He instructs her to let them in next time and she suggests he has his nap and closes the blind. This is probably reading too much in, however, as it has much more to do with what Uncle Charlie deems important – I’ll come back to this. There is a connection that could be made here with Dracula, and Harker finding “ a great heap of gold in one corner, gold of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money”. She says he looks tired, and we’ll touch on health again, and notices money on the floor, picking it up and admonishing him for being careless. His landlady tells him that two men called, looking for him but she said he was out – they told her not to mention the visit, she later says, they want to surprise him. Certainly, his voice, when a knock interrupts him, is soft, almost languid. Williams likens him to Dracula as Harker finds him entombed in the castle. We cut into a room and lying on the bed in the room is Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten), also known as Uncle Charlie as we’ll soon discover, his hands on his chest playing with a cigar but looking like he is lying in repose. Then we see images of Philadelphia but they are not all idealised homeless by the river, a decayed shell of a car by a no tipping sign, contrasted against kids in the street. So, we get images of people dancing, over the credits, to the waltz the Merry Widow. In truth there are elements that are likely to be a stretch but there was one direct reference, which we’ll come to, that convinces me that Hitchcock had given this some thought. You see, I read someone else’s piece making the connection and will therefore be making reference through this to Victoria William’s essay Reflecting Dracula (1) and, as the first source references it, James McLaughlin’s essay All in the Family (2) – references at the foot of the article in case you wish to seek them out. Now, truth be told I didn’t sit down to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 thriller and suddenly said, " Wait a second." Rather, I went in fully looking for tropes and connections to Dracula. The use of genre tropes is a strange thing as it might be deliberate, it might be accidental or unconscious and it could just be a form of pareidolia on behalf of the viewer.
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