Dave-El's Weekend Movie Post: Suspicion

April begins with "A" and so does Alfred Hitchcock.

It's a new edition of Dave-El's Weekend Movie Post as I write about another film by the master of suspense, director Alfred Hitchcock. 

Today's film is a suspense thriller from 1941 called Suspicion based on Francis Iles's 1932 novel Before the Fact. The film stars Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine as a married couple who are caught up in a murder plot.

Possibly.

It does seem like he is plotting to murder her. 

Is he? Really? Let's find out!

It's a meet cute on a train in 1938 England. 

Irresponsible playboy Johnnie Aysgarth meets bespectacled Lina McLaidlaw on a train in England.  There's some back and forth "will they/won't they" until their rising sexual tension builds and builds and they just can't take it anymore and they have sex. 

Sorry, this is a movie made in 1941.  

Let's try that again.

There's some back and forth "will they/won't they" until their rising romantic desire builds and builds and they just can't take it anymore and they elope, get married and engage in legally sanctioned heteronormative sexual intercourse.

It's only AFTER the legally sanctioned heteronormative sexual intercourse  Lina finds out that Johnnie is broke, is a habitual gambler, has no job and intends to live off Lina's money.

Oh hell no! Lina insists that Johnnie gets a job which he actually does.

The legally sanctioned heteronormative sexual intercourse is just that good! 

But not good enough for Johnnie to behave himself.

He continues to gamble and goes into debt.

Johnnie sells some of Lina's stuff but he's still in debt.

Johnnie gets fired from his job for embezzeling and his boss promises to not file charges against him if Johnnie repays the money he stole. So... more debt. 

Then Lina's father dies and Johnnie is upset that dear old dad did not leave any money to Lina.  

Lina has a friend named Isobel who writes mystery novels for a living. Johnnie begins pumping her for information about poison.  "I say, dear Isobel, if someone wanted to say... poison someone, hypotherically speaking, what kind of poison would be undetectable by the victim and untraceable in an autopsy?" Johnnie inquires of the novelist while staring at Lina with barely concealed contempt. 

Lina thinks Johnnie is plotting to kill her! 

Duh! You think?! 

One night Johnnie brings Lina a glass of milk to drink before bedtime. 

The glass is positively glowing! 

The next morning, the glass is untouched as Lina packs up to go see her mother.  Johnnie insists on driving Lina to the train station.

He takes a very curvy road along a friggin' cliff side at a very high rate of speed where it seems very clear his intent is to throw her out of the car in an "accident". 

Or... not? 

Johnnie stops the car and Lina confronts him! 

Johnnie confesses he was plotting a death.

His own.

What?!?!

Unable to face up to his mounting debts, Johnnie was plotting how to take his own life. 

Lina assures him he does not need to do this, they will deal with this together and...

What the hell, Hitchcock? Really? 

Well, yeah but Alfred Hitchcock was not happy about it.

 

specialty drawing created by RKO
for newspaper reproduction to publicize Suspicion 

In the book Before the Fact,  Johnnie IS plotting to kill Lina and Lina does die from being poisoned but not before she singled him out for her murder in a letter "before the fact". 

Hitchcock wanted to follow the book which is why Johnnie spends so much of the movie looking at Lina like he can't kill her soon enough and get his hands on the sweet life insurance money.

But RKO Studios said you can't have Cary Grant murdering anybody. 

As William L. De Andrea states in his Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994), "Suspicion was supposed to be the study of a murder as seen through the eyes of the eventual victim. However, because Cary Grant was to be the killer and Joan Fontaine the person killed, the studio — RKO — decreed a different ending, which Hitchcock supplied and then spent the rest of his life complaining about."

Lina accepts Johnnie's statements in the final scene and decides that he is, for all his faults, no murderer, the film becomes a cautionary tale about the dangers of suspicion based only on assumed, incomplete, and circumstantial evidence. 

But Cary Grant really leans hard into Johnnie's look and demeanor that just holds that the plot telegraph button hard that he is contemptuous of Lina and is not to be trusted.   

Hitchcock himself may not be trusted as there is some evidence that ending of Suspicion was not forced on him by RKO.  Still, Alfred goes to a lot of trouble to make us think Johnnie has murder in mind. 

Hitchcock even rigged a special light in the glass of milk to draw our attention to the glass and make us suspicious of it's contents.  

By the way, this is not my first film on this blog about a husband of questionable character plotting the death of a wife he can't stand for the money.  In Sudden Fear, Jack Palance is plotting the death of Joan Crawford. In that film, the twist is Crawford's character isn't just suspicious of her husband, she KNOWS he's going to kill her. Also Jack Palance has a weirdly shaped head and is NOT Cary Grant. 

Suspicion would have played better, I think, if Cary Grant had not leaned so hard on Johnnie's intensity and maybe relied on some classic Cary Grant charm to make the audience question it's own suspicions.