Under the Skin: Hitchcock’s Brilliant Knack for Subtext by Craig Hammill

Hitchcock made Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943) back to back. He even used the same cinematographer, Joseph Valentine, who would work one more time with Hitch on 1948’s Rope. 

The two movies also share a distinction of showing, in snapshot, two sides of Hitchcock’s filmography.   

Saboteur, a rip roaring comic cross country adventure follows unfairly accused wartime factory worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) and suspicious yet whipsmart billboard model Patricia (Priscilla Lane) as they try to prove Barry is innocent of murder and sabotage. The picture is an underrated gem; part of the Hitch “Accused Person on the Run who must prove their own innocence” genre he perfected, most notably in The 39 Steps (1935) and North By Northwest (1959).  Saboteur is Hitch in full tilt entertainment and escapist mode.

Shadow of a Doubt, co-written by Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s lifelong creative and romantic partner,  with a huge assist by Our Town playwright Thornton Wilder, tells a darker, more unsettling, contained tale.  Psychotic serial widow murderer Uncle Charlie (an unnerving Joseph Cotton) hides from the authorities with his sister’s family in small town Santa Rosa. Uncle Charlie is at first idolized then feared by his young adult Niece Charlie (in a pitch perfect performance by Teresa Wright), who is as smart and perceptive as Uncle Charlie himself.  Let’s slot this movie with Hitchcock’s darker more contained examinations of the unknowability of the souls of human beings, a subgenre which includes 1951’s Strangers on a Train, 1958’s Vertigo, 1960’s Psycho, and 1964’s Marnie. In these movies, the physical trek across a continent or country is largely replaced with a journey into the deep wells of the human psyche.

What unites both movies is the strength and shocking insightfulness of the subtext that lies just beneath their stories. Like H.P. Lovecraft, another master of unsettling horror, Hitchcock wields the tools of his trade to tell two stories at the same time. One for folks who like their genre stories served straight. And one for folks who are compelled to explore the closets and attics and basements and dark forests of which most opt to steer clear.

In Saboteur, at the same time we’re watching a comic chase romance, we’re also watching an evisceration of the “America First” movement prevalent in the U.S. at the start of  World War II.  Lead by pop culture heroes like aviator Charles Lindbergh and tacitly backed by many prominent Americans of the time,  this movement  tried to convince Americans there was no  point getting involved in the “European war” against  Hitler, Mussolini, and the rise of fascism and imperial nationalism across the world. The “America First” movement cloaked a material self-interest at best, an acceptance of fascism at worst. 

Even more daring, Saboteur, made by a British foreigner (Hitchcock), goes further to celebrate what folks around the world often felt was best in the complex and problematic American spirit: namely a democratic sense of fairness and a rooting interest in the underdog and the marginalized. 

We get the first subtext most clearly in the character of rich urbane charming American Charles Tobin (a wonderful silk and serpentine performance by Otto Kruger). The villain of our piece, Tobin is introduced swimming in a big American swimming pool, playing with his adorable young grand daughter. Hitch makes it hard for us to dislike this guy throughout the entire movie. Tobin is always polite, always charismatic, always charming, always. . .considerate. 

And that’s the point.  If villains were so clearly villains, fewer people would fall for their silky stratagems.

Near the end of the movie, Barry breaks into a charity party headed by New York City’s rich and famous only to discover that Tobin and many seeming pillars of American society and values are plotting to blow up an American warship.

When Barry asks why, Tobin gives a chilling speech (which Hitchcock films in a wide shot making Tobin seem small in a frame filled by material riches) in which the industrialist basically admits he doesn’t care much about actual American values but rather about staying rich and serving his own self interest. Who cares who suffers as long as Tobin ends up on top, a winner.

But Hitch is smart enough to serve some real optimism up with this inditement. One of the most interesting scenes in Saboteur finds our heroes Barry and Priscilla hiding in a train car with a team of Circus Performers: a human skeleton, a bearded Lady, a pair of conjoined twins, a little person with militaristic preferences.  When the police come  to search the train, the Human Skeleton,  sensing that Barry is innocent, insists on a democratic vote. The Performers lock and it’s left to the Bearded Lady to be the tie breaking vote. And she votes innocent.  

It’s a profound and touching scene in which the marginalized of the country end up being  some of the country’s greatest believers and practitioners in its core fundamental values. Hitch, never a starry eyed idealist, still shows that some in the troupe prefer the fascist  and militaristic promises of folks like Tobin. Just as Hitch shows in the scene of the rich charity party that some of the guests are real believers in the war effort and democracy.

This subtext is available throughout the movie if you want it. But if you don’t, you can just take your escapist chase adventure straight.

Hitch shows his subtextual royal flush cards earlier and a bit more straightforwardly in Shadow of a Doubt. But this might be because the subtext here is more profound and difficult. We need the whole movie to really absorb it. The subtext here gets at a kind of deep buried oceanic truth of human existence. One we glimpse when the flashlight of just trying to make it day to day accidentally swings to a corner and we see the devil for a second before it disappears in a flash. 

