He sees them standing on the corner downstairs, packs a bag with cash, leaves the house and boldly walks right past them. We first see Charlie lying on top of his bed, smoking a cigar, when told by his landlady two men had been asking for him. It's clear from the outset that Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) is the notorious "Merry Widow Killer," and more than once Hitchcock cuts to nightmarish fantasies of (presumably) merry widows waltzing. One of Hitchcock's favorite subjects was “The Innocent Man Wrongly Accused.” In Shadow of a Doubt, there's no possibility of innocence. Nor are we convinced that the niece, believing her uncle is a killer of old ladies, would allow him to buy her silence by promising to leave town (because his guilt would "destroy her mother"). Later you question the absurdity of two detectives following a suspect from New York to California, apparently without being sure of how he looks, and hanging around idly outside his residence for weeks while chatting up the suspect's niece one of them eventually even proposes marriage. No one would ever accuse Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt of being plausible, but it is framed so distinctively in the Hitchcock style that it plays firmly and never breaks out of the story.
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