Certification. A
Running Time. 1 hour 39 mins
Director. Alfred Hitchcock
Cast. Heather Angel, Nigel Bruce, Joan Fontaine, Cary Grant.
Rating. 55%
Despite being adapted from the novel, Before The Fact by Francis Iles, there is more than a whiff of originality in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion. In essence, the film is a study of the dynamics and emotions of the two principal characters - Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) and Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine). In particular, a wife's journey towards mental hysteria through the burden of real, or imagined Machiavellian intentions. She suspects her husband is a liar, and someone who is capable of the most heinous of crimes.
Suspicion is an early film-noir psychological thriller, where the tension comes from paranoia and the potential victim slowly realising that she is going to be murdered. Both the victim and the audience believe they know who the murderer is - a technique ahead of its time. Yet, Hitchcock ensures incidents and misdirection come at the audience in rapid succession and by the end of the film, I felt every bit as exhausted as Lina.
Cary Grant's character, Johnnie Aysgarth is the archetypal bounder. Somewhat against type, Grant struggles in the role and delivers an unconvincing performance as a man who lives life with carefree abandon and continually evades financial responsibilities. Aysgarth's motivations are frequently contradictory and, at times, random. This was the first time Cary Grant worked with Alfred Hitchcock, and despite an allegedly strained relationship with the director would appear in three more of his films; Notorious (1946), To Catch A Thief (1955) and perhaps most memorably, North By Northwest (1959).
In contrast, a year after her portrayal of the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca, Joan Fontaine was once again nominated for an Academy Award. This time, Fontaine received the Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. In doing so, the actress became the only person to win an Academy Award for acting in an Alfred Hitchcock film. Whilst Joan Fontaine's performance is solid as the dowdy, sheltered heiress from a respectable military family, it is far from impressive, and it is hard not to see the award in 1942 as a consolation prize for the snub the year before [when Ginger Rogers picked up the award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Kitty Foyle].
There is an innovative use of lighting in Suspicion. Hitchcock repeatedly uses a large lattice window to cast an ominous spider's web shadow across the main protagonists. And an iridescent glass of milk Johnnie carries up the stairs to soothe his fractured wife was created by placing a battery-operated light bulb within the glass itself. Simple, but effective. The milk, potentially laced with poison, glows as if to illuminate Lina's suspicions.
Hitchcock deliberately decides that from the time of her marriage onwards, we are restricted to a solitary perspective - that of Lina. We only know what she knows. We only see what she sees. We share her suspicions from our shared experience.
Other technical elements of the film aren't so innovative. The editing, in particular, is troublesome. Supposedly dictated by RKO Studios, the editing all too frequently undermines and contradicts the rhythm and tone established by Hitchcock's direction. Suspicion eventually implodes thanks to an ill-advised and inconclusive ending that fails to measure up to the intensity of the preceding drama. In many ways, the film's conclusion reverses the entire plot.
Allegedly, Alfred Hitchcock wanted to film an ending similar to the conclusion of the novel, where Johnnie gives Lina poisoned milk. She drinks the milk with the full knowledge that she will die (presumably, no longer wanting to live in this insufferable marriage) and at the same time gives Johnnie a letter to mail for her. A letter that details the whole truth, and the film was to end with Johnnie walking away from the mailbox without a care in the world, having posted the letter. Concerned with Cary Grant's image, Hitchcock later claimed that RKO Studios executives would not allow Grant to play a liar, murderer and adulterer, and that the public would struggle to accept this character. Hence, an alternate ending was quickly written.
It is the film's inadequate, anti-climatic conclusion that prevents Suspicion from being a noteworthy Hitchcock film. If perhaps Johnnie was as despicable as he was in the novel and Lina's suspicions had come true, what a film that would have been.
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