“If You Rip the Fronts Off Houses”: Killing Innocence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Abstract

Despite the large number of fictional murders he screened throughout his legendary directorial career, Hitchcock generally shied away from representing the killing of children. There is a notable exception to this in Sabotage (1936), one that occasioned a telling exchange between Hitchcock and Truffaut. Referring to the infamous scene in which a bus full of Londoners is killed by the explosion of a bomb carried by an unwitting young boy, Truffaut observed that “making a child die in a picture is a rather ticklish matter; it comes close to an abuse of cinematic power.” Hitchcock agreed, adding “it was a grave error,” because, in his words, the child elicited “too much sympathy from the audience, so that when the bomb exploded and he was killed, the public was resentful.”¹ The end result of the scene, Hitchcock suggested, is that the suspense that has been carefully maintained until the bomb goes off is then dissipated in shock, shock stemming especially from the death of this child (and what about that poor puppy?), with whom the audience has identified. While elsewhere in this volume, Peter Lee discusses this scene in terms of the ideological framework surrounding children, we would like to suggest that Hitchcock’s confession of having erred is perhaps better understood as accompanied by a supercilious smirk, since while Hitchcock stopped killing that treasured figuration of innocence, the child, in order to maintain that treasured desideratum of his cinema, suspense, he quickly moved on to the murder of other innocents.