Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

I have seen Shadow of a Doubt several times, and I’m still not sure how old the main character, Charlotte (Charlie) Newton, is. (I’m going to call her Charlotte throughout to avoid any confusion because her uncle is also called Charlie.) I had originally assumed that she was in high school, but this is not stated explicitly. She doesn’t seem to have a job. The only one in the family who clearly does have a job is her father, Joe, and he works in one of the local banks. It’s not even clear that Charlotte and her younger siblings, Ann and Roger, go to school during the events in the film.

The issue about Charlotte’s age is important because Shadow of a Doubt is all about the loss of innocence, specifically the loss of innocence for Charlotte Newton. But maybe her exact age isn’t the most important point because there is no doubt that Charlotte is young and that she is at a disadvantage compared to her Uncle Charlie. She is named for Uncle Charlie, one of her favorite relatives. It’s obvious that Charlotte is young and a bit idealistic; some might even say immature. Her encounters with her Uncle Charlie portrayed in the film put her on an even more unequal footing and thus make her transformation even more dramatic.

Shadow of a Doubt introduces the character of Uncle Charlie first. The narrative starts with him, living in a boardinghouse in New Jersey. Viewers see right away that he is in some sort of trouble and that he is on the run. This kind of introduction would make it seem as though he is the most important character, but I think this is a bit of a trick on Hitchcock’s part to put the initial focus on the villain. The most important character is really Uncle Charlie’s antithesis: his niece Charlotte Newton.

 (This blog post about Shadow of a Doubt contains spoilers.)

When Uncle Charlie arrives for a visit with the Newtons in Santa Rosa, California, he charms everyone. His sister Emma and his niece Charlotte idolize him. Emma romanticizes their shared childhood; Charlotte imagines that being his namesake makes them twins of sorts. She even uses the word twins in a conversation with her Uncle Charlie in the kitchen of the family home:

• Charlotte: “I meant it. Please don’t give me anything.”

• Uncle Charlie: “Nothing?”

• Charlotte: “Oh, I can’t explain it. But you came here and Mother’s so happy. Oh, I’m glad that she named me after you and that she thinks we’re both alike. I think we are, too. I know it. Oh, it would spoil things if you should give me anything.”

• Uncle Charlie: “You’re a strange girl, Charlie. Why would it spoil things?”

• Charlotte: “Because we’re not just an uncle and a niece. It’s something else. I know you. I know that you don’t tell people a lot of things. I don’t either. I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s something nobody knows about.”

• Uncle Charlie: “Something . . . nobody knows?”

• Charlotte: “Something secret and wonderful and I’ll find it out.”

• Uncle Charlie: “It’s not good to find out too much, Charlie.”

• Charlotte: “But we’re sort of like twins. Don’t you see? We have to know.”

In spite of her protestations, Uncle Charlie does bestow a gift on his niece. It’s a ring inscribed with other people’s initials. Charlotte is dismayed at first but then accepts the ring. For anyone other than Charlotte, such a detail would raise red flags.

Uncle Charlie is suspected of being the Merry Widow Murderer, which is why two detectives posing as newspaper reporters are in Santa Rosa. According to the newspaper article that Charlotte finds in the local library, one of the suspects in the case may have fled the Northeast. The last victim was in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a Mrs. Bruce Mathewson. B. M. is one of the set of initials inscribed inside the band of the emerald ring that Uncle Charlie gave to Charlotte.

Charlotte defends her uncle when Detective Jack Graham explains the real reason that he is in Santa Rosa with his partner Detective Fred Saunders. But she’s the one in the family who faces the facts and begins to see her uncle more clearly. She doesn’t discount the evidence that she finds about Uncle Charlie, including the inscription inside the emerald ring. She searches for the truth, at first convinced that Detective Graham is wrong about her uncle, but she begins to see that she and her family are wrong about Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie turns on Charlotte when he realizes that she knows about him and his past. He calls her “ordinary,” as if the word is an insult. But Charlotte isn’t ordinary. She is the only one in her family who faces the truth and accepts it.

Charlotte returns the emerald ring to Uncle Charlie one evening when she runs out of the house and he goes after her. When he catches up with her, he tells her his outlook on life: that it’s sordid no matter where you look, and because it is so sordid, it really doesn’t matter what he has done and what he plans to do. By explaining what he thinks about people and about his extremely pessimistic take on life, he places a great burden on Charlotte, someone who is so young, someone he should be able to care for and protect.

