Most actors would be thrilled to have appeared in any one of the classic films on Joseph Cotten’s resume: Citizen Kane, Gaslight—Carol Reed’s perfect high-brow noir—The Third Man and more. But of all the roles he played, Cotten’s Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt remains his most enduring. In the film — reportedly Hitchcock’s personal favorite of all his own movies — Charlie is a smooth, charming serial killer, “The Merry Widow Murderer,” whose adoring niece, Charlotte (Teresa Wright), gradually comes to realize that her namesake is a sociopath. The famous “faded, fat, greedy women” monologue that Cotten icily delivers at dinner one night — finishing with a gaze straight into the camera that’s both knowing and vaguely reptilian — is still deeply chilling all these years later, and has informed countless similar fourth-wall-busting scenes in the seven decades since it first stunned moviegoers in 1943.
