Fleapit revisited:Suspicion.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1941 film Suspicion (based on Frances Iles' 1932 novel Before The Fact, shown recently on BBC2 and still available on iPlayer) is not one of his very best. But then that's a pretty heated debate full of very stiff competition. What Suspicion is is a tightly told, and sometimes gripping story, that falls down a little because it's never quite eerie or tense enough.

In the last ten or so minutes the chill factor does pick up but even that is ruined by what, to me, seems a rather clumsy ending. I was interested in what happened to the characters in Notorious but at no point did I particularly care for them. Unusually for me, I was neither moved nor scared.

Yet I was never bored either. Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) is a dashing playboy, something of a libertine, who meets demurely dressed and timid Lady Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) on a train. He's got a third class ticket and she's got a first class one. His first attempt to woo her fails but when she overhears her parents, General McLaidlaw (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and Mrs Martha McLaidlaw (Dame May Whitty), discussing their belief she'll never marry she instantly kisses Johnnie.

Despite Jonnie's wooing, with eighty years worth of hindsight and progress, looking a bit creepy (he's a serial invader of personal space, he's big on 'negging', and he refers to her as 'monkey face') Lina sucks it all up and they fall in love alarmingly quickly. Soon, they're married and after an extravagant honeymoon he surprises her by moving them into a lavish, and large, home in Sussex. They even have a maid, Ethel (Heather Angel).

But Lina soon discovers that Johnnie has no job and no money. So how does he afford this lifestyle and is he just after her family's money, her inheritance? Even when Johnnie does find work, with his cousin Captain Melbeck (Leo G. Carroll) it doesn't last long. He continues to gamble, he continues to lie to Lina, and he continues to build up debt.

 

This leopard, it seems, is not changing its spots. But it doesn't end there. When Johnnie's old friend Beaky (Nigel Bruce) comes to stay with the couple a plan is hatched for a property development scheme but this, of course, does not go smoothly either. The suspicions that Lina have about Johnnie will go far beyond gambling and debt but, at the same time, she can't stop loving him.

She asks herself, and we ask ourselves, how far will he go? With Franz Waxman's orchestral score sometimes intruding on, and sometimes illustrating, the action we're thrown from a world of old fashioned train compartments, hunt balls, village churches, Newbury races, hats, and people using the word 'topper' to describe a virtuous person to one not nearly so comfortable.

Beaky provides rare comic relief as he continually refers to Johnnie as "old bean", pulls faces, and, somewhat bizarrely, impersonates frogs. Beaky is very much the wingman of the outfit. Grant plays Johnnie with not atypical insouciant charm but still underpinned by a dark uncertainty which Lina can't quite figure out. Is Lina being gaslit? It's not quite as simple as that and you'll just have to watch Suspicion to find out. And then lots of even better Hitchcock films.