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Arts & Entertainment

More Hitchcock For Halloween!

Check out some of the lesser known Hitchcock classics this Halloween season.

As I mentioned last week, Alfred Hitchcock has been in the media quite a bit lately, mostly due to the unbelievable find in New Zealand (of all places) of his earliest surviving silent movie from 1924, The White Shadow.  With that, and being the Halloween season, my thoughts are the more Hitchcock, the better (well, that is my philosophy any time of the year, but especially in October).  Last week, I looked at Rear Window and Vertigo…two classics Hitchcock directed starring James Stewart.  This week, it’s two of his lesser known but still just-as-“horrific” titles.   

Idyllic small-town America turns ugly in the Hitchcock masterpiece Shadow of a Doubt, the film which the director himself even considered his favorite. The film begins with Joseph Cotten’s character Uncle Charlie, one of the most devious and sinister characters in cinematic history, heading from the East Coast to stay with his sister in Santa Rosa, California. Teresa Wright plays his niece and namesake, who at first is excited about her uncle’s appearance but soon discovers that evilness hides under the surface of his kind persona. In the beginning, there is doubt in the minds of the audience about the accusations against Uncle Charlie. But, as the audience grows more and more suspicious, so does Wright’s character. Santa Rosa becomes a character itself by lending a “perfect” atmosphere around the town while something purely devilish is brooding within. This is one of the darkest Hitchcock films, mostly because of the way Cotten portrays Uncle Charlie with cool, calculated depravity. 

When director Alfred Hitchcock shot Frenzy, he was in his early 70s and was at the end of a filmmaking career that began in the 1920s in England. After Hitchcock left Britain behind for a career in America (his first film in the U.S. was 1940’s Rebecca), he rarely looked back. Frenzy is a triumphant return to London, with the film shot entirely there and starring an all-British cast. This movie does not boast any glitzy movie stars or any of the Hitchcock elegance of many of his previous films, but displays a rather dark, violent side unlike anything the director had shot before. The finished product results in a taut and intelligent thriller, one of the best of Hitchcock’s career and definitely the best of his later films. The movie begins with a body found, washed ashore in the Thames River. The corpse has a necktie around its neck, identifying the murder as another “necktie” serial killing. Through a series of twists and wrong turns, an innocent man is accused of the murders, which has been a common Hitchcock plot line over the course of his career (The Wrong Man and North by Northwest, in particular). The difference here is that early on in the film, the audience becomes privy to who is the guilty party and who is being framed. Knowing this before most of the cast, we are left squirming in our seats, waiting for the characters to catch up with what we already know. Also, unmasking the villain towards the beginning of the film allows the audience to focus less on plot and more on character and the cinematic style that makes Frenzy a magnificent thriller.

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Shadow of a Doubt: 1943, 108 minutes, not rated, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, Macdonald Carey, Patrica Collinge and Hume Cronyn, and Henry Travers.

Frenzy: 1972, 116 minutes, rated R, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Alec McCowen, Anna Massey, Jean Marsh, and Vivien Merchant. 

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The Niles Public Library owns copies of these movies on DVD. 

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