- Revisiting more contemporary and modern critical appreciation
- Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece earned three Oscar nominations
- The fatal glass of milk: A possible poisoned nightcap still thrills
Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.
Suspicion: Writing on a Classic, Part 2 | Collectors Guide, Part 2: Home video and soundtrack
This US 1953 re-release insert poster artwork also adorned the one sheet, two sheet and lobby cards; and first US Image LaserDisc (1989) LDDb
“You might say Suspicion was the second English picture I made in Hollywood. The actors, the atmosphere and the novel on which it’s based were all British,” director Alfred Hitchcock remarked to French filmmaker François Truffaut during a discussion of some of Hitchcock’s works. Although Suspicion was Hitchcock’s twenty-eighth film as a director, it was only the fourth he made since arriving in the United States in 1939. His first US movie, the 1940 Academy Award-winning film Rebecca, was created for David O. Selznick Productions. It was Hitchcock’s first all-English cast in an American-produced film.
Rebecca’s leading lady, Joan Fontaine, would now star in Hitchcock’s newest thriller, Suspicion—this time in the role of spinster Lina McLaidlaw. Cary Grant, popular star of His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby, made his première appearance in a Hitchcock film as Fontaine’s fortune-hunting playboy suitor Johnnie Aysgarth, who then goes on to marry her. As Fontaine’s parents, Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Dame May Whitty star, one of the rare times in any film when a real “Sir” and “Dame” actually play husband and wife.
To Murder or Not to Murder
“The real ending I had for the film was that Cary Grant brings his wife the fatal glass of milk to kill her,” related Alfred Hitchcock about Suspicion’s original plot. The director planned to remain true to Anthony Berkeley Cox’s mystery novel, Before the Fact, published under Cox’s pseudonym, Frances lles. As envisioned by Hitchcock, the story line would follow the bizarre tale of Lina McLaidlaw, a spinster who falls madly in love with and then marries a no-account philanderer. Because of her obsession with him, she knowingly lives with a man who is not only an embezzler, but also a murderer. Then Lina finds out her husband plans to murder her and her unborn child as well. Deciding that her husband “must not reproduce himself, she leaves a suicide note and drinks the poisoned milk he offers her and dies.”
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More than a Suspicion: Johnnie’s wrong for Lina. Or anyone, for that matter.
But in 1941, Hitchcock continued, “it was heresy to make Cary Grant a murderer,” although the director had already shot the film as originally intended. RKO Studios, unwilling to accept Grant in the role of a murderer, cut all references to this in the film. The movie now was only fifty-five minutes long. Hitchcock, along with screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, and collaborators Alma Hitchcock (the director’s wife) and Joan Harrison, went back to the drawing board. This resulted in lengthy shooting delays since they could not decide on an ending. So desperate was the on-set confusion, that both director and lead actress took sick on more than one occasion, delaying the production even further. Filming that had begun on February 10, 1941, was not completed until the end of July, an extraordinary amount of time for a film shot entirely within a studio.
A Title by Any Other Name
In addition to Hitchcock’s problem of how to end the movie, Suspicion could not seem to find an acceptable title. The working one, Before the Fact, was based on the novel. The director wanted to call the film Fright, and the studio, Suspicious Lady. When moviegoers were polled for their response to the titles, Hitchcock’s and the studio’s choices received lukewarm reactions. The studio began testing as many as fifty other possible titles, including these “amusing possibilities”: Search for Tomorrow, Last Lover and Men Make Poor Husbands.
The director was convinced that not having a definitive title only added to the confusion and lack of direction his production crew was suffering. Three months after the film was completed—and only days before it was to open in November 1941—a title was finally selected. It was the title Hitchcock had been advocating since the summer: Suspicion, taken directly from the first page of the novel, “Suspicion is a tenuous thing, so impalpable that the exact moment of its birth is not easy to determine…”
US original title lobby card (amended)
Behind the Scenes
Alfred Hitchcock, disappointed that his original vision for Suspicion was not a viable option for the studio, awed audiences nonetheless by ingeniously placing a light bulb within the “suspicious” milk glass, ensuring that its glow captured viewers’ full attention. Suspicion, released in November 1941, became RKO Studios’ biggest-grossing film of the year. The film received three Oscar nominations: Best Film, Best Musical Score and Best Actress, but only Joan Fontaine won an Oscar.
