Most of us play different roles in our lives, especially in social situations and in relationships. We are actors all, playing many scenes, many stories, many movies.
But how often is one merely oneself, an open book, freely and simply who and what one is, in the company of others?
Worth taking note of is who these others are, what they mean to you, as well as what affects their live-in-person presence has on you.
So often the people who clean out closets, attics, barns, the people who dumpster-dive or buy something for $5 at a thrift shop or garage sale, unwittingly, hit the jackpot and find out the painting they own is worth 20 thousand for a small amateurish-looking painting.
Even the people who know they have something important get surprised anyway. The woman who was given an “ugly” pop art print by her friend who dragged her to modern art shows, the person who had the Frank Lloyd Writing architectural designs, the American woman that owned a nice (Canadian) painting (turned out to be a rare Krieghoff). All of them astounded by the 70,000 to 1.2 million kinds of estimates. Having ‘greatness’ of value thrust upon them as surely as a winning lottery ticket.
Some weep openly, some hug the appraiser, some coolly say “Very nice” or “Good God’, some say “Not a bad bargain for something free”. A range of responses, tones and moods. Often, though, sheer disbelief that the item taken for granted could be worth that kind of money. Some say, defensively, “It’s staying in the family”; others “Wanna buy it?
Responses 360 degree different from the folks who assume too much and get an unexpected ‘comeuppance’ on what they confidently bought from an investment perspective.
The experts always say “Buy what you love. It’s the best reason to.” And yet…
An old woman on today’s show who wears clothes and adornments signalling her interest in appearances, images, and likely beauty. Thought she’d bought a certain vintage chesterfield, which looked like something she’d own anyway–the red plush cushioning, the wooden decorations. Paid 2 thou for it and believed it was the genuine article by a certain designer. She said, in any case, that she had had full value for it for as long as she had owned it.
And the appraiser slowly, painfully, took her through her missing information, leaving her with a value of several hundred and the unmistakable knowledge that the designer had been dead years before her chesterfield had been made. She was palpably disappointed.
She had bought something she really liked and maybe she did feel she had had her money’s worth of enjoyment quite apart from what she believed was the true nature of the item. But she had also bought a dream, an image, a surface, without adequate background, without complete information. She wanted to believe, and that hope had misinformed her choice on a number of levels. She had set herself up for disappointment because of a lack of info and experience with regard to genuine antiques.
Same thing happened earlier on the same show to an aging, grey-braided Lynyrd Skynard t-shirted hippie who came to find out if he owned genuine Remington and Russell cowboy sculptures. He didn’t. Both had believed they owned something genuinely valuable, but their dreams turned to dust for public viewing, and to serve as a lesson to buy carefully if one is planning to buy the real thing.
Uncle Charlie, a psychopathic killer of three rich widows on the run, arrives in Santa Rosa to stay with his older sister’s family which includes his overly-innocent niece-namesake young Charlie. A duality of good and evil and appearance and reality runs balancedly throughout Hitchcock’s own favorite movie. At one point, even the innocent young Charlie says she could kill her uncle herself. And in the ending, the town-beloved, philanthropic Uncle Charlie is given an absurd hero’s funeral by its citizens. What does it all mean? wonders young Charlie at the end. Was her uncle whom she once loved really a good man who simply went bad? Why did he hate the world and everyone in it? And so her shadow of doubt continues despite being the one flukey survivor of the strange duo.
Certainly, this is an essential core Hitchcock with the usual doses of abnormal psychology, murder, strong suspense, grim ironies and humor, and its challenges to audience. Most noteworthy is the blatantly cynical dinner-table speech of Uncle Charlie about the world as a “sty”, the people as “swine’, and the injustice of idle, non-working widows living off the hard work and saved money of dead spouses “eating and drinking the money” (incidentally, his motivation and rationalization for three murders).
A mask and a character’s views for sure, but one is left wondering if that is what the director really felt behind the mask of his many dark movies and evil characters. Did he himself live with the same shadow of doubt about the goodness, kindness, happiness, and innocence that young Charlie blithely espouses and ignorantly believes? Did he, like Uncle Charlie and his sister, miss an older, more idyllic age? And did the director believe, like the detective in the denouement, that sometimes perhaps the world just goes crazy?
Shadow of a Doubt is one of the strangest coming-of-age films ever made. Like other Hitchcock films, there are lessons to be learned–with some characters sadder, but wiser, and never the same after their own personal world views have been shattered. Hitchcock always pushed the envelope, time and again, presenting attractive, personable villains who aren’t just cardboard stereotypes. They trouble the viewer with their perspectives and get one to ponder that there are more things in heaven and earth than perhaps even we, not just young Charlie and the detective, had bargained on.
Shadow of a Doubt is a timeless, naturalistic-realistic (nothing fantastic about it), hard-hitting, and strangely true movie. Must-see viewing for anyone seriously interested in film, Hitchcock, ideas, human and abnormal psychology, views of the sexes, and life in a large, basic dualistic way.
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For many reasons, this movie parallels/echoes Shakespeare’s dualistically-viewed/constructed Macbeth. “Fair is foul and foul is fair”, “There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face”, “Look like the innocent flower,/But be the serpent under ‘t”, “this even-handed justice”, “The primrose way to the ever-lasting bonfire”.
With one of his famous “unresolved endings” albeit a conventional romantic one, with perhaps shallower, less thoughtful audience members believing that Johnnie is really reformed after lying and manipulating his way through the entire plot, Hitchcock still has managed to create one of his classic ambivalent male-female character studies.
