Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt

A young woman from a small-town family in Santa Rosa is ecstatic at the news that her Uncle Charlie is coming to stay with them for a while. Everything goes swimmingly until a pair of detectives come over posing as government workers taking a survey and the suggestion that her uncle is an infamous serial killer is placed upon young Charlie. Relationships are tested and secrets are revealed in this brilliant piece of cinema from Alfred Hitchcock.

In Shadow of a Doubt, we can see that Hitchcock was beginning to discover his love for the trope of the 'wrong man'. Hitch showed extremely early on in his career that he had an interest in the scenario of a man being wrongly accused of his crime with The Lodger (1927), however what we get with Shadow of a Doubt, which was produced 16 years later, is a film so much more engaging and an example of the amount of progress that Hitchcock had made due to the experience of directing 27 feature films in that time period. The 'wrong man' trope is used off-screen in this film, which is interesting as Hitchcock has mirrored the characters in focus in his films such as The 39 Steps, where we follow a man who is wrongly accused, in Shadow of a Doubt, we follow the right man who is being pursued for the murder just as the wrong man is, somewhere else in the off-screen world of the diegesis.

Experimentation can be seen in all of Hitchcock's work and the key features of Shadow of a Doubt include canted shots, suggesting the character in frame to have an unstable mindset as he is pacing up and down the room, along with causing a feeling of uneasiness in the audience. This is where Hitchcock's brilliance lies, he knows how to experiment with film without screaming it in his audience's faces and therefore taking away from the meaning behind the experimentation. His innovational use of the camera in presenting a certain mood are used infrequently and it is there that the magic lies.
We can see that Hitchcock really grasped the knowledge that music is the perfect form of art to collaborate with film in order to create certain moods in this feature. With blaring orchestral music playing during the build-up of, and throughout, the dramatic moments of the film, we associate this music with danger in our subconscious, so when it is played quietly during the less dramatic moments of the film, we are still clinging on to our seats in fear that something is going to happen. Hitchcock would go on in his career to realise that music can make or break a film, with the screeching string soundtrack of his 1960 masterpiece, Psycho, being embedded into any viewers ears for a long time after leaving the cinema or turning the television off.

There is a certain brilliance to Alfred Hitchcock's films which one rarely finds in thrillers anymore. Hitch's understanding of the ins and outs of cinema, due to his involvement since the beginning of the mass production of films, is something that has been attempted to be replicated by other director's but has not ever been as brilliant, think Psycho II, Psycho III, or even the Gus van Sant remake of Psycho. Watching a Hitchcock film is truly a delight, even in the modern day, where technology can simulate tigers out of absolutely nothing and destroy the city of New York in post-production, there is nothing, for me, like sitting back and watching a director master the art with as much ease as it appears Hitchcock did.