(7 votes, average: 4.14 out of 5)
Loading …Rent Movie.com movie reviews presents Suspicion movie review a 1941 film starring Joan Fontaine, Cary Grant and directed by Alfred Hitchcock A woman thinks her husband may be planning to kill her. Johnny Aysgarth is a handsome gambler who seems to live by borrowing money from friends. He meets shy Lina McLaidlaw on a train whilst trying to travel in a first class carriage with a third class ticket. He begins to court Lina and before long they are married. It is only after the honeymoon that she discovers his true character and she starts to become suspicious when Johnny’s friend and business partner, Beaky is killed mysteriously. Repeated viewings can’t dispel the shock of the final scene in this classic 1941 romantic mystery–a brief but disorienting confrontation that suddenly inverts the heroine’s mounting conviction that she’s married a murderer, forcing us to reconsider virtually every scene and line of dialogue that’s preceded it. It’s a masterful coup de grace for director Alfred Hitchcock, who has built a puzzle around the corrosive power of suspicion, threaded with deft ambiguities that toy with dramatic conventions and character archetypes in nearly every frame. As embodied by Joan Fontaine, who nabbed an Oscar in this second outing with the director, Lina McLaidlaw is a buttoned-up, bookish heiress whose prim exterior conceals longings for a more engaged emotional life. Her solution materializes in the darkly handsome Johnnie Aysgarth, a gambler, womanizer, and spendthrift who flirts, then pursues, and soon marries her. As Aysgarth, Cary Grant is both irresistible and sinister, capable of deceit and petty theft, as well as grander designs on his bride’s impending fortune. Lina’s passion for Johnnie is clouded by each new revelation about his apparent dishonesty, from clandestine gambling to real estate development schemes; more troubling are clues implicating him in the death of his best friend, and the prospect that Johnnie may be slowly poisoning Lina herself. By the time we see him ascending a darkened staircase with a suspicious glass of milk, an image made all the more indelible through the spectral glow the director captures in the glass, the evidence seems damning indeed. In fact, even as Hitchcock stacks the deck against Johnnie, and takes full advantage of Grant’s skill at conveying such menace, the director also dots his landscape with visual clues to Lina’s own neurotic (and erotic) obsessions. The final scene forces us to reevaluate her behavior while leaving enough of a cloud over Johnnie to rob him, and us, of a complete exoneration. It’s a wicked, unsettling payoff to a brilliantly executed thriller. –Sam Sutherland
Comment by Mcgivern Owen L
# January 1, 2007,
“Suspicion” is one more classic Alfred Hitchcock film. Like many, it too is filmed in murky but beautiful black and white. The key character is Cary Grant, who worked with the great director so often. Grant plays the role of a lying, scheming, swindling, cheating and thoroughly unlikable fellow. He marries a young but wealthy ingenue, Joan Fontaine. He is patently and without remorse after her inheritance. Fontaine quickly realizes the type of jerk she has married. She even starts to suspect that Grant is out to kill her! The plot further thickens when Grant’s buddy, actor Nigel Bruce, dies suddenly on a business trip with Grant. We wait for one of those English detectives that Hitchcock casts so well to haul Grant off to jail. And then? Then there is that famous car ride that ends the movie so abruptly and has given other reviewers fits. It is all too true that “Suspicion” ends quickly with no clear-cut resolution. We are left with no clue if the couple divorced, lived happily ever after or if Grant finally got tossed in a British cooler. The abrupt and unresolved ending is similar to “Notorious”. This reviewer has no problems with murky endings. Why not appreciate them “as is”? Some interesting sidebars: 1)”Suspicion” was filmed with an entirely British cast on a Hollywood lot, nowhere close to the English seashore.2) Grant was said to be furious at the Director because Hitchcock allegedly was very patient with Fontaine but hassled him during production. 3) Ms Fontaine won a 1941
Best Actress Oscar for her role, making her the ONLY actor/actress to be so recognized for a Hithcock film. The recommendation from this reviewer is to enjoy “Suspicion” for what it is-an above average suspense film with perhaps a hole or two in it. Viewers should ignore the fact that Grant and Hitchcock have done better work elsewhere. They might also ignore the fact that RKO Pictures changed the “original” ending. That scarcely makes Hollywood history. Why not just calm down and watch the movie? “Suspicion” should stand alone on its’ own merits.