"Diane Negra's nifty gem of a book is jam-packed with insights into one of Alfred Hitchcock's most underrated (yet among his favorite) movies. Lurking amid the oblique and obvious references to Freud, fascism and foreigners, she finds in Shadow of a Doubt a claustrophobic return to America's foundational fiction - that it remains an innocent city on a hill, rather than the blood-stained remnant of war and plunder. Negra's book, like a reel of film unspooling on the projection room floor, unravels how Hitchcock's obsessions with symmetry and pairing leave the viewer, and in this case, the reader at once informed and anxious. She demonstrates how close reading, archival research and wide-ranging scholarly sources contribute to surprising feminist interpretations of a film that still resonates." Paula Rabinowitz, University of Minnesota "Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, with its idealized portrayal of the American family and rosy depiction of small-town USA, can be easily mistaken for the British filmmaker's paean to his adoptive country. In a dazzling close reading of the film, Diane Negra peels off this Rockwellian veneer layer by layer. Her interpretation moves adroitly from Freudian family romance to homefront patriotism, from the female gothic to bourgeois nostalgia, to expose the film's dark and intense ambivalences over American consensus culture and family values. In the process, she makes a compelling case for moving Shadow of a Doubt closer to the heart of the Hitchcock canon.

" Milette Shamir, Tel Aviv University "This is a wide-ranging book that examines Shadow of a Doubt in all sorts of perceptive ways. [It] is extremely good at teasing out the significance of Shadow of a Doubt" Carl Sweeney, The Movie Palace.