But at a larger level I came to see that the way the film probes conventional gender and family roles and the nature of domestic/small-town safety and security vs. Certainly, wartime regulations and restrictions influenced the conditions of its production. Over time, I’ve grown more convinced of the value of seeing Shadow as a kind of war film and make the case for that in the book. Why do you think the wartime context is important for studying Shadow? The film was shot in 1942, at the outset of World War II. California was once very regularly the site of particularly positive visions of the American Dream. Now when we think of California, we think about climate change and the socially destructive effects of Big Tech. Some of the locations seen in the film were destroyed in a 1969 earthquake. Partly for these reasons the world the film summons seems more sealed off and inaccessible in various ways including ideologically.
Over time contextual elements around the film and its setting have changed – for example I think we respond differently now to its depiction of a mid-twentieth century California small town (or if you rather a small city with small town features). Shadow of a Doubt is my favourite film and I’ve been fortunate to talk about it with students in lots of different places including the US, Germany, Spain, Poland, and Norway. Inevitably, student responses to it added to my understanding of the film and enriched my appreciation of it. I was in my 20s when I first taught Shadow and I’m now in my 50s and I’ve realized that my primary identification point has shifted from Charlie Newton to her mother Emma Newton. That has probably complicated and altered some of the feminist arguments I make in the book.
What drew you to study Shadow of a Doubt and did your perception of the film change as your work progressed? In this blog post we spoke to author Diane Negra to discuss the milestone film and her important study. New from Auteur, Shadow of a Doubt redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Hitchcock’s 1943 film, the one that he at various times identified as his favourite and his best.
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