Performance Spotlight: Teresa Wright in Shadow of a Doubt

Note: This is the first post in a series dedicated to For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III, looking at some of my personal favorite performances in Hitchcock films. Performance is something I haven't tackled in great depth on this blog, but I really wanted to try something new. My favorite Hitchcock films have been with me so long that I can't sum them up easily in film reviews or formal essays. As a result, these spotlights are less structured than what I've posted before, but I hope they get across my great love for these roles and for what these actors brought to the Hitchcock canon.

With introductions out of the way, let's start with one of all-time favorites.

Teresa Wright in Shadow of a Doubt

"I guess I don't like to be an average girl in an average family."

Few actresses have been as critically lauded as Teresa Wright was when her career began. Instead of the typical bread crumb trail of bit parts and disappointments leading up to that big break, Wright got her glory right from the beginning. After success on stage as the ingenue in Life with Father, Wright was signed on by Samuel Goldwyn, who immediately saw in her a kind of genuine, youthful appeal. As he put it, when he saw her at her dressing table, "(she) looked for all the world like a little girl experimenting with her mother's cosmetics."

Goldwyn immediately cast her as the lone innocent of The Little Foxes. Set against scene-stealing performances by Bette Davis, Dan Duryea, and Patricia Collinge, Wright not only held her own, she got her first Oscar nomination. Her next two pictures, Mrs. Miniver, and Pride of the Yankees were likewise critical successes that got her back-to-back Oscar nominations (she won for Mrs. Miniver). Three Oscar nominations for her first three films--not even Meryl Streep can say that. It's a record that's never been beaten. And that's not even taking into account her (in my opinion) two best films: William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives and Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt.

 

What is it about her? The standard truism for acting Oscars is that you win for transformation, you win for outsized flashiness, or you win for past services rendered. Teresa Wright can't lay claim to any of these. She was never flashy and her performances were, to a great extent, variants on the same theme. She played innocents and heroines, loyal sweethearts, devoted wives and daughters. And she remained roughly 18 years old for the entirety of the 1940s. She was, in so many ways, The Girl Next Door. Not in the sunshine-y, MGM style that Judy Garland was, but the kind of girl you could imagine working in hospitals or marrying your best buddy. To that extent, perhaps you can attribute her success to an era that badly needed her.

And yet what I keep coming back to with Wright and the love I have for her is that she never played an Ideal. There's a core of reality to every Teresa Wright performance, a resistance to easy platitudes. Just go back to Best Years of Our Lives and the cool strength in her voice when she tells a traumatized Dana Andrews to go back to sleep. Or the moment when she says, "I'm going to break that marriage up!" That line could so easily have been played for cuteness or girlish petulance--Wright just sounds like a woman who's realized the truth. Even in something like The Little Foxes, cast opposite a bunch of scene-stealers and a very condescending love interest, playing a character who's rather too innocent to be believed, Wright listens, showing us the girl's dawning intelligence.

Teresa Wright was lovely, she was the kind of actress who radiated charm and goodness. But watching her, I don't feel pressured into liking her. I feel like I'm watching a good woman who has to struggle and question and mature. Her goodness is always earned. 

In Shadow of a Doubt, Teresa Wright's character Charlie is a young woman, living at home, surrounded by a loving, middle-class family, and quite clearly dying inside from boredom. "This family's just gone to pieces," she tells her befuddled father (Henry Travers). When he tries to reassure her by telling her that the bank just gave him a raise, Wright sums up her angst with a sharp, "How can you talk of money when I'm talking about souls?"

In a stroke of inspiration, Charlie remembers her favorite relative, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten). She seizes on the rather vague idea that a visit from Uncle Charlie will restore the family, shake them up a bit. But, sure as the old Chinese curse, Uncle Charlie's visit gives them a lot more excitement than they bargained for. Because Uncle Charlie is in fact, a serial killer who has come to their small, sleepy town to hide from the law. And when Charlie slowly begins to suspect her uncle's true nature, it will mean the death of her innocence and her love for him. And her literal death as well, if Uncle Charlie decides she must be silenced.

