Certainly he is hero worshipped by his niece, and yet she alone learns his true nature and ultimately (accidentally) causes his death. It’s unusual in having a central villain who is almost the hero. Hitchcock often said this was his favourite film – and certainly the one he found easiest to defend from his critics, in that it had the most plausible senario. He might look alright and have a voice that charms, but he is the devil in disguise. However, her intuitive understanding is a long way from allowing the young niece to challenge her uncle, and the tense cat-and-mouse play between the two is powerfully dramatized, showing Hitchcock in his best form.In the first scene a train enters the station, filling it with black smoke – and from the first it is clear that all is not right with Uncle Charlie. This growing knowledge shocks her out of the warm sense of safety that she held in her small world. Subtle clues add weight to Charlie's vague doubts. Yet Charlie feels a tension-as if her double, played with razor-thin menace by the mild-mannered Joseph Cotten, has brought violence into her home as well.

Uncle Charlie brings happiness into the Newton home and a special pleasure to Mother. The two are linked, psychic twins, and when Charlie goes to send for her uncle, she finds a telegram announcing his visit already waiting for her.

Meanwhile, her namesake, Uncle Charlie, lies on another bed thousands of miles away in Philadelphia surrounded by discarded bills, deep in secret thoughts. Young Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright) lies on her bed in Santa Rosa, California, bored with her small-town life and family. A favorite of Alfred Hitchcock himself, with an exceptional script by the playwright Thornton Wilder, SHADOW OF A DOUBT anticipates such family menace dramas as CAPE FEAR.

Tv shadow of doubt