The Birds hitchcock folder icon shadow of a doubt 1943

It’s not entirely clear the Newark scenes are diegetically set there Wright muses that her uncle has been in Philadelphia, but the film never clarifies whether she’s misremembering, he had fed the family misinformation, he drifts so much that he was also there, or Newark is standing in for the visually-comparable Philly.Īpparently Hitch chose Newark not out of some proto-neorealist commitment to location shooting, but rather because wartime exigencies included $5000 set-construction limits, as Sheri Chinen Biesen notes in Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir.

Then it’s off to Santa Rosa and pop-Freudian thrills. Hitchcock makes great use of urban space here:

Long before the ’67 riots became an excuse to condemn Newark, here’s a British suspense filmmaker’s rather unflattering establishment of the city:Ĭotten spends the first several minutes in an SRO flophouse, then evades some mysterious pursuers through the Ironbound. Indeed, the IMDB-not wholly reliable, but still useful-suggests this was the only film shot in Newark between the 1910s and the 50s.Īs such, it’s a valuable visual record, beginning with its opening sweep across the Pulaski Skyway. But still, I am willing to bet (and will test this with a Facebook trivia poll of my friends when I post this) that few people realize Hitch was shooting here. Okay, it’s not entirely forgotten, since I was just scooped on this by the Star-Ledger (dammit). Less remembered is the opening scene scene, shot in Newark.

In any case, Joseph Cotten in quaint, sunny Santa Rosa, menacing his niece Theresa Wright, while they barely suppress incestuous desire, that’s what people remember about Shadow of a Doubt (exept Sonic Youth, who titled a song after it but then based its lyrics on a different Hitchcock movie, those wacky young ‘uns). Mostly remembered as the ur-text of Creepy Uncle movies, Shadow of a Doubt lingers near the top of Alfred Hitchcock’s B+ tier-not quite his A game of Psycho or Vertigo, but part of his energetic wave of early-40s American work, before he lost his footing later in the decade with duller stuff like The Paradine Case and Under Capricorn.

The Birds hitchcock folder icon shadow of a doubt 1943