hitchcock at war: shadow of a doubt, wartime propaganda, and the director as star

In a related way it illustrates how the film’s terrors have to do with the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. Analyzing the film’s narrative system, issues of genre, authorship and social history, knowledge and epistemology, homesickness and “family values,” it shows how the film’s impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content. This book redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. This scrupulously organized film operates as a “master class” on principles of narrative design while generating resonant commentary on the nature of family life. The film exhibits a meticulous consistency as a cause and effect chain and in the way that its various scenes and sequences come together to form a unified narrative that is highly effective in building suspense and cultivating identification with characters. Given Hitchcock’s predilection for obsessive details, it seems likely that one of the reasons he liked Shadow so much is that is an extraordinarily well-ordered narrative system.

Shadow of a Doubt Diane Negra, Forthcoming, Auteur Books, 2021 Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was British-born Alfred Hitchcock’s fifth American film and the one that he at various times identified as his favorite and his best.

Hitchcock at war: shadow of a doubt, wartime propaganda, and the director as star