![]() His daughter, Patricia, said it was “because he loved the thought of bringing menace into a small town.” For Hitchcock, part of the game in making his first movie set in America was to make it absolutely American, with a sweet comic surface and a heart as dark as the noirest of the noir. ![]() “Shadow of a Doubt” may or may not be Hitchcock’s greatest film, but it’s his most intimate and heart-wrenching.On at least four different occasions, Alfred Hitchcock said that “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943) was his favorite film, but never why. But Cotten’s killer meets his match in a formidable teen-ager-his niece, played by Teresa Wright-who, instinctively decent, senses that without innocence love is not possible. Hitchcock is perverse enough to suggest that the murderer’s bitter clarity is in greater touch with life than is the feeble virtue of the town’s residents. In recent decades, critical consensus has settled on the American movies from the fifties, especially the complex fable of voyeurism and fear “Rear Window” and the ravishingly beautiful hallucinatory nightmare “Vertigo.” Hitchcock, however, often said that his own favorite was “Shadow of a Doubt,” from 1943, in which a debonair murderer of widows (Joseph Cotten), who has a fully worked-out nihilistic theory of existence, settles into peaceful Santa Rosa, California. What is Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest film? A large retrospective of his work, running through January 12 at Film Forum, prompts the kind of question that breaks up friendships.
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