Suspicion (1941)

Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion is based on the novel Before the Fact. In the film, Joan Fontaine's character is in her late 20s and unmarried. Her parents assume she never will be married so she marries a character played by Cary Grant shortly after meeting him. The vast majority of the film shows the two after their marriage. Fontaine is constantly in fear that her husband is doing something wrong and as the film progresses she worries that her husband is a murderer and is plotting to kill her. Like in Rebecca, Fontaine plays a woman who is in constant fear of her husband and rather crazy. The suspense in this film is that there constantly seems to be evidence demonstrating how Grant has done something wrong, but it turns out he didn't and often nothing happened at all. The most suspenseful part of the film is at the end where Grant brings his wife a glass of milk that she thinks is poisoned. Here the book and film end in opposite ways. In one version she drinks it, knowing it's poisoned, and dies hoping her husband won't get caught and in the other version she does not drink it.

The acting in this film is most excellent. While Fontaine is not as good as in Rebecca she is still quite good and deservingly won an Oscar for best actress for her portrayal of Lina. Cary Grant is also quite good although this performance is not as memorable as that of North by Northwest. As is typical for a Hitchcock film, the supporting cast contains a wide variety of interesting people who are not the least bit familiar to American viewers. As is typical for Hitchcock's films, they do a good job in a wide variety of roles.

While this film is overall rather good, it does take quite some time to get going. Actually it never goes anywhere which is rather irritating at first, but as the viewer gets used to nothing happening it actually gets rather dramatic. I was disappointed with the ending of the film but that's not entirely Hitchcock's fault. RKO Pictures did not like the original ending and forced Hitchcock to change it much to his dismay. While Hitchcock eventually got full control over his pictures, that was not the case in 1941. A good movie, but nothing spectacular.

75/100
C

UP NEXT: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

From the famous glowing milk scene. According to the making of documentary on the DVD, the milk glows because Hitchcock had them put a light in it. This picture hardly does the scene any justice.