What is the movie about? Does the title contain an allusion? When is the story set?  What film genres are at work and why? Why are there two Charlies? How did Uncle Charlie and his sister become so close? Why are there so many soldiers in town? What do the Freudian symbols and the biblical quotation mean? Was Hitchcock rejecting or affirming his Catholic upbringing and Jesuit schooling? Was he an amoralist or a moralist?  

Jeffrey Stout was a civil rights and anti-war activist in his teens and twenties. He attended Brown University and did his graduate work at Princeton, where he taught religion, philosophy, politics, and film from 1975 until his retirement in 2018. His books include Democracy and Tradition and Blessed Are the Organized. He is now working on a history of “religion” in Western political thought and a study of the cinematic sacred.