When they return to the family home, Uncle Charlie and Charlotte have another conversation, this one on the front walk outside. Uncle Charlie continues to impose his wishes on his niece:

• Uncle Charlie: “Charlie, will you help me?”

• Charlotte: “Help you?”

• Uncle Charlie: “The same blood flows through our veins, Charlie. A week ago, I was at the end of my rope. Oh, I’m so tired, Charlie. There’s an end to the running a man can do. You’ll never know what it’s like to be so tired. I was going to . . . Well, then I got the idea of coming out here. It’s my last chance, Charlie. Give it to me. Graham and the other fellow, they don’t know. There’s a man in the east. They suspect him, too. And if they get him, I’ll . . . Charlie, give me this last chance.”

• Charlotte: “Take your chance. Go!”

• Uncle Charlie: “I’ll go, Charlie. I’ll go. Just give me a few days. Think of your mother. It’ll kill your mother.”

• Charlotte: “Yes, it would kill my mother. Take your few days. See that you get away from here.”

• Uncle Charlie: “You realize what it’ll mean if they get me? The electric chair. Charlie, you’ve got to help me. I count on you. You said yourself we’re not ordinary uncle and niece, no matter what I’ve done.”

• Charlotte: “You go in [the family home]. I’ll be in in a minute.”

Once Charlotte realizes what her uncle is capable of, and he begs her not to say anything, he gives her an unusual argument, and it works. It works because he is repeating Charlotte’s own words. He tells his niece that they are so much alike that they are like twins. And even though Charlotte is horrified by what her uncle has done, she sees some similarities in their personalities.

The scene at the dinner table in the Newton family home when Uncle Charlie talks disparagingly about money, wealth, and widows is quite shocking. It’s also a bit surprising that he would reveal so much at the dinner table in front of his sister’s whole family. In spite of its shock value, I don’t find it to be all that important to the story. The narrative would still be complete without it. The most important scenes are those that include the conversations, one on one, between Uncle Charlie and Charlotte.

One of the most important of their conversations occurs when Uncle Charlie and Charlotte are talking on the porch at night. In that scene, Charlotte tells her uncle first that she will kill him first, before he has a chance to hurt anyone in the family. This conversation occurs after he stages her first “accident” by cutting through one of the stairs on the set of backstairs on the house. After she nearly tumbles to the bottom of the stairs, Charlotte confronts him directly, asking, “When are you leaving, Uncle Charlie?” He decides that he’d rather stay in Santa Rosa, that he doesn’t want to leave the safety of his family, and Charlotte tells him, “. . . I’m warning you. Go away, or I’ll kill you myself. See? That’s the way I feel about you.” It’s a remarkable transformation for someone so young. It’s almost hard to believe, but it’s Charlotte’s response to all the pressure that Uncle Charlie has put on her himself.

The entire film balances on that fulcrum: the struggle between the two Charlies. The film starts with Uncle Charlie, who will do anything to save himself, and ends with Charlotte, who becomes more and more of a force for Uncle Charlie to reckon with. She doesn’t tell anyone what she knows about Uncle Charlie or what she would do to protect her family until the end of the film. Only at the end, during Uncle Charlie’s funeral (which is a celebrated procession), does she and her new boyfriend, Detective Jack Graham, start to talk about the real Uncle Charlie behind his charming façade.

The featurette included on the DVD that I watched, “‘Beyond Doubt’: The Making of Hitchcock’s Favorite Film,” is worth a look. Shadow of a Doubt was Hitchcock’s favorite of his films, and I can see why. It’s one of my favorites, too.

January 12, 1943, release date  •  Directed by Alfred Hitchcock  •  Screenplay by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville  •  Based on a story by Gordon McDonell  •  Music by Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Lehár  •  Edited by Milton Carruth  •  Cinematography by Joseph A. Valentine

Teresa Wright as Charlotte (Charlie) Newton  •  Joseph Cotten as Charles (Uncle Charlie) Oakley  •  Henry Travers as Joseph Newton, young Charlie’s father  •  Patricia Collinge as Emma Newton, young Charlie’s mother and Uncle Charlie’s sister  •  Macdonald Carey as Detective Jack Graham  •  Wallace Ford as Detective Fred Saunders  •  Hume Cronyn as Herbie Hawkins  •  Edna May Wonacott as Ann Newton  •  Charles Bates as Roger Newton  •  Irving Bacon as the station master  •  Clarence Muse as the Pullman porter  •  Janet Shaw as Louise  •  Estelle Jewell as Catherine

Distributed by Universal Pictures  •  Produced by Skirball Productions

Transit (2018)

“Who is the first to forget, he who is left, or she who left him?”

