


The first opposition in the movie occurs between film noir world and “ the sunny world of small- town comedy” as Wood has put it. Money spilled on the commode shows that he doesn’t even care about money and the abundance of it due to dangerous business he’s involved. This choice of angle shows his uncanny world and his dark motives. While showing him in his own room, there’s oblique angle usage which is hard to miss. There are lots of cues, that the uncle is no good, even from the beginning.
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Clash of Two Worlds: Darkness of Film Noir vs. The employment of noir syntactics can be seen clearly in the movie: shadows depicting prison bars, oblique angles, etc. At last, we see that this “rescue” has brought nothing more than a chain of misfortune to the family. It’s as if she’s waiting for a chevalier to save her from her dull, boring life and bring some action to her life. Young Charlie, as if there’s something supernatural between her and Uncle Charlie, thinks that she can communicate with him. In addition to these, there’s an undergoing theme of luck and telepathy. With throwing his hat on Young Charlie’s (Teresa Wright) bed, Uncle Charlie brings bad fortune to the family. After this, with the conversations going on we can understand that the little girl of the family, Ann (Edna May Wonacott) and the father, Joseph (Henry Travers) are prone to superstitions. In the opening scene, we see that Uncle Charlie’s (Joseph Cotton) room number is 13. Deconstructing Shadow of a Doubt via identifying the oppositions which Wood has suggested will provide a strong base of analysis.įirst, there’s a repeated theme in the movie which turns around superstition. As writer and film critic Robin Wood suggested in his essay Ideology, Genre, Auteur, the comparison of characters, neighborhoods and the analysis of the relationships will be employed as a way of understanding Shadow of a Doubt in depth. Analyzing Shadow of a Doubt in terms of the oppositions it contains is just one way of doing it. There’s a prosperity of themes in this movie and many ways to read them as a result. That makes it an outstanding movie just from the start. It’s the director’s favorite one in terms of his own films. Shadow of a Doubt is a psychological thriller movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock and it’s made in 1943.
