shares with his neighbor Herbie (Hume Cronyn, in his film debut). ![]() Emma embodies the American '40s mother figure, but there's a melancholic wistfulness and a wounded sensitivity just below the surface. All three children are fiercely intelligent, eccentric, and both wise beyond their years and dreamily, naively romantic. The family is tight-knit and close, all-American (as stupid as that word is, it fits here), church-going, hard-working, comfortable with each other. The family at the center of Shadow of a Doubt is both typical and unusual: a banker father, Joseph (Henry Travers, best known as the angel in It's a Wonderful Life), a working mother and homemaker, Emma (Patricia Collinge), a daughter in her early twenties, Charlie (Teresa Wright, so good here and in my favorite movie about veterans returning from the war, The Best Years of Our Lives), and two younger children, Ann and Roger (Edna May Wonacott and Charles Bates). ![]()
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