Incredible film. Again we are seeing a shift into the realm of stories about anti-heroes where our protagonist is a serial killer and tries to murder his co-protagonist at the end. Whereas the gangsters of the 30’s who were our criminal lead roles were presented as criminals and got their comeuppance's at the end, Shadow of a Doubt doesn’t make such a stark discrimination between criminal and victim as the duality between the two Charlies suggests. This movies inherently challenges us to empathize with Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright both and thus partake in a moral dilemma as the audience about who to root for.
This film is part of the cultural shift to accept the fact that evil and good live in all of us, Nazi Germany has shaken the moral truisms of history to its core. No one and everyone is suspect now. We will now start to see the villains as main characters and be forced to empathize with our human failures and flaws onscreen.
The Hays code has a lot of work cut out for it.
We have entered into a period too where POV, and the use of the camera to portray psychological conditions is becoming prevalent. Hitchcock will use this trope, point of view, or shooting from the perspective of a character over and over again and influence generations of filmmakers to continue doing so. The era of the psychological, anti-hero cinematic realism has begun!