Hitchcock Comes to Town
Near Santa Rosa, California
In the summer of nineteen forty-two, Alfred Hitchcock brought his entire production company to Santa Rosa and spent four weeks turning the city into a movie set. The result was a film he would later call his personal favorite among all the pictures he ever made.
The film was Shadow of a Doubt, and its premise required a specific kind of place. The story involves a serial killer named Uncle Charlie, the charming Merry Widow murderer, who arrives in a small California city to visit his sister's family. The family adores him. Only his niece, also named Charlie, begins to suspect what he is. Hitchcock needed a town that looked genuinely innocent, genuinely settled, genuinely American in the way that made the intrusion of evil underneath it as disturbing as possible. He chose Santa Rosa.
The screenplay was written partly by Thornton Wilder, whose play Our Town had convinced Hitchcock he understood exactly the kind of benign surface he was trying to puncture. Wilder traveled to Santa Rosa with Hitchcock in June of nineteen forty-two to walk the streets and incorporate actual landmarks into the script. He was then called to active duty in the Army before the writing was complete, and Hitchcock reportedly joined him on a cross-country train to his new military post in order to keep working on the screenplay.
Federal wartime rules limiting studio set construction costs to five thousand dollars brought the production to Santa Rosa in a practical sense. On location, Hitchcock had what no studio backlot could provide: the real thing. McDonald Avenue with its Victorian houses. The train depot where Uncle Charlie arrives. Courthouse Square. The Tower Theater. The Carnegie Library. Hundreds of local residents appeared as extras.
What the film preserved by accident is a record of a city that no longer entirely exists. The Carnegie Library seen in the film was later demolished. Several other buildings Hitchcock's camera recorded have since been replaced. Shadow of a Doubt is, among other things, an unintended documentary of downtown Santa Rosa in nineteen forty-two.