I saw Transit earlier this year, in January, and I had a lot of trouble following the plot and keeping track of the characters. The film still intrigued me, and I decided to read Transit, the novel on which it is based, by Anna Seghers. It is representative of postwar literature published in France: bleak, existential, a series of events that barely form a plot. That description doesn’t sound like a recommendation, does it? But I enjoyed the novel very much, enough to decide that I needed to see the film again. I’m not sure that reading the novel helped me understand the film any better; however, seeing the film a second time and keeping a list of the characters handy did the trick.

And I am really glad that I saw Transit a second time. It’s a haunting story of people trying to escape the occupation of France. Seghers’s novel was based on her experiences escaping Germany and occupied France, but the film changes several of the basic details. One is the fact that the film is set in the present, which makes its message about people escaping persecution even more poignant for modern-day viewers. The novel is a rather straightforward story of a man trying to flee the Nazis, but the film is a multilayered story within a story about a writer with an unfinished story, a manuscript.

Georg, the main protagonist of the film, needs to escape Paris because the occupying forces are closing in. He never explains why he needs to leave, and the occupying forces are never clearly identified. First, Georg was supposed to escape with his friend Heinz, then he meets Paul, who offers him money to take two letters to a writer named Weidel and space in a car to leave Paris. Georg accepts this new offer. When Georg arrives at Weidel’s hotel room, he learns that Weidel has killed himself by slashing his wrists. The hotel’s proprietor gives all of Weidel’s papers, including a passport and a manuscript, to Georg. But Georg’s plans fall apart when he chances upon a police roundup of several people, including Paul. He now falls back on his plan to help his friend Heinz.

Georg takes Heinz by train to meet Heinz’s wife Melissa and their son in Marseille. The original plan was to get Heinz to Marseille, and then Georg would escape to the hills and meet someone named Henry. A voice-over narrator joins the story while Georg and Heinz hide in one of the train’s railcars. The voice of this narrator is what viewers hear as Georg reads Weidel’s papers one by one—the manuscript; the letter from the Mexican consulate in Marseille; and the letter from Marie, Weidel’s wife. Heinz dies on the way to Marseille, and Georg has no choice but to leave him behind and continue by foot.

To find a hotel room in Marseille, Georg has to pay a week in advance because he does not have a residence permit. Part of the bureaucratic jigsaw puzzle meant to bedevil the population at large is that people can stay in Marseille only if they can prove, with a visa and ship’s passage, that they don’t want to stay. The next day, Georg goes to the Mexican consulate first to straighten out Weidel’s affairs. In the consulate, while he waits, people start to tell him their stories, which annoys him at first. But then he thinks to himself, “This is Marseille. It’s a port. And ports are places where stories are told, that’s what they’re there for. The people here have every right to tell stories. And be listened to.” Georg thinks this to himself, and viewers learn of it because he told this to the voice-over narrator. Even before the Mexican consul mistakes Georg for Weidel, Georg’s identity is already muddied by the narrator telling us what Georg was thinking instead of Georg telling it himself.

(This blog post about Transit contains spoilers.)

Georg intends to clear up the Weidel matter on his first visit to the Mexican consulate, but he is mistakenly identified as Weidel by an employee and then by the Mexican consul himself. The consul tells Georg that his wife (Weidel’s wife) Marie was just in the Mexican consulate two days earlier. Visas, two ship’s passages, and a money order are ready for them both, and now that both are in Marseille, Georg can take all of them. Georg and Marie Weidel, someone he has never met, need transit visas for the United States and Spain because they are stopovers on their trip to Mexico, and no stopover country will allow passengers to disembark for fear that they will never leave.

