OT: Shadow of a Doubt / The Magnificent Ambersons

The message boards for both these films are more or less dead, so I'm posting here since Uncle Charlie is, along with Norman, one of Hitchcock's great psycho-killers.

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A perfectly good use of the Psycho board. The vast majority of "Hitchcock film" boards are dead...you will likely find a better audience here. (I think the Frenzy board gets one new post every three years.)

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I was looking at The Magnificent Ambersons on TCM this morning when the dinner scene came up, and it appears to me that the speech Joseph Cotton gives at the dinner table here is a likely influence on the chilling speech Cotton gives as the serial murderer Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, which came out the following year.

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I see that your computer, too, spell checks into a misspelling of "Joseph Cotton."

Modernly , Quentin Tarantino gets a lot of grief as a "copycat" of other people's work -- except it is usually such obscure work(the TV series The Virginian; an old TV show called The Rebel; all manner of European B films) that I feel he is giving new life to LOST work.

But Hitchcock was no slouch in the "copycat" department either, was he? Shadow of a Doubt uses one key actor(Joseph arrgh Cotton) from Citizen Kane/Ambersons , and emulates the angles and texture of Welles' cinematographers(not used on Shadow of a Doubt.)

There was musing somewhere that Hitchcock could have gone all the way and cast Orson Welles himself as Uncle Charlie...but that would have lost some of Cotton's "All-American boyish" quality. Welles ended up playing an "Uncle Charlie type"(the murderous villain set down in an American small town) in The Stranger which has a somewhat Hitchcockian climax and death scene for Welles(he's a Nazi in America just after the war; not a good guy.)

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The camera angle, Cotton's vocal tone and position in the frame are nearly identical.

Hitchcock does a lot of push-in/dollying-in to a speaker shots in Rebecca (1940). One at about 30 mins which dollys in on Miss Danvers as she talks coldly/sinisterly/ominously to the new Mrs DeWinter feels a lot like a L-R reversed version of the Magnificent Ambersons' shot except that the push-in to Danvers feels a little more subjective than the Ambersons one - as though what Hitch is really doing is visualizing the new bride's dawning awareness that Danvers is going to loom large over her time at Manderley, maybe even be a nightmare.

In general, Rebecca is a hell of a fluent, polished, modern-feeling movie with a whole bunch of subjectivizing camera moves, intriguing transitions, lighting tricks, sfx, you name it. It's not quite Citizen Kane but it's definitely heading in that direction. Rebecca was a big step forward for Hitch. It just looks and sounds genuinely modern in a way that things like the excellent 39 Steps and Lady Vanishes don't quite.

The underlying techs of lights and film and lenses and cameras and audio recording were improving all the time through the '30s and you can feel in Rebecca that Hitch has got all the budget he needs and all the latest toys to play with. And, look, in Huston's Maltese Falcon (1941) there are lots of little dolly-ins and dolly-outs, e.g., when Bogart is on the phone. A new more intimate, audience-manipulating, nudging cinema is technically feasible around 1939, and suddenly all the cool kids were doing it.

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