ElMaruecan82 "Suspicion" marks the first of four memorable collaborations between Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant, and the second and final one with Joan Fontaine in a performance that earned her the Oscar for Best Actress, the only acting Oscar in a Hitchcock film. And it's quite deserved as Fontaine's facial expressions never fall in melodramatic caricature and powerfully capture the psychological premise of the title.And what a premise! How can a woman live with a husband who might be a killer, who might kill her? The film is an immersion into one character's fearful psyche, an arm-wrestling battle between doubt and love translated to the screen into bits of genius genius... until the ending causes the whole edifice patiently built up to collapse in the most infuriatingly anti-climactic way.But the film wasn't flawless to begin with. If "Rebecca" could quickly set the tone with the haunting shadows of Manderley, the dreamy voice-over and stay relatively faithful to its Gothic spirit, the first act of "Suspicion" feels more rushed out as if it was impatient to get to the point by using the most artificial tricks to make Grant and Fontaine's character fall in love. It started well with a conversation in the dark revealing that we're in a tunnel, hence in a train. Cary Grant is Johnnie Aysgarth, a smooth-talking playboy travelling in first class without money, and whose rude manners and obnoxiousness with the ticket inspector shouldn't please the type of woman his travelling companion is. Now everyone describes Lina as dowdy but there's no way a face as delicate and beautiful as Fontaine's could earn her the nickname of 'monkey face', even from Cary Grant, and even with the glasses, I couldn't buy it.Fontaine does a great job at looking shy or reserved like in "Rebecca", but "Suspicion" insists so much on her dullness it undermines its credibility. Olivia de Havilland was as beautiful as her sister but her Oscar-winning performance in "The Heiress" was the perfect embodiment of the shy spinster that falls in love with the first opportunistic wolf-in-sheep-disguise. In "Suspicion", we only take it at face value when Lina overhears a conversation between her parents (Cedric Hardwicke and May Whitty) about her desperate case and then literally throws herself in Johnnie's arms. End of first act.There's something interesting in Lina's character though in the way she only seems to exist for Johnnie, in a good mood, the "Blue Danube" is played like a leitmotif, a reference to the magical waltz that sealed their union much to her parents' reluctance. She's literally diluted herself in that love as a gratitude that's quite true to life. Indeed, there's always one person in a couple that drags the other, one making more concessions, one more forgiving, no matter which side you take, the romantic balance will be either positive or negative, never neutral. Truffaut lauded the film for its consistency, the fact that it stayed focused on Lina's mind and the evolution of her husband's perception and yes, the film's quite good at it. At first, Johnnie strikes as a little boy, whose reliance on Lina's money is so casually admitted that there couldn't be any greed or malice behind it. Then he turns out to be a greedy opportunist, selling two valuable chairs Lina's father gave as a honeymoon gift. As the film progresses, his persona gets more intriguing. For each suspicious action, there's an element that lowers the guard. One of his friends Beaky (Nigel Bruce) has a slip of tongue, revealing a few lies of his buddy, but he minimizes it with humor. Johnnie is a compulsive liar in the best case. But Johnnie's behavior can also reveal darker sides like the effective moment when he abruptly tells Lina not to interfere with his business and later, when he asks a famous writer many questions about the undetectable poisons. This is one of my favorite trademarks from Hitchcock, the casual discussion about the perfect crime, which you know will always pay off and Grant's acting is delightfully ambivalent. Then the 'suspicion' culminates with the classic 'glass of milk' moment, where he climbs up the stair with a white glowing figure emerging from the dark. A simple practical effect (a light bulb in a glass of milk) and Hitchcock plunged us into Lina's mind, will she drink it or not? At that point, "Suspicion" had the makings of a great film, because Grant played his part perfectly, he could be what he was suspected to be... or not.Then came the ending. While Hitchcock wanted Johnnie to be the killer, and Lina to drink the glass of milk after incriminating him with a posthumous letter he would send to his mother-in-law, he was vetoed by the studios... because Cary Grant could never be cast as a murderer. It's for reasons like this that I cherish actors like Bogart, Cagney or Brando who could fit in any roles. I'm pretty sure Grant wouldn't have minded being a bad guy, he resented Hitchcock for having favored Fontaine all through the film and not getting an Academy nod, but if his role was closer to Charles Boyer in "Gaslight", things might have been different. He should have blamed it on studio politics rather than Hitchcock, the harm is done.And the problem with Hitchcock movies is that they always benefit from a second viewing... as long as they ask for a second viewing, once you finish "Suspicion", everything is so perfectly wrapped up that you don't feel the urge to watch it again. Hitchcock knew it was only his second movie and had to make compromises, his pragmatism would pay off later as he would benefit from more creative freedom, once his reputation firmly established in Hollywood.Still, all it needed to be a masterpiece was just one final shot on a smiling Grant, an enigmatic grin just to conclude on ambiguous note, that would have fit a film with such a title.

