May 15 Joseph Cotten

Happy Birthday Joseph Cotten and James Mason.

To celebrate Joseph Cotten’s birthday I watched Shadow of a Doubt. The film opens with well dressed Victorian people waltzing. Joseph plays a man in the east coast who goes to visit his sister’s family in Santa Rosa CA. At his rooming house there are men who want to talk with him. Joseph goes right past them on the street and they follow but loose him in the streets. He has a lot of money on his end table and spilled over to the floor. He arrives in CA after spending most of the train trip in a curtained area pretending to be sick.

When two men come to talk with the sister to interview them as the perfect American family. He wanted nothing to do with them. When one man actually got his picture, Joseph asked for the film and was handed the film. Joseph goes to the bank to deposit money. He has over $40,000.00 cash. As Joseph reads the paper he finds something disturbing in the paper and tears it up, making a paper house. When Teresa Wright, Joseph namesake niece, goes to the library to see what was in the paper. There is a story about a murder. Two men killed 3 widow and the press called them Merry Widow Murderers. She thinks that he is one of those men. They talk, she doesn’t know exactly, but she knows enough. He agrees to leave in a few days. The other man is killed and Joseph decides to stay. Teresa wants him to leave. That day she goes down the steps and falls. As she looks into the stairs she finds that it has been cut. The next night she is to drive Joseph to a lecture. Joseph shuts her in the garage with the car running. She gets out and recovers but decides to stay at home to try to reach the detective. He decides to leave the next day, to the same city on the same train as a widow. As he leaves town he left money to the church children’s fund. The town people think that he is a hero.

Joseph plays the role very well. He plays the murder as a normal man with family who loves him and he loves. A charming man who can fool everyone.

The most telling speech is one that Joseph talks about city women:

In the cities it’s different: middle age widows, husbands dead; husbands who’ve spent their lives making fortunes, working and working, and then they die and leave their money to their wives--their silly wives. And what do the wives to, these useless women? You see them in the best hotels every day by the thousands; drinking the money; eating the money, losing the money at bridge, playing all day and all night smelling of money. Proud of their jewelry and nothing else. Horrible, faded, fat, greedy women. Are they human or are they fat, wheezing animals? Hmm? An what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?

As he talks the camera moves closer and closer. Creepy.

I like this film. A small town with a lot of people walking around at 9 PM. For comic relief two people talk about murdering each other and trying to out do each other with their plots.