The rich only-child Lina is easily taken in by the lazy, charming, scheming n’er-do-well Johnnie who openly insults her by referring to her “affectionately” as Monkeyface throughout their relationship. A horsewoman, she figures she can control him (she says she’ll put the ‘bit’ in him) and that he really loves her despite such sneaky unforgivable acts such as selling off sentimental antique chairs–a wedding gift, no less, from her parents, and, unconscionably, trying to take out money against an insurance policy on her life. All very suspicious, of course, and midway through Lina has a potentially turning-point moment of wiseing up, by writing a farewell letter, then, ironically, tearing it up.
In one of his neglected, edgy classics Suspicion, Hitchcock presents a deluded female protagonist who, despite numerous nagging doubts, naively clings to the fantasy that her chronically lying, scheming husband is really a good man at heart, who loves her very much. Completely baffling, of course, to the audience who is in on the real state of affairs from the beginning and which suspects Johnnie, long before Lina is finally convinced he is trying to kill her for money.
Cary Grant is outstanding, as his usual charming, generous, caddish self. (No one has ever played that role better except maybe George Sanders. C.f., his movie critic role in All About Eve.) He is also very funny and hard-to-dislike as his drinking/betting buddy Beaky points out. Somehow there is truth to what Lina wants to and finally believes about Johnnie and what he is like. But that is contradicted throughout the movie by such matters as Johnnie using and bilking Beaky as a convenient source of spending money. There is also the troubling matter of Johnnie’s handling of Beaky ‘s drinking problem and all the surface evidence that “Old Bean” who last attended Beaky before his murder was not some imaginary figure called “Olbean’ by the police, but rather “Old Bean” Johnnie.
And the climax of the car on the cliffs finale. Was Johnnie saving Lina or trying to kill her, unsuccessfully or with a sudden change of heart? Questions, questions. But Lina, unchanged and naively unwilling to believe Johnnie to be bad, buys into his final explanations, setting up what appears to be a conventional denouement. And yet that uncomfortable suspicion still left in more thoughtful audience members’ minds, questions like “Is he still lying? Are the final lies the consummate ones? Does Johnnie still plan to kill her for money? Is he promising reform just to continue using Monkeyface?” and so forth.
With perhaps the only answers being that they have both bought into who and what they are. That Lina, unchanged, will resume her irrational romantic fantasy, and that, realistically, Johnnie will never change and just continue to be Johnnie. Only an audience member, as shallow and naïve as Lina would accept and believe the movie’s apparent conventional happy ending. The sort of moviegoer with an innocent naivete like the female Charlie in the even darker Shadow of a Doubt, significantly Hitch’s own favorite film.
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Hitchcock, himself, was a very divided personality who himself was interested in romance (To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, Spellbound, Rebecca, and Vertigo, which is why he could realistically portray the romantic dreams of characters in love. But he was a cynic who had experienced and portrayed the lies and manipulations of many people and characters, quite often aided and abetted by superficial charm. As he pointed out, the Iago-like villain would often get nowhere close to his goals and successes unless he was attractive or likeable in appearance. Otherwise, no one would trust him. You see this in the above-mentioned film Shadow of a Doubt as portrayed by Joseph Cotton in the role of the male Charlie.
Much like two alter-ego peas in the same pod, he shows audiences how humans contain/embody both good and evil, innocence and corruption. Or two ends of the continuum, so to speak. But unquestionably, the Johnnies of the world must needs require the lenient, manipulable Linas of the world in order to complete/continue their selfishly egoic games and schemes. In this cynical Hitchcockian sense, Lina and Johnnie can be said to ‘deserve each other.’ In that sense, the movie’s conventional happy ending was actually a cynical sop served by Hitchcock to conventional-bound audiences of /for all time, and is more dualistically open-ended or negatively-toned than it might first seem.
Spellbound
Casablanca
Autumn Sonata
Intermezzo
Murder on the Orient Express
Gaslight
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Notorious
Cactus Flower
Inn of the Sixth Happiness
Anastasia
Indiscreet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Spellbound
To Kill a Mockingbird
Moby Dick
The Omen
Cape Fear
The Boys from Brazil
Arabesque
The Big Country
MacArthur
Gentleman’s Agreement
The Gunfighter
The Keys to the Kingdom
On the Beach
Pork Chop Hill
Twelve O’Clock High
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Roman Holiday The Guns of Navarone
Inevitable, that Hitchcock, of all directors, should be the first director to deal head-on with psychoanalysis and stress disorder. He had been moving in that direction previously with psychological themes of earlier films (Shadow of a Doubt, Rebecca, Suspicion), and later would go on to explore psychology, crime, and obsession more in Psycho, Frenzy, Rear Window, and others.
His signature motif of The Wrong Man–a suspicious-behaving, falsely-accused man on the run continues in this classic as well. Strong scenes include the Salvador Dali dream sequence, the downhill skiing scene with an evil-looking Peck, the razor threat scene, and the denouement with the murderer revealed. A tad melodramatic and too much psychological deconstructing, but all in all, convincing with nice humorous touches thrown in (Bergman’s Freudian mentor). Lots to think about and discuss about abnormal psychology. It would have been a more realistic film without the intrusive, over-the-top theremin-punctuated score which won an AA.
(quote by W.B.Yeats, “Two Songs from a Play”)
He is not a star for you to follow.
He is just a man walking away down the road,
the one who took the fire with him.
No. He is a son of God, a vast conception of self.
He is a wisp of air, a greatness of imagination.
He is true to his dream and will honour it forever.
There is a greatness to his style and gestures.
His arms reach out before him, to hold his dream again.
In that brief moment, he is crowned with stars
and lives in eternity’s sunrise.
(originally posted on October 3, 2012)
“Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know;
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow.”
–Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To a Skylark”–the greatest forgotten poem of English literature today
(and with that much creatively expressed beauty, the last, unquoted stanza line does not frankly matter, incidentally)
