Suspicion (1941)

What the trade papers printed

Variety’s figure for the film’s box office in 1942 was $1.8 million, and a profit of $440,000 is also recorded. The Canadian Motion Picture Exhibitor’s notice of 15 Nov 1941 described a fortune hunter and his wife, with Cary Grant marrying Fontaine for her money and growing worse as the story goes along. The paper credited Hitchcock with “his usual thorough direction” and named Heather Angel, Whitty, Bruce and Hardwicke among the other players. Of the finish, it said only, “It ends with reasonable pleasantness.” Its verdict for exhibitors was “Good for the distaff clientelle.”

Canadian Film Weekly’s issue of 18 Mar 1942 reprinted a clipping sent in by Harrison of the Capitol in Cobourg. The clipping, from the Cobourg World, announced a Monday and Tuesday booking of Suspicion, cited Fontaine’s Academy Award and pronounced her “a clever actress.” The same paper’s issue of 7 Jan 1942 carried two items on the awards season. One reported the New York Critics Circle poll, in which Citizen Kane was the year’s best film and John Ford took the directing award for How Green Was My Valley. The other reported that the Committee on Exceptional Photoplays, which the paper describes as a section of “the Board,” had praised Fontaine’s performance, although the 10 films the item names as the Board’s choices for 1941 do not include Suspicion.

The reviews

A 2016 Los Angeles Times article recalled that many critics had rated the picture “a middling effort” for Hitchcock, with the ending a point of contention. The same article said admirers still rank it somewhere in the teens among his 50-plus films. The paper’s own reviewer in 1941, Philip K. Scheuer, had called the ending “abrupt” and held that this made it “effective.” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that Grant was “provokingly irresponsible” and “oddly mysterious,” which he considered right for the role.

Radio and television versions

In 1988 American Playhouse televised a remake with Anthony Andrews and Jane Curtin. The radio record is earlier, with six adaptations between 1942 and 1949. Screen Guild Theater’s broadcast of November 24, 1949, reunited Cary Grant, Fontaine and Bruce. CBS Radio’s Academy Award Theater aired a half-hour version on October 30, 1946, with Grant and Ann Todd, and Screen Guild Theater had Grant, Bruce and Loretta Young on January 21, 1946. Lux Radio Theatre’s remake of September 18, 1944, starred Olivia de Havilland, Fontaine’s sister, with William Powell and Charles W. Irwin. On Screen Guild Theater on January 4, 1943, Basil Rathbone stepped in at the last minute for an ill Brian Aherne, opposite Fontaine and Bruce. The initial adaptation was Lux’s one-hour version of May 4, 1942, which had Fontaine and Bruce, with Aherne, Fontaine’s husband, in Cary Grant’s part.

The parts and the Oscar

Fontaine’s first Best Actress nomination had come for Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), and that award went to Ginger Rogers for Kitty Foyle. After Suspicion, she was one of the biggest female stars in Hollywood, though typecast in melodrama. As she later put it, the studios seemed to want her to “cry the whole Atlantic.” For Grant, the role and the one in Notorious were darker and morally ambiguous, and they tested his screen persona. Geoff Andrew of Time Out read Suspicion as proof that Grant could be “simultaneously charming and sinister.”

The accounts of the 1942 ceremony conflict. Fontaine beat her sister, who was nominated for Hold Back the Dawn. Biographer Charles Higham writes that Fontaine pointedly spurned de Havilland’s congratulations as she went forward to collect the award, leaving de Havilland offended and embarrassed. Fontaine’s autobiography, No Bed of Roses (1978), says she was paralyzed with surprise, that de Havilland insisted she get up, and that “Olivia took the situation very graciously.” After Fontaine’s death, the statuette was to be sold at an animal rights auction, but the Academy threatened to sue because it had not been offered back for $1, and her estate kept it.

Later accounts of the production

The shoot ran from February 10 to July 24, 1941, and all of it took place on sound stages. The filmmakers put a lightbulb in the milk so that the glass would seem to glow on its way upstairs, and Hitchcock’s cameo comes about 47 minutes in, when he posts a letter at the village postbox. Fontaine, whom RKO had dropped from its contract list some years earlier, had to be borrowed from David O. Selznick at an expensive fee. Grant, in the later record, did not warm to her and found her temperamental and unprofessional. Later accounts of the casting say that Frances Dee and Laurence Olivier were to star once Hitchcock joined and the budget rose, and that the story had begun as a B picture for George Sanders and Anne Shirley.

Later accounts of the ending

Hitchcock’s memory of the ending he did not use, in the book-length interview with François Truffaut published in English in 1967, is that Lina’s letter told her mother she knew Johnnie was killing her and that her love for him outweighed it. The other recorded version differs in one respect. In it, Lina writes to her mother that she fears Johnnie will poison her, asks him to mail the letter, and drinks the milk, with a last shot of him posting the evidence against himself. Francis Iles’s 1932 novel Before the Fact, the inspiration for the story, finishes with Johnnie bringing his sick wife a drink she knows is poisoned, and she swallows it willingly. The film leaves open whether the glass of milk is poisoned, and the glass is seen untouched the following morning.

The published accounts disagree over who chose the finish. Donald Spoto, in his biography The Dark Side of Genius, disputes Hitchcock’s claim to have been overruled. Spoto says the first RKO treatment and the memos between director and studio show that Hitchcock firmly wanted a picture about a woman’s fantasy life. Hitchcock was himself quoted as saying he had been forced to change it, since the studio cared more about protecting Grant’s heroic image. He later called the ending “a complete mistake” that came of making the story with Grant, adding that without a cynical finish it was “too simple.” William L. De Andrea’s Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994) also says that RKO decreed a new ending because Grant was to be the killer and Fontaine the victim, and that Hitchcock supplied it and complained about it for the rest of his life.

The script RKO set aside

The Library of America’s edition of Nathanael West’s collected works prints an adaptation of the novel that RKO never produced. West, hired by RKO as a screenwriter in November 1939, wrote it with Boris Ingster in seven weeks, West handling characterization and dialogue and Ingster the narrative structure. It was abandoned when RKO assigned the book to Hitchcock, who already had a very different screenplay, credited to Alma Reville, Joan Harrison and Samson Raphaelson. Reville was Hitchcock’s wife and Harrison his personal assistant.