Anxiety was the fashionable diagnosis if you went to see a shrink in the 1940s. Suspicion is the anxiety movie, the story of a prim spinster swept off her feet by a handsome chap who then starts wondering what he saw in her.
Her money is the obvious answer, though Joan Fontaine looks like a prize worth having in Alfred Hitchcock’s fraught little melodrama halfway stranded between the gothic of Wilkie Collins and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalyst’s couch.
Cary Grant plays the raffish Johnnie, the bounder who whirls into the life of wealthy wallflower Lina (Fontaine), quickly marries her and then reveals that he hasn’t a penny to his name.
He’ll work, he says, when pushed, though it soon turns out that Johnnie’s idea of work is stealing from his boss and spending his ill-gotten gains at the race track.
But is he a killer? If Johnnie’s wonky charm powers the first half of the movie, Lina’s dark suspicion is the energy behind the second half, once she realises that the best way for Johnnie to get hold of her money is by collecting on her life insurance.
Grant fell out with both Hitchcock and Fontaine while making Suspicion, after complaining that Hitchcock was more interested in Fontaine’s character than his. That’s the story that goes around anyway. A better rationale would be that Grant felt he’d been badly directed by Hitchcock. Johnnie’s regular moments of figurative moustache twiddling and dark reaction shots – they’d be asides to the audience if this were the theatre – spoil the ambiguity of Johnnie’s character and slightly hang the actor out to dry.
Grant eventually patched it up with the director, and went on to make three more films with him. He never made it up with Fontaine, though, who won an Oscar for her performance – a case of sour grapes?
Whoever is at fault, Fontaine’s performance is better than Grant’s. Her character has integrity, which helps, but she also manages to suggest that what keeps Lina together with this reckless and possibly malign individual is the sheer physical reaction she has when he’s near. She’s hot for him. It’s Rebecca, which she’d made the year before, all over again, basically.
To an extent the characters have been lifted from the psychoanalyst’s couch. As well as anxious Lina there is no shortage of characters in arrested development. Johnnie most obviously is the child who can’t take responsibility for anything (Lina actually says as much to his face). But Lina is also stuck at some infantile level of dependency and can’t make a go of her life unless she has her parents (May Whitty and Cedric Hardwicke, both great) to support her, or Johnnie, once he’s replaced them. There’s also Johnnie’s odd friend, the strangely ever-present Beaky, a bon viveur and nice-but-dim enabler, played superbly by Nigel Bruce.
There is no hint of a sexual relationship between Beaky and Johnnie in Bruce’s performance but look elsewhere in the film and there are a lot of single people rattling around unaccountably. The mannish crime novelist Isobel Sedbusk (Auriol Lee) and her effete unmarried brother Bertram (Gavin Gordon), for example. And who is that woman at the dinner party hosted by Isobel, the one who is dressed like a man? Pathological sexuality (see Strangers on a Train, Vertigo and Psycho) is often an obsession of Hitchcock’s and he seems to be paddling in those waters here too.
It does not quite work, and that is mostly down to the way Johnnie is written, directed and played. But it does not quite work very superbly, Franz Waxman’s madly gothic score and Harry Stradling’s lighting (so many web patterns to get caught in!) adding to the angst-inducing sense of a woman trapped by her own doubts.
The ending, when all is revealed, does not work either. It makes a logical sense but not an emotional one. Johnnie is revealed as a… If you’ve not seen it I won’t ruin it. In spite of its faults, there’s really a lot to enjoy here, and Hitchcock has (possibly deliberately?) made his film in such a way that it’s possible to rework it on the fly. Rewrite the ending in your head if you don’t like it either.
Suspicion – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
