Welsh has the feistiness and determination of Wright, but not the vulnerability. The new version’s failings lie elsewhere, in the color (which softens the shadowy foreboding of the earlier black-and-white version), the directing and the casting. John Gay’s teleplay closely tracks the original script by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson and Alma Reville, its only major differences being an expanded opening and a swollen ending. Even with all of its music, however, there is just no way the new movie can match the tension and tautness of the original, which, though no masterpiece, was very, very good. This surely accounts for some of the inertia in the preview copy.
The only version of this “Shadow of a Doubt” that CBS made available for review lacked some music that will be in the broadcast Sunday. The suspense comes in her response to this shattering revelation and his panicky response to her response. The crux is not the mystery-we’re almost immediately tipped that Uncle Charlie is indeed the rat-but the shifting, intricate relationship between him and his adoring niece, as a series of events persuades her of his guilt, and he knows she knows. One of the detectives (Norm Skaggs) gets the hots for young Charlie. But hot on his trail are two out-of-town cops who suspect him of being an infamous Merry Widow slayer. When urbane, handsome, seemingly rich and successful Uncle Charlie (Harmon) unexpectedly pops in on his prim hometown bearing gifts of expensive jewelry and furs, he’s welcomed euphorically by his teen-aged niece/namesake Charlie (Welsh) and her mother, Emma (Diane Ladd). This is the type of story-ordinary people swept up in extraordinary circumstances-that so often attracted Hitchcock. On Sunday, “Shadow of a Doubt” steps down. And so on and so on.Īctually, TV’s “Shadow of a Doubt” is the movie’s second remake, the first being a theatrical cheapie in 1958 with a new title, “Step Down to Terror.” The nightmarish possibilities for damage are infinite: Robert De Niro took a good punch in “Raging Bull,” but let’s do it in color with Tony Danza.
However, the subsequent two-parter on TV was obscenely bad.Īnd what about “The Defiant Ones”? What could have been the rationale for the 1986 TV version? Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier weren’t good enough, so let’s move it up a notch with Robert Urich and Carl Weathers? Unfortunately, the “Z” list is much longer and includes two series versions of “Casablanca” plus movie versions of “Letter to Three Wives,” “Indiscreet,” “Stagecoach,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “Old Man and the Sea” and “The Defiant Ones.” Well, you could see someone getting ideas about “The Sun Also Rises,” which didn’t do much for Spain or Hemingway as a theatrical film.
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