The filming on location in Santa Rosa, California reportedly had the support of the locals who attended shoots and behaved in exemplary fashion, quietening as cameras rolled and applauding wildly when they weren't, so perhaps when Alfred Hitchcock referred to this as the favourite of his movies he was referring to the process of filming it, not the plot, which is ludicrous, and there are many other reasons why his thriller about sinister Uncle Charlie's visit to his niece's home doesn't count as one of his best - none of the characters are sympathetic (and I found the mother, Emma, and 'Young Charlie' particularly one-note and irritating); there's an awkward staginess to the performances of the comic relief characters of the father and his murder-obsessed neighbour with his fanned-out magazines; the plotting around the home census researchers is especially clumsy; on several occasions, the editing appears to have been performed with the goal of ruthlessly shortening the movie, not letting it run its full and natural course; and while I think Joseph Cotten's Uncle Charlie is supposed to be a madman chameleon (based on the horrifying real-life case of the Gorilla Killer, who apparently posed as a devout Christian to inveigle his way into homes), scene by scene Cotten's Charlie changes in ways that don't really make sense, from guarded and secretive - a man with something to hide - to loud, brazen and obnoxious at the bank, and then coquettish and childlike with his niece.
★★★★☆
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