Eventually, he settled on Teresa Wright, who had understudied the part of Emily in Our Town on Broadway, and so knew her way around Wilder's small town as well as anyone. The only problem in the film's smooth production, which ran an efficient $813,000, was Hitchcock's failure to get Joan Fontaine for the leading role of young Charlie Newton. in other words, as it were, life in a small town lit by neon signs. I would like them to be very modern I mean that the small town should be influenced by movies, radio, juke boxes, etc. By conventional I mean stock figures which have been seen in so many films of this type. If possible I am extremely anxious to avoid the conventional small town American scene. As a result, Hitchcock made few compromises in his careful examination of American life. Hitchcock essentially acted as his own producer at Universal Pictures, then one of the smaller of the Hollywood dream factories. Yet the finished screenplay was Hitchcock's own, along with his faithful collaborator, his wife, Alma Reville. Louis was based, (another, far more optimistic monument of wartime Americana) assisted in writing the dialogue. After Wilder, Sally Benson, who was responsible for the stories on which the film Meet Me In St. In many ways, Shadow Of A Doubt is the exact inverse of his paean to small-town life, the drama Our Town, for the film features the venality and the provincialism of the small town just as Our Town chose the companion virtues of simplicity and regionalism. Thornton Wilder, before enlisting in the Army, prepared the prose outline of the film. Eventually, two very different specialists in American ways would be credited with work on the screenplay. Shadow Of A Doubt began life as the story "Uncle Charlie," by Gordon McDonell. That such a thorough critique of American mores appeared during World War II, a time when other directors were enshrining rather than embalming these standards, seems nothing short of incredible. In the process, Shadow Of A Doubt slanders that most cherished of American landscapes, the small town. The film moved Hitchcock out of the category of mere genre director and into the realm of the essayist on the universal fears and discontents of his species. Saboteur, 1942's picaresque tour over a condensed map of the country, highlighting the nation's archetypes and oddities in a brisk chase between enemy agents and True Love, was a very rough draft of this vision.ġ943's Shadow Of A Doubt, however, was Hitchcock's first fully realized cinema masterpiece, a grim, sad picture of American docility and Babbittry. & Mrs Smith, Suspicion and Saboteur) Alfred Hitchcock believed he was at last able to imagine a true picture of America on celluloid. After making five films in the United States since his arrival in 1939 ( Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Mr.
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