Suspicion 1941

An early Hollywood-era psychological thriller from Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine as a budding married couple on different pages. Grant is a total jerk from the start, borrowing money from his bride-to-be within minutes of their initial encounter and negging her relentlessly during their awkward first date, but love is every bit as blind as accused and she falls for him anyway. His behavior doesn’t improve after they’re wed, too-young and in a great hurry, but finally, after some years, she begins to recognize the warning signs. By then, though, isn’t it already too late?

Suspicion is essentially a feature-length protraction of the famous “girl, don’t go in there” scenes that crop up so often in teen slasher movies. Fontaine’s character - the mousey, bespectacled sweetheart Lina - walks straight into a lifetime’s worth of trouble, ignoring or politely excusing terrible behavior because she’s too cordial to call her husband’s bluff. Even when the contrary evidence is irrefutable, she compartmentalizes the problem and pushes it aside. Shut that box of worry in the closet, please, right alongside all the others. The idea, one would think, would be to pile on and pile on until the lies reach critical mass and everything blows up in a noisy, fateful climax, either revealing a chain of stacked misunderstandings or disintegrating the marriage in one manner or another. That’s how it plays in Before the Fact, the novel this is based upon, but in the film version a poor test screening and studio reluctance to paint Grant as a fully-fledged bad guy results in a weird, hurried non-finish.

For years after its release, Hitchcock would claim he opposed the ill-conceived “happy” ending, but there’s since been some evidence to the contrary. Regardless, the director lays enough early groundwork to leave some doubt in viewers’ minds, even after they’ve been hand-held through that flat, superficial climax. It’s well-composed and acted - particularly by Fontaine, who collected an Academy Award for her role - but ultimately feels hollow and drawn-out, like two acts forever in search of a third. I can’t believe she bought that line. Again.