Four of Alfred Hitchcock’s American films were nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. The best of these is Suspicion. (The other three are Rebecca, which won, Foreign Correspondent, both 1940, and Spellbound, 1945.) Suspicion is witty, suspenseful, absorbing, romantic, deeply moving, visually remarkable.
Like Rebecca, Suspicion remains English in setting and spirit; and, again, its central character is a sheltered girl. A late child who has been carefully brought up, Lina McLaidlaw avoids potential spinsterhood by impetuously marrying against her parents’ wishes John Aysgarth, a playboy and ne’er-do-well. After an extensive continental honeymoon, Lina learns that Johnny’s cousin and employer, from whose firm he has embezzled funds to pay gambling debts, has discharged him and that now he will go to prison unless he pays back the money. She confides to Johnny nothing she has found out. Soon, she grows suspicious that her spouse has killed a friend with whom he had entered into a doubtful business arrangement and, having failed to get the money he needs that way, now he is planning to murder her to collect on her life insurance.
Suspicion is based on Francis Iles’s—Anthony Berkeley’s—novel Before the Fact. The “fact” to which the title refers is the disillusioned girl’s imminent poisoning by her spouse—in effect, her suicide by proxy. The girl in Rebecca wrongly suspects her husband of not loving her; in Suspicion, the girl may be right. This film turns the screw, then, by premising wifely anxiety that is completely justified. (Why else do both films, and so close together, and with the same actress, Joan Fontaine, in the lead?) All this changed during the shooting, though. The original ending, the wife’s murder by her husband, was replaced once the studio, RKO, decided that the actor playing the latter, Cary Grant, was too popular to turn out to be a killer. In a hastily contrived (but thrilling) new finish stressing the rewards of marital complicity and communication, Lina realizes that her suspiciousness has been without basis and, accepting a share of responsibility for the troubled union, pleads for reconciliation. And why not? For indeed the novel itself unfolds in the first person from the wife’s vantage; even there, then, the possibility exists that the wife is foolishly suspecting her spouse. The story ends with her anticipating her death that night; but, after we close the back cover of the book, as it were, we certainly can imagine her waking up the next morning absolutely unharmed. (Indeed, the author may even be stressing this possibility as a way for the reader to get out of the box of the subjectivity that the first-person narration imposes.) Therefore, the film’s revised ending may be taken, happily, at face value. Or did Hitchcock, piqued at studio interference, devise an utterly ambiguous final shot—Johnny slowly uncoils his arm around Lina as they drive off—that subversively hints the husband’s murderousness without the studio’s detecting it?
Containing such contradictions and cross-purposes, Suspicion ought to be incoherent; yet it is nothing of the sort. The reason for this is obvious. Regardless of whether John Aysgarth is or is not out to murder his wife, a critical underlying theme remains intact: the exacting need of love to remain love, by retaining either its true character or, at least, the illusion of this. Either ending—Lina’s self-sacrifice to her husband’s murderous intent; Lina’s great humility in the face of his exoneration—makes the same point: that Lina Aysgarth is willing to go to all necessary ends for the sake of her Johnny and her love for him.
Helping to make Suspicion so incredibly appealing, moreover, is its wistful, gently melancholy air—an expression of love’s tender fragility, even transience, and, in defiance of this, the sublimation of Lina’s desire to hold onto each whisper and echo of her Johnny’s love, which she feels is evaporating. All this helps to make Suspicion an unusually delicate film for Hitchcock. Another contributor to the outstanding result is the elusive, shadowy texture of Harry Stradling’s black-and-white cinematography, with its lovely variations on the visual theme of the girl’s entrapment in a spiderweb of suspicion. Nor can one praise too highly the fascinating, delightful script by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison and Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s endlessly helpful spouse.
But to Hitchcock, of course, goes the highest praise; despite challenges, he has made one of his most poignant films—and one that towards the end gives the heart a terrific jump.
Except for Grant, whose role the subjectivism accorded the role of the wife may have made unchartable, all the acting in this film is splendid: Nigel Bruce as Johnny’s friend, May Whitty as Lina’s sympathetic mother, Cedric Hardwicke as Lina’s military father, Auriol Lee as a lesbian friend of the Aysgarths who writes murder mysteries. As Lina, Fontaine won an Oscar; in Oscar’s lead acting categories her performance is nearly in the same exalted league as Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (Olivier, 1948), Simone Signoret’s Alice in Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959), and Daniel Day-Lewis’s Christy Brown in My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989). (Fontaine also won year-end prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review.) Her acting is brilliant—crisp, richly textured, emotionally vibrant and, finally, heart-piercing. And something more: she brings neurotic complexity, formerly reserved in Hollywood for “bad girls” and female villains, to a role reflecting the positive and the decent. Countless American film actresses thus remain in her debt.
Let me add this personal note: Joan Fontaine was the first film actress to capture my heart, and she is still among my favorites.
Tags: Cary Grant, Hitchcock, Joan Fontaine
