Shivering in the Shadow

When we first meet Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) he’s laying on a bed, fully dressed, face weighted with brooding, waiting for some men to come and prompt his next move. When we first meet the teenaged Charlie (Teresa Wright), Uncle Charlie’s niece, she’s laying on a bed, fully dressed, face weighted with brooding, waiting for a miracle to save her immediate family, whom she feels is stuck in a perilous middle-class suburban rut. Turns out that miracle is... Uncle Charlie! Somehow—perhaps, as Charlie suggests, via telepathy—Uncle Charlie heard his niece’s psychic summons. He’s coming to Santa Rosa on a train that spews one colossal black cloud, coming to visit his adoring elder sister and her rather perfect little American family. (The only element that betrays this sense of perfection is the unusually advanced age of the parents, considering that their youngest looks to be no more than six.)

Let’s not call Shadow of a Doubt (1943) noir exactly. It’s a touch too early, and, despite its title, not too concerned with expressionist atmospherics, nor does it exude toughness or underline its characters’ darker impulses. But it fits quite beautifully into Metro Cinema’s Film Noir series because it emanates a murky, resonant perversity that finally out-obscures many of the more overtly noirish pictures to come. Its director, Alfred Hitchcock, often said it was his favourite among his films. I wonder if it wasn’t this very perversity, so neatly nestled in a seemingly innocent small town setting (the film’s main scenarist was Our Town author Thornton Wilder), that earned Hitchcock’s special affection (and looks forward to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet). Because Shadow of a Doubt is without a doubt a love story—between an uncle and his niece. The way she just looks at him in those early scenes, starry-eyed, sort of floating in place, like she’s beholding a dream-figure, is fraught with a woozy ache—one that might not have been so near-palpable if the both script and Wright’s performance didn’t maintain a surface of essential sweetness. Every time I watch Shadow of a Doubt I wonder if it wouldn’t be juicier if we saw more of Uncle Charlie’s hidden shadows reflected in little Charlie—which is the same as saying if we saw more noir—but then I look at Wright melt before Cotten in the kitchen, where he gives the sort of gift one gives a lover one’s come to court, and those doubts fall away.

If you haven’t seen the film you may be wondering what are these hidden shadows exactly. It’s best to let them sink in slowly. Uncle Charlie’s never been photographed and he’s never stayed anywhere long. He brings money and lavish gifts but doesn’t specify just how he acquired them. He gets especially uneasy when he hears a certain waltz. And every now and then he lets his mask of gentle charisma slip and says the nastiest things about people, about women in particular. Some years later, in another masterpiece, Cotten would embody the American innocent abroad. But here, still fairly young, still fairly new to moviegoers, he is the epitome of American corruption. And the juxtaposition of his sordid allure next to Wright’s purity still sends a shiver up the spine.

The milky way: Louis Malle's Black Moon

Black Moon (1975) opens with the initially serene image of a badger innocently snuffling its way across a quiet rural road… only to meet sudden death under the wheels of our heroine’s smart little orange Euro-hatchback. The badger’s shocking accidental demise is our entrée into this film’s distinctively violent world, violent in the literal sense—there’s some sort of war going on, apparently between the sexes, with early scenes involving young men executing a line-up of young women by firing squad, and young women tormenting and molesting some young men—and violent in the figurative sense, with its almost total absence of exposition, its dearth of intelligible dialogue (though there is a conspicuous quote from Macbeth), and its succession of bizarre images and encounters that never accumulate into anything so pedestrian as coherent causality. Black Moon proved to be something of a bête noir in Louis Malle’s formidable oeuvre, a fantastical, anti-allegorical, sumptuously photographed (by Ingmar Bergman’s long-time collaborator Sven Nykvist) work that greatly rewards those viewers inclined to shrug off things like narrative logic in favour of sustained fascination, beauty, and mystery. It’s now available on DVD and blu-ray from Criterion, who’ve made a special project of heralding Malle’s legacy.

Our protagonist, Lily (Cathryn Harrison), is an Alice-figure hovering somewhere between adolescence and womanhood, apparently oblivious to her nascent sex appeal. She finds herself at a country manor inhabited by a small, elderly woman (Therese Giehse) confined to a bed and two young, mute adults (Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey “superstar” Joe Dallesandro and Canadian actress Alexandra Stewart), each of whom seem to communicate primarily through telepathic touch, and a gang of rowdy naked kids who vanish at random. There are a great many non-human inhabitants of this house and its surroundings as well, including pigs, turkeys, a unicorn, a snake, a chorus of sheep, and flowers with feelings to hurt. Lily’s central action throughout is to look at things, most often astonishing or alarming things, and Malle and Nykvist manage again and again to render the images of her looking captivatingly. The most notable shift in Black Moon finds Lily gradually coming to understand that the old woman’s survival, and perhaps that of others she meets, is dependent on breast milk, and the film draws to its close with Lily resolving to offer her breast up to one in need.

Malle’s work frequently concerned sexual development in children, most obviously in films such as Murmur of the Heart (1971) and Pretty Baby (1978), and while its tempting to regard Black Moon as purely surrealist—especially given that one of the script’s co-authors is Joyce Buñuel, daughter-in-law of filmmaker and one-time card-carrying surrealist Luis Buñuel—there are a number of elements that prompt an interpretation in keeping with this over-arcing Mallesque theme. Many of Lily’s encounters impart a heightened awareness of gender, sensuality and the body as a site of numerous forms of erotic interest, hidden threat, and corporeal need. Not to mention the scenes where Lily reaches across a table for a giant-sized glass of fresh milk or the fairly straightforward symbolic possibilities generated from the aforementioned snake and unicorn. I don’t want to pigeonhole Black Moon so much as address some of its fecund multiple readings. It’s a delightfully perplexing film. It’s a bestiary. And it’s one of the most beguiling weirdo-discoveries on home video this year.