Shadows and Doubts: Hitchcock, Genre and Villainy

Made over the summer of 1942 and released during 1943, Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt pre-dates the high point of the crime thriller on the American screen, but is nonetheless often characterised as the director’s most important contribution to film noir. The story of the disruption of an idyllic small town by a debauched serial killer, Shadow of a Doubt anticipates many of the concerns of film noir, whilst remaining somewhat aloof from the genre as a while- a position indicative of Hitchcock’s own ambivalent place in the canon of crime fiction and cinema. His films persistently deal with themes of murder, treason and kidnap; and yet they have never comfortably fitted into any particular school crime narrative.