Alfred Hitchcock (1941)
Narrowly focused but without the intensity that might make a virtue of that, Suspicion is increasingly unsatisfying. Lina McLaidlaw marries eligible bachelor Johnnie Aysgarth: she discovers he’s penniless then that he’s a gambler then that he’s an embezzler. At the business end of proceedings, she thinks he’s trying to poison her. It turns out that Hitchcock acceded to RKO’s demands to change radically the ending of the source material (a 1932 novel by Francis Iles called Before the Fact), in which Lina’s suspicions are justified. In the film, it turns out that Johnnie, ashamed of himself, was planning suicide rather than murder; Lina’s passionate loyalty persuades him to look to the future with her beside him. (If nothing else, it’s appropriate that, as their car recedes into the distance, he’s still in the driving seat and she’s the passenger.) The change from book to screen is certainly destructive. The fact that Johnnie wasn’t going to kill Lina is presented in the film as if she was wrong ever to doubt him. Since he’s proved to be a rotter in lots of other ways there’s no emotional sense in her deciding he’s unchanged from the man she fell in love with.
The very obviously painted studio sets of the English countryside have a claustrophobic, sometimes sinister quality and there’s the odd breathtaking image – like the chiaroscuro of dark-suited Johnnie ascending a staircase, bearing a glass of what we think is poisoned milk for his wife. But even if Hitchcock had sensationally killed off his leading lady, Suspicion wouldn’t be up to much. Cary Grant (in his first appearance in a Hitchcock film) is fine while Johnnie is courting Lina – the louche undercurrent to his easy charm is splendid when the couple first meet in a railway carriage (strangers on a train ten years ahead of time …) In contrast, Johnnie’s double act with his long-time pal, the equally incorrigible ‘Beaky’ Thwaite (Nigel Bruce), soon gets irritating. There are bigger problems with Cary Grant here, though: he’s uncomfortable once Johnnie has to start looking potentially murderous and he’s radiantly insincere when he comes clean. With Joan Fontaine in the role of Lina, it was an odd coincidence seeing this film just after watching The Heiress again – Lina’s father General McLaidlaw (Cedric Hardwicke) suspects that Johnnie is after the money his daughter will eventually inherit. Fontaine, with her beautiful cheekbones and slender elegance, is much less convincing as a mousy spinster than her sister Olivia de Havilland is as Catherine Sloper. Although she’s appealing, Fontaine hasn’t the range or depth to conceal the improbability of Lina’s predicament, with its mechanical shifts from losing faith in Johnnie to believing in him (over and over) again. Fontaine won an Oscar for her pains but you feel it was probably because this role followed on quickly from her much more memorable performance in Rebecca the previous year, which went unrewarded.
With May Whitty (as Lina’s mother), Auriol Lee (as an apparently lesbian writer of crime fiction) and Leo G Carroll (as Johnnie’s boss for the short time he’s in paid employment). The cinematography is by Harry Stradling Sr and the score by Franz Waxman. How Suspicion ended up with the screenplay it did sounds (from the partial account given on Wikipedia) as if it could be a better mystery story than the film itself. The writing credits eventually went to Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison and Alma Reville.
28 December 2010