 

Shadow of a Doubt is one of my favorite Hitchcocks and I had the great experience of introducing one of my friends to it a few years back. She was no stranger to Hitchcock or classic film, but she was quite blunt about what she did and didn't like. After we watched Teresa Wright walk away cheerfully from an uncle who'd just violently twisted her hand, my friend shook her head. "God, she's dumb." But much later, as we watched a scene with Charlie and her little sister Ann (the brilliant Edna May Wonacott) discussing the merits of flower-picking, my friend let out a happy sigh. "I love that whole family," she said. And by the climax of the film, as we watched a now-wised-up Charlie threaten to kill her uncle, my friend turned to me and asked me, "Who is that actress?"

I think the key to Wright's performance is that she plays Charlie for everything except fear. Once she finds out the truth about her uncle, Wright's face and body spell out utter revulsion and anger. As she watches him twist a paper napkin with strong, ruthless fingers, her eyes widen and you can see the slow realization in her mind: this is who this man is, this is the man I loved. And you can see the beginnings of cold hatred. "We thought you were the most wonderful man in the world," she tells him, her shoulders stiff. "The most wonderful and the best." Wright doesn't shrink away; she's almost paralyzed with how much she wants to get away from him. And yet, even though she's clearly afraid for what will happen if he stays, she isn't afraid of him. She's not a victim, she is his adversary. So when Wright tells her uncle to go away or she'll kill him herself, you don't see empty threats. She could really do it.

 

Wright is at her most chilling in a later moment that takes place after a carbon monoxide "accident." Charlie is unconscious on the lawn and her family is crowded around her. Uncle Charlie tenderly calls her name, rubbing her hands, and leaning over her. Charlie comes to, dazed for a split-second. But then she sees Uncle Charlie and her gaze turns flat as a cobra's. "Go away." It's that pure, reflexive hatred that makes you see just how much Uncle Charlie has poisoned her world.

 

Critics make a lot of the incestuous subtext in Shadow of a Doubt. The symbolic way Uncle Charlie slides a ring on young Charlie's finger, the moment when he throws his hat onto her bed, and the constant references to the two Charlies being twins, soulmates, inseparable. And of course, the way Charlie moons over him in the beginning. Well, the reading's certainly there for the taking, but I don't think Wright plays it for only that. She plays infatuation, yes, to a degree that would make you uneasy even if you didn't know that Uncle Charlie was a killer. Nobody could possibly live up to such adoration ("Before you came I didn't think I had anything!" she tells him). But Wright shows her infatuation in the beginning as something that blurs boundaries. There's hero worship and affection and flirtation and romance there and maybe a buried hint of desire, but it can't be reduced to the sum of its parts.

Although I have to admit that I will always be disturbed by the moment after Uncle Charlie hurts Charlie's hand. He pats her cheek in an avuncular manner, telling her there are things in the paper that aren't for her innocent eyes to read. And instead of looking confused or angry or even a little insulted, Wright looks back at him in starry-eyed amazement, like they've just shared some wonderful secret. It's pretty much impossible not to think of abusive relationships in that scene.

 

I think some people fault Shadow of a Doubt because compared to other Hitchcock films, it's not particularly terrifying (Uncle Charlie may be a serial killer but he's also sane, with enough self-preservation to keep him restrained for most of the film). What makes it so compelling for me is the battle of wills between Charlie and her uncle, between two people who are family. She loved him as much as she ever loved anybody and he loved her as much as he was capable of loving anybody. After she discovers the truth, the love between them evaporates but they can't simply separate. They are tied together in an uneasy alliance, both working together to hide their secret from the others and yet always ready to turn on each other, hurt and angry. What could be more familial than that?

This post is part of For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon. If you want to make a donation (proceeds are going towards the restoration of The White Shadow, a formerly lost film that helped kick-start the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock's career), here is the link.

