The scene is presented almost in real-time with the diegetic music building in the fashion of a scene from a love story, as a besotted pair chart city and landscape in an attempt to be reacquainted.The geography of the town is matched by that of the house, one in which there are an unusual number of exits, including one from the top floor of the residence. One particularly memorable sequence involves Charlotte in a mad dash across the town to the library, hoping to reach it before it closes for the day. Hitchcock’s playground for Shadow Of A Doubt is the perfect idyll of Santa Rosa, a location defined by its white picket fences and modest yet familiar town square. And thats without even mentioning the single-location worlds of Rear Window, Rope and Lifeboat. The San Francisco of Vertigo feels like a real city, the slow driving sequences expanding the scope of the locale impressively. One of my favourite things about the work of Alfred Hitchcock is his ability to present space and place. It’s a brutal end to a work far ahead of its time.
The recurrent image of the dancers is brought to centre-stage again as the film closes, with the sight of the waltz being played out as Charlie falls to his death, and while its not literally spoken one cannot help but think of Uncle Charlie’s earlier insistence that “The whole world’s a joke to me” as he falls victim to fate. Shadow Of A Doubt is a noisy film in general, with the chatter of kids, the sound of traffic and the various noises produced by the locomotive making for a packed sound track. Sound is one of the key traits of Shadow Of A Doubt, and one of the most powerful devices employed here by Hitchcock. One understands immediately that something is not right here, with the subdued climax being the first of many such instances of this kind of behaviour in the film. The diegetic score, provided by an orchestra is already huge and only builds further and higher as the sequence progresses. As the landlady of the abode pulls down the window blind it recalls a coffin closing, our vampire put to rest. We cut from the credits to the far less glamourous sight of a Philadelphia brownstone, presented by way of a dutch angle, before meeting Uncle Charlie who is laying uneasily still in the middle of a bed (an image that would later be recalled as his namesake sits in a similar state). As is the case with the Lynch film, Shadow Of A Doubt is a movies movie, a post-modern exercise that dissects the medium from the inside out.
Shadow Of A Doubt opens with an image that David Lynch would pay homage to some years later with the opening moments of Mulholland Dr., as a group of people dance while the “Merry Widow” waltz plays out.
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