Joan Fontaine

Suspicion

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Johnnie and Lina

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, … Read more

The Witches

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Miss Mayfield comforts Linda

1966’s The Witches (aka The Devil’s Own) is another great opportunity to indulge the guilty pleasure of watching a once-glam Hollywood goddess at the tail end of her career being relentlessly monstered in a down-market movie. Think Joan Crawford in Trog or Bette Davis in Burnt Offerings. Here it’s Joan Fontaine getting the treatment, the one-time star of Rebecca, and Oscar-winner for Suspicion, returning to the land of her British parents to play a teacher recruited to run a primary school in a picture-postcard English village. In Wicker Man style, Miss Mayfield does not realise that almost everyone in the village is involved in something untoward, and that one of her charges has … Read more

Ivy

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Ivy with Miles Rushworth

Sick of “sad sack” roles, Joan Fontaine struck out for the border with 1947’s Ivy, a pivot away from the passive wallflowers of Rebecca and Suspicion, roles that had made her Hollywood’s biggest star and won her an Oscar, and towards something much ballsier. She plays Ivy (as in Poison Ivy), a woman in Edwardian Britain who sets her cap at a rich bachelor and decides to make him her husband no matter what’s in her way. Problem one: wealthy Miles Rushworth (Herbert Marshall) is in a long-standing relationship with young Bella Crail (Molly Lamont), and everyone knows they will soon be engaged. Two: Ivy is already married, to Jervis (Richard Ney), a … Read more

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands

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Burt Lancaster and Joan Fontaine

The title of the movie Kiss the Blood Off My Hands makes a promise that can’t be fulfilled. An attention grabber, even before it had debuted there was talk of changing it, to Blood on My Hands (which is how the film is listed on the IMDb). In some parts of the USA it went out as the even more timid The Unafraid. Dramatic though the original title is, it’s all wrong for a story about an accidental killer and his gal and is more suited to a lurid 1960s shocker or a 1980s video nasty than a 1948 melodrama. It’s the first in a long string of fascinating movies made by Burt … Read more