JohnHowardReid Copyright 14 November 1941 by RKO-Radio. New York opening at the Radio City Music Hall: 20 November 1941. U.S. release: 14 November 1941. Australian release: 31 December 1941. 9,135 feet. 101½ minutes.SYNOPSIS: Cad marries heiress. Cad tries to murder heiress. Does he?NOTES: The prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Annual Award for Best Actress went to Joan Fontaine. Also nominated for Best Picture (defeated by "How Green Was My Valley"); Music Scoring of a Dramatic Picture (lost to Bernard Herrmann's "All That Money Can Buy")."Suspicion" was number 8 on The Film Daily's annual poll of U.S. film critics. (Mrs. Miniver was first, followed by How Green Was My Valley, King's Row, Wake Island, The Pride of the Yankees, The Man Who Came To Dinner, and One Foot In Heaven).The New York Film Critics voted Joan Fontaine's the Best Feminine Performance of 1941.To win her Best Actress honor, Joan Fontaine defeated her sister, Olivia de Havilland (Hold Back the Dawn), as well as Bette Davis (The Little Foxes), Greer Garson (Blossoms in the Dust), and Barbara Stanwyck (Ball of Fire)."Francis Iles" is the pseudonym of Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893-1970), who also wrote under the name, Anthony Berkeley. "Before the Fact" is generally regarded as his masterpiece. It's a great shame it was not brought intact to the screen, but ruined by a spurious ending.COMMENT: Did Joan Fontaine deserve her coveted award for "Suspicion"? Was she given the award because voters felt she had been unjustly edged out by Ginger Rogers' "Kitty Foyle" the previous year when she should have won for "Rebecca"? There's no question that "Rebecca" is the superior film in all respects. "Rebecca" is one of the finest movies of the forties. "Suspicion" is a cheap cheat.Oh, "Suspicion" is well made all right. Beautifully made in fact. The camera-work dazzles, Hitchcock pulls out all stops and the cast is a wonderful who's who of British character players. Ninety-nine percent of "Suspicion" is an absolute delight. It's unfortunate that all the atmosphere, all the suspense that has been so carefully built up, is ruined by the ending. As Hitchcock himself says: "I'm not too pleased with the way Suspicion ends. I had something else in mind. The scene I wanted, but it was never shot, was for Cary Grant to bring her a glass of milk that's been poisoned and Joan Fontaine has just finished a letter to her mother: 'Dear Mother, I'm desperately in love with him, but I don't want to live because he's a killer. Though I'd rather die, I think society should be protected from him'. Then, Cary Grant comes in with the fatal glass and she says, 'Will you mail this letter to Mother for me, dear?' She drinks the milk and dies. Fade out and fade in on one short shot: Cary Grant, whistling cheerfully, walks over to the mail¬box and pops the letter in.""Suspicion" is a fatally flawed film whichever way you look at it. My advice is to walk out just before the end. That way you can really enjoy it. And there is a lot to enjoy: Grant perfectly cast as the hollowly charming Johnnie, Fontaine (if you accept her performance at surface level) sympathetically effective, Hardwicke, Bruce and Witty contributing their usual, solidly entertaining character studies; Stradling's moodily attractive lighting; Hitchcock's tingling, suspenseful direction.

adrian-43767 SUSPICION is exceptionally well directed and photographed, a visually beautiful film, and the acting by the two main leads is of superior quality. I have never seen better from Cary Grant, and Joan Fontaine received her Oscar for this performance (although I preferred her in REBECCA). The supporting cast is also very good.Where things come unstuck is with the script. Aysgarth (Grant) is clearly a thief, a liar, and possibly a murderer, but wife Fontaine is too blinded by her love to see it. I readily accept that love can blind you, but with so much evidence - especially after the sale of her father's much prized chairs - I would have thought that any self- respecting woman would have given him the boot, not least because he does not have a cent to his name.Instead, Mrs Aysgarth recurrently forgives her sinful hubby and, in the process, loses the spectator's respect. The final blow is the studio-dictated ending that basically tells you the rest of the movie is a fib. Pity, Hitch would have deserved better. The greater our loss, too. 7.5 would be my mark, but I can't honestly round it up to 8, so I'm giving it 7.

ags123 One of Hitchcock's better films from the 1940s, "Suspicion" holds up well despite its disconnection from the modern world. Maybe that's part of its appeal. It's got all the Hitchcock hallmarks - suspense, humor, glamour, sophisticated repartee, fine craftsmanship. Cary Grant is endlessly charming whether he's a hero or villain; It doesn't matter. Joan Fontaine commands the screen in a quiet, subtle way. She is lovingly photographed throughout, looking, arguably, at the peak of her beauty. The ending is highly problematic. Some viewers are okay with it. I find it awkward and stagy. It upends everything that's gone before it, blithely dismissing all that previous tension with a wordy and bogus explanation. The plot builds to a murder which never occurs. Still, "Suspicion" engages on every repeated viewing.