The Mexican consul asks Georg for the name of his wife as a way to prove his identity. Georg is able to remember Marie Weidel’s first name because he read the letter from her that Paul had asked him to deliver to Weidel in Paris. Georg tells the Mexican consul that his wife left him, and the Mexican consul asks Georg, “One thing interests me. It’s more of a question. Who is the first to forget, he who is left, or she who left him? I’m interested in your opinion as a writer.” This question, which starts this post, is asked by more than one character, and it underlines one of the deepest fears about their predicament: that of being forgotten entirely. Georg’s response: “I can hardly remember her.”

Georg meets Marie later in the film, and he begins to fall in love with her. He never tells Marie his real identity, and by a series of coincidences, his true identity is never revealed. Marie continues believing that her husband has arrived in Marseille and is looking for her because the Mexican consul keeps her updated with Georg’s (Weidel’s) visits. During one of their conversations, the question about being forgotten comes up again:

• Marie: “Who is the first to forget: he who is left, or she who left him? What do you think? [pause] He has forgotten me.”

• Georg: “Who?”

• Marie: “My husband.”

• Georg: “How do you know?”

• Marie: “The consul told me.”

• Georg: “What consul?”

• Marie: “The Mexican one.”

Marie is living in Marseille with a doctor named Richard. During this same conversation, she explains to Georg that Weidel wouldn’t leave Paris when she wanted to go, even though it was becoming more and more dangerous to stay. She and Richard fled the Germans together. She tells Georg, “They say that those who’ve been left never forget. But it’s not true. They have the sweet, sad songs. Pity is with them. Those who leave, no one is with them. They have no songs.”

Georg agrees to help Marie and gives her one of the ship’s passages that he received from the Mexican consul. He keeps the other for himself. Both are for the ship Montréal. When Marie tells him that she knows that her husband will be on the ship because the Mexican consul told her that her husband (but really Georg) picked up the passages and all the other papers for their escape, Georg decides to stay in Marseille. He goes to Richard and Marie’s apartment and offers his passage to Richard.

After the Montréal sails, Georg sees or thinks he sees Marie in the Mont Ventoux café looking for her husband. He tries to catch her, but she seems to vanish into thin air. He goes to the dock to check the Montréal’s passenger list and learns that it hit a mine and exploded. There were no survivors.

Georg goes back to the Mont Ventoux café, where viewers learn that he told his story to the bartender there (the bartender is the voice-over narrator) and that it is the bartender who is telling Georg’s story. The bartender tells Georg that he should leave or at least hide because the “cleansing” of Marseille has started. But Georg refuses to leave the café. He gives Weidel’s manuscript to the bartender for safekeeping. He is waiting for Marie. He turns around every time the bell over the front door of the café chimes. The very last shot is of Georg turning around and starting to smile, but viewers are never sure if Georg actually sees Marie when he turns around or if he is imagining her: The film ends without showing anything more than Georg turning around and starting to smile.

The structure of the film is complex and layered, which may put some people off, but I found it rich and satisfying, especially on second viewing. Unlike the novel, the story is told by the bartender at the Mont Ventoux café, who tells Georg’s story as Georg told it to him. Georg is also the bearer of Weidel’s last story, that of his manuscript. Even Georg’s identity is complex and multilayered, and perhaps he tells his story to the bartender so that he himself won’t be forgotten. On his first visit to the Mexican consulate in Marseille, Georg’s identity begins to be transformed, a process many people might find unsettling, but Georg seems to accept it as another way to escape.

I imagine that Transit is a film that reveals more and more on each subsequent viewing. And I think the effort is well worth it.

February 17, 2018 (Berlin), April 5, 2018 (Germany), release dates  •  Directed by Christian Petzold  •  Screenplay by Christian Petzold  •  Based on the novel Transit by Anna Seghers  •  Music by Stefan Will  •  Edited by Bettina Böhler  •  Cinematography by Hans Fromm

Franz Rogowski as Georg  •  Paula Beer as Marie  •  Godehard Giese as Richard  •  Lilien Batman as Driss  •  Maryam Zaree as Melissa  •  Ronald Kukulies as Heinz  •  Sebastien Hülk as Paul  •  Barbara Auer as the woman with two dogs  •  Matthias Brandt as the bartender at Mont Ventoux and the narrator  •  Alex Brendenühl as the Mexican consul

Distributed by Music Box Films  •  Produced by Schramm Film