Cary Grant made his first screen appearance in a Hitchcock film with Suspicion. This first pairing of director and actor led to three other popular films: Notorious in 1946, To Catch a Thief in 1955 and North by Northwest in 1959. Joan Fontaine, who had worked with director Alfred Hitchcock in Rebecca in 1940, won her only Academy Award for the role of Lina McLaidlaw in Suspicion the following year. Many critics felt her performance in Rebecca was superior to that in Suspicion, but that she was awarded the Oscar because she had lost out to Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle the previous year. – US Turner/Time Life VHS (1992)
New reviews: Expression, Globe, Grunes, Offscreen, Ruthless
From master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock comes a skilfully crafted tale of what may or may not be deadly deception. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1941, Suspicion is one one of Hitchcock’s most subtly unnerving films.
Joan Fontaine won the 1941 Oscar for Best Actress (and the New York Film Critics Circle Award) for her emotional performance as Lina McLaidlaw, a bookish young woman who meets dashing Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant). Romance leads to marriage and after their honeymoon they return to England and move into an expensive house Johnnie has rented and furnished. But she’s mortified to learn that he’s flat broke, unemployed and in heavy debt. Soon Johnnie proves himself to be a liar and a thief as well. More debts, more lies and a mysterious death; Johnnie’s behaviour is charming and reassuring but his every action convinces Lina that he’s plotting her murder. Can the man she loves be a killer? Can she really be his next victim?
After a string of successful films in England, including The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock came to Hollywood. His first film in the United States was the then-successful, now-classic thriller Rebecca, which also starred Fontaine. Rebecca would win the Oscar for Best Picture that year but his next two films, Foreign Correspondent and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, were not as well received. Hitchcock wanted a success of the same order as Rebecca, and on February 10, 1941, photography began on Suspicion.
The screenplay was written by sometime playwright Samson Raphaelson, assisted by Joan Harrison and Alma Reville. It was based on a novel entitled Before the Fact (1932) by Francis Iles who was also published as A.B. Cox, Anthony Berkeley and A. Monmouth Platts; he seemingly suffered from an identity crisis! Raphaelson also wrote many short stories and scripted other films including several for Ernst Lubitsch, such as The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and Heaven Can Wait (1943).
Hitchcock had a reputation for manipulating his actors off set as well as on but even he had no control over the striking phenomenon that occurred while he was making Suspicion: Joan Fontaine’s life at the time of shooting began to closely resemble the plot of her breakthrough film of the year before, Rebecca. Her husband, actor Brian Aherne [of Shooting Stars, Forever and a Day, and I Confess], showed signs of being obsessed with his recently deceased young mistress, actress Claire Eames. He gave Fontaine little affection, and their household was tense because of a menacing butler. Hitchcock certainly wished Fontaine no ill, bur he was able to use her disquiet to strengthen her performance in Suspicion and she won an Oscar to help compensate for her ordeals.
Although they had already worked together on Gunga Din (1939), Fontaine and co-star Grant did not get along at all. He was sceptical about the cause of her frequent absences (she claimed she was ill) and greatly irritated by what he considered to be her unprofessional, downright nasty behaviour. Again, Hitchcock knew how to use this real-life situation to his advantage in their scenes of conflict but it is also noticeable in their scenes of affection. It may be the compelling plot, Grant’s and Fontaine’s skills as actors, Hitchcock’s strong on-set directing or perhaps a combination of all three but clearly there is something wrong between the two of them.
A noted innovator, Hitchcock frequently had camera, lighting and prop people invent technical tricks for his films in order to achieve breathtaking or frightening effects. But Suspicion works on a more intimate level than many of his other films; it is a subtle Hitchcock film, and perhaps its most famous scene is the one in which Johnnie simply goes upstairs to bring Lina a glass of milk that may or may net he poisoned. Probably the only unique special effect in the film – so simple and so eerie – is the tiny light Hitchcock placed inside the glass of milk to make it glow. The viewer’s eye goes right to that possibly deadly glass, and the tension rises as he climbs the stairs.
The shadows from the skylight are like the strands of the spider web in which Lina appears to be trapped, a web spun by her husband’s irresponsible and mysterious behaviour. Beautifully photographed by Harry Stradling, A.S.C. and directed with Hitchcock’s peerless style and precision, this taut film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1941 and it brought the director the recognition and praise he had not enjoyed since Rebecca. Cut from the same cloth as Rebecca and Notorious, also starring Grant, Suspicion ranks as one of Hitchcock’s finest early Hollywood films. – US Image LD (1995) LDDb
US magazine advert; in Hollywood
Suspicion: Writing on a Classic, Part 2 | Collectors Guide, Part 2: Home video and soundtrack
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This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.
