Erich Kuersten’s younger sister series (starting here) inspired me to think about the younger sisters in Hitchcock films, particularly Pat Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train (1951), and her bespectacled predecessor, Edna May Wonacott as Ann Newton in Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
Alfred Hitchcock’s *minor* characters are rarely throwaways. Little Ann was the co-creation of Hitchcock, and screenwriters Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville (Mrs. Hitchcock). Not surprisingly, Ann recalls the younger sisters in Wilder’s Our Town, and even more so, “Tootie” (Margaret O’Brien), the high strung – one might even say neurotic – little sister of Judy Garland’s character in Benson and Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis. She is the darkest member of the Newton family other than the psychopathic Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) himself.
Reading the recently published Britton on Film, the collected film criticism of the late Andrew Britton (worth buying for his essay on Mandingo, alone), I discovered this provocative description of the character:
A marvelous inflection of the generic type of the smart, precocious, tomboyish younger sister produces in Ann Newton, a little girl characterized by a sustained autistic withdrawal from reality into movies (her ambition is to look like Veronica Lake) and, predominantly, books—she wants to become a librarian and is introduced refusing, literally, to take her head out of Ivanhoe, the classic novel of sublimated romantic dream by an author who epitomized, for Mark Twain, the rottenness of the European character. She also has a dread of “movin’ around and changin’” (“I don’t want to get carried away”), a profound conservatism (“It’s wrong to talk against the government”), and in her love of horror stories and her repressed resentment of the family (“I broke my mother’s back three times”), anticipates by thirty years a crucial contemporary development in the horror film. [Britton is referring to “family horror” films like Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, and The Exorcist.]
Note Ann’s placement in the portrait of the Newton family, above. She is positioned between the two Charlies, “normal” Charlie (Teresa Wright) and “crazy” Charlie (Cotten), without physically relating to (touching) either one. The fact that she is the only member of the Newtons who is standing shows clearly her alienation from the rest of the family. While everyone in the group is looking at Mother (Patricia Collinge), Ann is the only one who isn’t smiling. Her expression could easily be interpreted as a glare of hatred..jpg)
Looking at this frame, I can’t help thinking of the last shot of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). Repulsion, obviously influenced by Hitchcock’s Psycho, is the story of a cosmetologist, played by Catherine Deneuve, who grows increasingly alienated and psychotic over the course of the film. The last shot is a zoom or track into a family photo showing the Deneuve character as a little girl. She is staring directly at the camera, the scared rabbit look in her young eyes revealing that she was quite mad, even then.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Charlie’s Little Sister (Shadow of a Doubt)
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4 comments:
This was really interesting, thanks for the post!
That quote from the film critic you posted was particularly amusing. I had always read the girl somewhat differently, as down to brown earth rather than stuck in movies. When I think of her it's always at the dinner of Uncle Charlie's first night in the Newton home. He passes out presents--which neither Ann or her neglected brother much appreciate--and is about to give the ring of one of his victims to his niece Charlie, Wright, but is stopped by her. "I don't want anything." She says and goes to the kitchen. Ann very wisely notes, "She's just saying that. It's the girls in stories who say they don't want anything that always wind up with the most stuff in the end." Or words to that effect. Rather than being a little conservative, I saw her as simply aping what, in her precocious youth, she deemed proper behavior. Come adolesence though, and watch out! Patricia Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train character, though quick and acerbic, like Ann Newton, seems slightly more wicked. Although a certain conservatism reigns in her character: she doesn't think the offing of Farley Granger's shrill adulterous wife counts as much of a crime, since she can only see her as a "tramp"; yet the fun way Ms. Hitchcock played the roll, it's clear she enjoys the vicarious thrills the situation presents--I don't think the script did right by her though. The scene where she and her glasses remind Bruno of murdered Miriam is an extraordinarily lame contrivance, even by the standard of Hitchcock films. It's not there to put the sister into danger; it doesn't reveal anything about Bruno's psyche--he feels no inner guilt; it's in the film to ludicrously get the Ruth Roman character into the know and turn her into Granger's accomplice.
Thanks for the observant comments, Joseph.
The fascination of Ann, for me at any rate, is that while she is almost completely superfluous in terms of plot, everyone involved with the project (Hitchcock, Reville, Wilder, Benson) seems to have poured a lot of themselves into the character. A precocious bookworm. Borderline autistic. Isn't that what Alfred was like as a child?
According to McGilligan, Edna May Wonacott, who played Ann, was not a professional actress, but someone Hitchcock spotted on location in Santa Rosa, "skipping down the street with her mother. Wonacott had a girlish look: freckles, pigtails, spectacles—a mirror of Hitchcock's own daughter, Pat, at that age."
You wrote, "Rather than being a little conservative, I saw her as simply aping what, in her precocious youth, she deemed proper behavior." But isn't that the very definition of conservatism? (Or one of them?) Accepting without question the ideology of the culture she gets from: (a) books, and (b) the "proper behavior" of those around her?
Once Ann realizes that not everything she reads or hears is true, she might grow up to be as "wicked" as Pat Hitchcock's character in Strangers on a Train. I do disagree with you, however, on one point. You wrote that the scene in Strangers on a Train where the sister's glasses remind Bruno of murdered Miriam "doesn't reveal anything about Bruno's psyche." On the contrary, it's the first scene where we see Bruno lose control. The lie that Bruno tells himself and others is that it's all a game, and he's got all the bets covered. When the sight of Barbara's (Pat Hitchcock's) glasses causes him to lose control, we understand — even if he doesn't — how much his clever plans are a mask for the unconscious disturbances that really motivate him.
Well, I agree with you that aping others is at the very heart of bourgeoisness; all I meant is that a child can't be a philistine, they haven't learned how to choose for themselves. It doesn't surprise me so much was poured into Ann, because for that time in movies she's a very fresh character. I disagree that she's autistic and unobservant too. She seems not to cotton to Charlie at all in the way the other Newton women blindly do. And she clearly doesn't believe everything she reads in books or else she wouldn't have clocked what she saw as her older sister Charlie's Bovary-like manipulation at dinner to seem selfless--she's already a sharp critic.
As far as Strangers On A Train goes, I would agree with you excepting that after the dinner scene the thing with the glasses never comes up again (unlike, say, the masterful use of the lighter), quite a red herring. It's not, as you put it, "the first scene where we see him lose control", it's the only one; even as he's dying after the carosel sequence, he refuses to fess up and let Granger off the hook. Shouldn't this develop in some way if it's of genuine psychologic significance? And also, I don't think we need that scene to know how disturbed he is--after all this is a man who whimsically murdered another's man wife on the flimsiest, vaguest of handshakes (figuratively) after having dinner with him!
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