When the two men appear across the street, Oakley leaves town, telegraphing young Charlie that he’s coming for a visit. She bends down to pick up the money carelessly strewn on the floor. As he lies on the bed of a dingy boarding house in the film’s opening, the landlady tells him that two men have asked for him. Viewers of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt already know what young Charlie doesn’t know, that her beloved uncle, Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten), isn’t all he seems to be. He is her mother’s (Patricia Collinge) younger brother. She had, after all, been named after him. The girl had always believed there was a special bond between them. “I only send telegrams the normal way,” the clerk (Minerva Urecal) replies. In fact, that very day she had been thinking of a solution-Uncle Charlie, that wonderful, favorite uncle back East, and when she reads the telegram that he’s coming for a visit, she tells the clerk the coincidence must be due to mental telepathy. All day, Charlie had been depressed, telling her father, Joe (Henry Travers), “This family’s gone to pieces. Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright) learns from her little sister, Ann (Edna May Wonacott), who had answered the phone, that the family has a telegram at the postal union. You, of course, would hear most expediently by e-mail.īut in 1943, in Santa Rosa, California, a wall telephone would be the primary long-distance communication device, with the receiver on a stiff cord and the mouthpiece on the phone itself. And suppose, while you’re thinking about this uncle, you hear from him, that he’s coming for a visit. Whom would you like to invite for a visit? A high school classmate you haven’t seen in twenty-five years? A former suitor? A new acquaintance you met a few weeks ago? Better yet, what about a favorite uncle, the one your mother is always talking about, the one you were named after? And maybe you’re a little bored, in this town of yours where nothing ever happens.

I’ll find out.”- Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright) to Uncle Charlie

I have a feeling that inside you somewhere there’s something nobody knows about, something secret and wonderful. “I know that you don’t tell people a lot of things.

Without a shadow of a doubt