Suspicion (1941)

Suspicion is an American comedy thriller film first released in 1941, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  The film stars Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce and Dame May Whitty.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


From the moment they first met, sitting opposite one another on a train, Lina MacKinlaw knew that Johnnie Aysgarth would be the love of her life.  A marriage hastily ensues but it isn’t until after the honeymoon that Lina discovers that Johnnie hasn’t a penny to his name.  An inveterate gambler and wastrel, Johnnie is up to his eyes in debt and Lina is horrfied when she later discovers that he was dismissed for stealing from his employer.  To raise money, Johnny goes into partnership with an old friend, Beaky Thwaite, the latter putting up the capital to start a real estate business.  Not long after they decide to wind up the scheme, Beaky is killed in a road accident in Paris, before he can take his money out of the company.  When Lina learns that Johnnie was not where he claimed to be at the time of Beaky’s death, she draws the obvious conclusion.  How long will it be before he kills her...?

Suspicion is classic Hitchcock - a suspenseful psychological thriller which takes a darkly comedic look at one of the director’s obsessions: the institution of marriage.  The film gives Cary Grant his first leading role in a Hitchcock film – three more were to follow, culminating in North By Northwest (1959).  The female lead was played Joan Fontaine, who had previously starred in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1950), a film which has many similarities with this one.  Fontaine won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in this film.  There’s also a nice turn from Nigel Bruce, playing a dim but very likable Britisher with a penchant for Donald Duck impressions.

Suspicion deals with a recurring theme in Hitchcock’s work – the duality of human nature.  The perceived dual character of the film’s hero/villain - played superbly by Grant in one of his best performances – is accentuated by the atmospheric film noir-style cinematography.  The stark shadows projected onto the walls and floor of the marital home give the impression that the heroine is caught in a spider’s web from which death is the only escape.  We never quite know whether the threat is real or imaginary, until the last moment.

The film itself has a something of schizoid nature.  It begins as a light-hearted romantic comedy, but gradually darkens as our suspicions over the Cary Grant character grow, and the second half of the film is much more recognisable as a Hitchcock thriller.  The film was originally to have had a much darker ending, in which the heroine allowed herself to be murdered by her husband, but the studio bosses at RKO vetoed this to preserve Cary Grant’s nice guy image.  As a result, the film has a contrived happy ending which looks like a sloppy last-minute alteration and virtually undermines everything that preceded it.

© James Travers 2008

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