The Fascination Films

On my list of Indispensable Bloggers, there would be a place of honor for Greg Ferrara, who always manages to stir up the most thought-provoking film discussions. Just a casual glance at his posts for Movie Morlocks and I guarantee you'll find something to jolt your movie-lover's brain. Anyway, Greg's latest topic for Movie Morlocks is "I Half-Heartedly Recommend This Movie," about the films we sorta-kinda-maybe want our friends to see except for the fact that the good is matched with just enough bad to make it a little embarrassing. We all have movies like that.

But Greg's post got me thinking, not so much about mediocre films, but about what I think of as my "fascination films." Have you ever had that moment of walking down a street and suddenly swiveling your head to stare at someone, thinking, "Huh, they're not my type, maybe they're not even that attractive, but there's something there?" Some films I don't consider great, hell maybe I don't even like them all that much, but they fascinate me.

I'm not talking about the feeling of guilty pleasure as in, "Holy shit, guys, I'm starting to find myself actually invested in the love story of Samson and Delilah. Hold me." Nor am I talking about the nostalgia you feel for much-flawed, much-loved films of your childhood (which is where I'd put something like Desiree). I'm talking about the films that I find myself thinking about, weeks, even years afterward, possibly more than I think about genuinely better films. For example, The Ox-Bow Incident is a fantastic film, but I don't think I've given it half the mental space I've given to the muddled, murky Pursued.

What is it about these films that intrigues me? Do they hit some kind of emotional trigger? Am I drawn by their tantalizing possibilities or by their grating flaws? Well, before this post is lost in a sea of rhetorical questions, here's a look at some films I can't help but find...fascinating.

The Collector (1965)

I'll be tackling this one for an upcoming blogathon. The Collector is William Wyler's adaptation of the classic John Fowles novel about an insane, working-class butterfly collector and the beautiful posh girl he captures to make his own. It's got Terence Stamp  in a frightening performance as the creepy collector (the fact that Stamp can look so genuinely repulsive while at the height of his beauty is a feat in and of itself) and Samantha Eggar was never better. And of course it has Wyler, probably one of the greatest "actor's directors" that ever lived. But somehow, The Collector ends up stranded somewhere between a polished but airless film translation and a brilliant, gripping thriller. It's got far more subtlety and nuance than your average thriller yet, watching it, I can't help thinking that the film needed a director with more willingness to be lurid and animalistic and sexual. More like Nicholas Ray or Samuel Fuller. Something in Fowles' harsh, class-conscious novel doesn't translate to Wyler's reasoned, reserved style. And Maurice Jarre's goofy score just tears a gaping hole through the film's mood. And yet, I find this movie so compulsively watchable. If it only took that one step forward into being truly twisted, it would be a genuine classic.

Pursued (1947)

It's not every day you get to watch a Freudian Western noir. Not to mention one with Robert Mitchum as an amnesiac hero, Teresa Wright as his semi-incestuous love interest, and Judith Anderson as the stoic homesteader who adopts Mitchum. Hell, just trying to wrap your head around the idea of Judith Anderson in a Western is hard enough. The film's plot is so bizarre I don't dare summarize it (go watch it yourselves), but it is an oddly enjoyable film. Give credit to director Raoul Walsh and cinematographer James Wong Howe for making such an incredible mishmash of ideas into a coherent film. Howe's cinematography in particular; he manages to make the wide open vistas of New Mexico into a space as dark and cramped as any film noir alleyway. And I have to admit, I'm a sucker for Teresa Wright and watching my favorite cinematic good girl get all vengeful and seductive is a real treat. True, the Niven Busch script stumbles pretty badly at times, as if Busch really, really wanted to make this another Duel in the Sun and had to be forcibly restrained. But man, this film is a trip. If nothing else, it proves my theory that film noir and Westerns have always really been two sides of the same coin.

