Suspicion

Suspicion (1941 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Plot

Handsome, irresponsible playboy Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) meets dowdy Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) on a train and charms her into eloping despite the strong disapproval of her wealthy father, General McLaidlaw (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). After a lavish honeymoon and returning to an extravagant house, Lina discovers that Johnnie has no job, no income, habitually lives on borrowed money, and was intending to try to sponge off her father. She talks him into getting a job, and he goes to work for his cousin, estate agent Captain Melbeck (Leo G. Carroll).

Gradually, Lina learns that Johnnie has continued to gamble wildly, despite promising to quit, and that in order to pay a gambling debt he sold two antique chairs (family heirlooms) that her father had given her as a wedding present. Beaky (Nigel Bruce), Johnnie's good-natured but naive friend, tries to reassure Lina that her husband is a lot of fun and a highly entertaining liar. She repeatedly catches Johnnie in ever more significant lies, discovering that he was fired weeks before for embezzling from his cousin Melbeck, who says he will not prosecute if the money is repaid.

Lina writes a letter to Johnnie that she is leaving him but then tears it up. After this Johnnie enters the room and shows her a telegram announcing her father's death. Johnnie is severely disappointed to discover that Lina has inherited no money, only her father's portrait. He convinces Beaky to finance a hugely speculative land development scheme. Lina is afraid this is a confidence trick or worse, and tries to talk Beaky out of it, but he trusts his friend completely. Johnnie overhears and angrily warns his wife to stay out of his affairs, but later he calls the whole thing off. When Beaky leaves for Paris, Johnnie accompanies him partway. Later, news reaches Lina that Beaky died in Paris. Johnnie lies to her and an investigating police inspector, saying that he stayed in London. This and other details lead Lina to suspect he was responsible for Beaky's death.

Lina then begins to fear that her husband is plotting to kill her for her life insurance. He has been questioning her friend Isobel Sedbusk (Auriol Lee), a writer of mystery novels, about untraceable poisons. Johnnie brings Lina a glass of milk before bed, but she is too afraid to drink it. Needing to get away for a while, she says she will stay with her mother for a few days. Johnnie insists on driving her there. He speeds recklessly in a powerful convertible (a 1936 Lagonda LG45^[2]) on a dangerous road beside a cliff. Lina's door unexpectedly swings open. Johnnie reaches over, his intent unclear to the terrified woman. When she shrinks from him, he stops the car.

In the subsequent confrontation, it emerges that Johnnie was actually intending to commit suicide after taking Lina to her mother's. Now however, he has decided that suicide is the coward's way out, and is resolved to face his responsibilities, even to the point of going to jail for the embezzlement. He was in Liverpool at the time of Beaky's death, trying to borrow on Lina’s life insurance policy in order to repay Melbeck. Her suspicions allayed, Lina tells him that they will face the future together.

Suspicion illustrates how a novel's plot can be so much altered in the transition to film as to reverse the author's original intention. As William L. De Andrea states in his Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994), Suspicion "was supposed to be the study of a murder as seen through the eyes of the eventual victim. However, because Cary Grant was to be the killer and Joan Fontaine the person killed, the studio — RKO — decreed a different ending, which Hitchcock supplied and then spent the rest of his life complaining about." Hitchcock was quoted as saying that he was forced to alter the ending of the movie.^[3] He wanted an ending similar to the climax of the novel, but the studio, more concerned with Cary Grant's "heroic" image, insisted that it be changed. In his biography of Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto disputes Hitchcock's claim to have been overruled on the film's ending. Spoto claims that the first RKO treatment and memos between Hitchcock and the studio show that Hitchcock emphatically desired to make a film about a woman's fantasy life.^[3]

As in the novel, General McLaidlaw opposes his daughter's marriage to Johnnie Aysgarth. In both versions, Johnnie freely admits that he would not mind the general's death because he expects Lina to inherit a substantial fortune, which would solve their financial problems. The book, however, is much darker, with Johnnie egging on the general to exert himself to the point where he collapses and dies. In the film, General McLaidlaw's death is only reported, and Johnnie is not involved at all. Again, Johnnie's criminal record remains incomplete.

Several scenes in the film create suspense and sow doubt as to Johnnie's intentions: Beaky's death in Paris is due to an allergy to brandy, which Johnnie knew about. A waiter who barely speaks English tells the police that Beaky addressed his companion that night as "Old Bean", the way Beaky addressed Johnnie. At the end of the film, Johnnie is driving his wife at breakneck speed to her mother's house. This scene, which takes place after her final illness, is not in the book.

The biggest difference is the ending. In Iles' novel, Johnnie serves his sick wife a drink which she knows to be poisoned, and she voluntarily gulps it down. In the film, the drink is not poisoned and can be seen untouched the following morning. Another ending was considered but not used, in which Lina is writing a letter to her mother stating that she fears Johnnie is going to poison her, at which point he walks in with the milk. She finishes the letter, seals and stamps an envelope, asks Johnnie to mail the letter, then drinks the milk. The final shot would have shown him leaving the house and dropping into a mailbox the letter which incriminates him. Hitchcock's recollection of this original ending—in his book-length interview with François Truffaut, published in English as Hitchcock/Truffaut in 1967—is that Lina's letter tells her mother she knows that Johnnie is killing her, but that she loves him too much to care.

A musical leitmotif is introduced in Suspicion. Whenever Lina is happy with Johnny — starting with a ball organised by General McLaidlaw — Johann Strauss's waltz "Wiener Blut" is played in its original, light-hearted version. At one point, when she is suspicious of her husband, a threatening, minor key version of the waltz is employed, metamorphosing into the full and happy version after the suspense has been lifted. At another, Johnny is whistling the waltz. At yet another, while Johnny is serving the drink of milk, a sad version of "Wiener Blut" is played again. By placing a lightbulb in the milk, the filmmakers made the contents appear to glow as the glass is carried upstairs by Johnnie, further enhancing the audience's fear that it is poisoned.

A visual threat is inserted when Lina suspects her husband of preparing to kill Beaky: On the night before, at the Aysgarths' home, they play Anagrams, and suddenly, by exchanging a letter, Lina has changed "mudder" into "murder" and then "murderer". Seeing the word, Lina imagines the cliffs Johnny and Beaky told her they will inspect for a real estate venture the next morning, and faints.

In the end, when it turns out that, for all his faults, Johnny is no murderer, the film version becomes a cautionary tale about the dangers of suspicion based only on assumed, incomplete, and circumstantial evidence.

The 1988 American Playhouse remake stars Anthony Andrews and Jane Curtin.

Amazon.com Suspicion Anthony Andrews, Betsy Blair, Jane Curtin, Jonathan Lynn

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