Hitchcock's Diegetic Imagination: Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt, and Hitchcock's Mise-en-Scene

The author considers the collaboration between Thornton Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and examines the influence of Wilder's theories of theatrical abstraction and cinematic realism on Hitchcock's developing sense of mise-en-scene. Wilder helped Hitchcock employ mise-en-scene as a vital tool of suspense, thus producing a thriller that turned as much on details of properties and setting as on narrative or visual devices. This article originally appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Volume 31, Issue 1.