Alfred Hitchcock turns the fantasy of living in a small American town inside out with “Shadow of a Doubt.” The film follows young teenager, Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Teresa Wright), who longs for some excitement in life. It arrives in the form of her namesake, her cultured Uncle Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten). After two undercover cops show up working on a “survey” of the average American family, they reveal to her that her beloved uncle may in fact be the serial killer known as the “Merry Widow Murderer.”

Charlie is forced to question her own blind loyalty to her favorite Uncle (a relationship that is dripping with incestuous overtones). Her uncle is very charming and debonair; he makes it extremely hard for his niece, at first, to believe that he may be a serial killer underneath it all. Here Hitchcock, ever a master of setting and place, creates the perfect average American family in an average American small town. It is complete with a chatty neighborhood policeman and Emma Newton, who is young Charlie's simple-minded mother and Uncle Charlie's sister. She is strongly insistence that a cake cannot be made just for pictures.

But in the end after Charlie learns all the facts and even after her uncle tried to kill her, the towns people and Charlie honor Uncle Charlie at his funeral. Charlie also confesses that she withheld crucial information. And finally all the key individuals in the story resolve to keep Uncle Charlie's crimes a secret.

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