In the first scene of the movie, we are introduced both to Uncle Charlie and Uncle Charlie’s mania-his hatred for and compulsion to kill widows. Uncle Charlie, reclined on a bed, smoking a cigar, knows police are outside. And Uncle Charlie is so tired of running he considers, for a moment, turning himself in. 

Instead, he decides to pack up his sociopathic suitcase and visit his unsuspecting and adoring family in Santa Rosa, California. He figures he can hide out undetected until he figures out his next steps.

We are then introduced to his eighteen year old niece, also named Charlie, reclining on her bed, bored out of her mind in small town Santa Rosa.  Niece Charlie is fed up with the static boring unambitious repetition of small town life. She wants excitement. Something to prove there’s more to existence. Her answer-to wire her Uncle Charlie to come visit. Because Uncle Charlie is different and exciting.

This start to the movie, the more one watches it, lays out the subtext in broad daylight.

Uncle Charlie and Niece Charlie are each drawn to each other. Telepathically it seems (a point the movie makes explicit in dialogue when Niece Charlie asks the telegraph office employee if she believes in telepathy). Uncle Charlie, over time, appears drawn to Niece Charlie to be the Angel of Death in his own tortured existence he can not be. Niece Charlie seems drawn to Uncle Charlie not to spice up life, as she initially thinks, but to truly prove to her that there are deep, strange, buried things about human nature, human intelligence, the cosmos. And it is the struggle with these truths that make life worth living.

Each gets their wish in the most horrible of ways.

Throughout Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock uses this doubling, doppelgänger strategy to rich effect.  Uncle Charlie becomes more and more aware that Niece Charlie is the only one to truly understand what he is. Niece Charlie becomes more and more aware that Uncle Charlie’s horrific philosophy of the world makes a kind of sense, though one she rejects. Niece Charlie after all has become aware how mindless most people behave day to day. Uncle Charlie only confirms that and goes a step further to say-if we kill cattle who behave mindlessly for our own consumption, why can’t we kill humans who behave mindlessly for our own self-gain?

This philosophy is literally spelled out in one of cinema’s most unsettling shots and monologues. Joseph Cotten’s Uncle Charlie basically says the above at the family dinner  table then looks directly into the camera (and thus directly into Niece Charlie’s eyes from whose point of view the shot is staged).

In a way, by looking right at the camera and Niece Charlie, Uncle Charlie is looking right at us, the audience.

Niece Charlie is so horrified she screams and leaves the table. NOT because she rejects Uncle Charlie’s murderous theology immediately as ridiculous. But because she is horrified to see her own theories about the boringness and mindlessness of small town life carried to an unexpected extreme conclusion.

It’s hard now in 2023 (80 years later) to believe such a philosophy made it into a mainstream American 1943 movie. But Hitchcock and his collaborators got it in there.

But again, just as in Saboteur, Hitch presents this horrific philosophy and gives it its full due not to confirm it but rather so that Niece Charlie can consider and ultimately reject it. 

Two key scenes take place outside of a church (including the final scene) and another scene finds Niece Charlie encouraging her younger sister, Ann, to pray before bed (but to keep it short).

These scenes are far from simplistic affirmations of traditional belief structures. Hitchcock isn’t saying the road to goodness passes through the church or religion or an affirmation of small town orthodox values.

He does however seem to be saying something a bit more complex if still ultimately affirmative.  

Niece Charlie struggles psychologically throughout the movie with what is the right thing to do.  

In the penultimate scene of the movie, Uncle Charlie tries to kill Niece Charlie by throwing her from a moving train, but at the last moment, Niece Charlie is able to pivot and throw Uncle Charlie so he himself gets thrown and killed. 

Niece Charlie stays quiet about Uncle Charlie’s psychotic true self as Uncle Charlie gets a beautiful funeral through Santa Rosa. But Niece Charlie is also now, a killer, just like her Uncle Charlie. Albeit a killer in self-defense.

With each viewing, this writer feels more and more that Shadow of a Doubt subtextually focuses on the question of how one decides to use their understanding of the world in action.  Both Uncle Charlie and Niece Charlie are clear eyed and razor sharp in their intelligence.  Both  of them spend a lot of time thinking about how the world really is. 

But whereas sociopathic Uncle Charlie, driven by compulsion, feels his perception of the darkness of the world, permits him to repay it kind, Niece Charlie, driven by a desire to be constructive in the world, ultimately realizes that each of us must make an individual choice to be constructive in action, as hard as that is.

The cycle of construction (Niece Charlie) and destruction (Uncle Charlie) is never ending. Even more to the point-the cycle may be necessary. The universe may produce constantly a near equal number of Niece Charlies and Uncle Charlies to somehow keep it on balance.

Yet Hitchcock and Shadow of a Doubt also seem to imply that there may just be (at least up to our current moment) slightly more Niece Charlies than Uncle Charlies  in the story of our small planet. This may not always be. It certainly may happen ultimately that more Uncle Charlies than Niece Charlies overwhelm the future. But it hasn’t happened yet. We continue on. 

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.