Stella Dallas (1937)

Ah, Stella Dallas. The film that's essentially required watching for any Barbara Stanwyck fan. I have to admit though, even as a Stanwyck fan, that this movie pisses me off. I don't like how ridiculously manipulative it is. I don't like the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of Stanwyck's Stella (who is poised and attractive enough to charm a rich man into marrying her, but suddenly displays the taste and subtlety of a circus clown whenever the film wants her to be embarrassing). I don't like the way the film asks me to believe in the beauty and selflessness of the love between Stella and her daughter Laurel and then tries to tell me that Laurel could be so easily tricked into believing that her mother doesn't love her. Even Laurel's actress, Anne Shirley, said this was a load of crock and she had no sympathy for this ninny she was playing.

However, and I hate to admit it, there is a great deal of truth in Stella Dallas. There's Stella's anguish as she slowly comes to see herself as a burden. There's Laurel's teenage desperation as she practically hurls her long limbs off a stool in an attempt to keep her mother away from the boy she likes. There's the brittle condescension and forced "understanding" of the upper classes, when faced with their raucous inferiors. Unlike many critics, I don't think the film agrees with Stella's decision to abandon her daughter to a better life. I don't think this film even likes rich people that much. The movie looks at the American cultural divide of the time and sees it as a self-perpetuating tragedy. When it focuses on that and Stanwyck's performance, it's a sharp and heartbreaking film. If only the film didn't take such ham-handed methods to get us there.

Peter Ibbetson (1935)

Peter Ibbetson is that rarest of cinematic unicorns, a unique film. Peter Ibbetson (Gary Cooper) fell hopelessly in love with Mary (Ann Harding) when they were children and when they reunite, circumstances force them apart. Yet, through some kind of miracle, they find that they can meet together in each other's dreams, living out their pure, deathless love in their minds even as their bodies age. There was a flood of romantic fantasy film in the 40s (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Portrait of Jennie, A Matter of Life and Death, etc) that handled this kind of material with humor and longing and sophistication. But Peter Ibbetson, especially compared to other 30s films, is like a Victorian aunt that suddenly wandered out into a crowd of wisecracking showgirls. Mary becomes Peter's spiritual guide,  the symbol of absolute purity and devotion, essentially the Beatrice to his Dante. It's the kind of romantic ideal that's been pretty much killed stone-dead for the past century or so; nowadays we like our romances a little more human. And I can't really say I like Peter Ibbetson. Cooper and Harding are stiff as boards, the child actors are dreadful (and they call each other Gogo and Mimsey, no really) and outside of the dream sequences, the film doesn't really convey any kind of otherworldly charm. But it's the kind of film which compels me to ask people, "Have you seen it? What did you think?"

Marnie (1964)

Well, you all knew by my intro picture that this one was coming. A lot of critics like to call Vertigo Hitchcock's most personal film. But for me, this is the one that feels like it sprang fully forth from somebody's Id. All of the Hitchcock obsessions are here: blondes, Tippi Hedren, sadism, rape, traumatic memories, flashing colors, bad matte paintings, and a suspense plot that's more about attraction and repulsion than whether anyone actually commits evil. It's like Hitchcock had so much he wanted to say that he no longer cared whether his audience would follow his lead. The first time I saw Marnie, as a middle-schooler speeding my way through every Hitchcock film, I thought it was okay but a little off. The next time, I saw Marnie, I thought it was dreadful. And then the next time I saw it, I was completely enthralled. It's just that kind of film. Half the time I don't know whether I should be giggling or shuddering.

Robin Wood's famous salvo ("If you don't love Marnie, you don't love cinema") doesn't do the film any favors and my opinion of Hedren's performance sways with every passing breeze. And all that "red is the color of blood" imagery is even worse than the matte paintings. But even so, the film's incoherent passion and darkness and cruelty still give it the power to draw you in. The relationship between Marnie and Mark is one of the most fascinating in all of Hitchcock. And the character of Marnie herself, childish, sarcastic, cold and tormented, is compelling enough to defy any schlock psychology about frigid females. She's more interesting perhaps, than even Hitchcock knew.

While writing this post, I struck up a conversation with one of my co-workers and, hoping to get some inspiration from her, asked her if there were any films she found, not just good, not just bad, but fascinating. With a puzzled smile, she told me, "I don't feel that way about moves." To which I can only respond, like Barbara Stanwyck, "What a life!"