| Chris Polley |
Suspicion plays on glorious 35mm at the Heights Theater on March 27th as part of our collaboration on the 2025 Hitchcock Film Festival. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” Joseph Heller famously wrote in his 1961 wartime satire Catch-22. Taking place during World War II and reveling in the titular paradoxes inherent in the very concepts of warfare and military service (e.g. the necessity of a sound, rational mind to survive blatantly irrational and chaotic circumstances), the novel took the thin line between patriotism and nationalism to task, waking up multiple generations of passive middle class readers, especially angsty adolescents who were maybe looking for something a bit more globally minded than Salinger or Kerouac. Similarly, if there were ever a singular filmmaker with cross-generational appeal to rightfully claim responsibility for the provocation of the masses (perhaps even in their most formative years), it would certainly be Alfred Hitchcock.
Arguably no other director has so mastered the medium in terms of both pure entertainment value and an uncanny ability to inspect the dark heart of humanity with such verve and precision. From the dissection of madness and obsession in Vertigo or Rear Window to the blurring of man’s moralistic tendencies in Strangers on a Train or Rope, ‘Hitch’ was a master of? suspense, for sure, but he was also a master of mining both empathy and misanthropy, often suggesting that being human ultimately meant that the two were inextricably linked. The one area in which many find fault in his oeuvre, however, is his poor treatment of women—both on and off the screen. Whether it’s rote depictions of victimization in Frenzy or reports of on-set abuse during the filming of The Birds (“It was brutal and ugly and relentless,” Tippi Hedren said of the infamous shoot, which featured hundreds of agitated live birds despite Hitchcock assuring his star that no live animals would be used1), the astute storyteller was hardly revolutionary when it came to gender politics.
A few entries in Hitchcock’s filmography suggest otherwise, though, even if completely by accident. Suspicion in particular manages to craft the director’s most fascinating female lead in Lina McLaidlaw (played impeccably by Joan Fontaine), who is both a frightening embodiment and possibly accidental subversion of the “paranoid” or “hysterical” woman trope. Fontaine’s Oscar-winning performance (the only one from a Hitchcock film) manages to surpass the auteur’s stronghold (“He had a tremendous kind of paternal interest in me. He began, I think, to feel that he was a star maker,” she said in an interview with the BBC in 19782) on soon-to-be-antiquated ideas of femininity, effortlessly surpassing the limitations of stereotypes in fiction—even fiction made by men. Released just a year shy of the birth of Rosie the Riveter and on the eve of foreign invasion, global allyships, and nuclear warfare, Suspicion does much to assure that a healthy skepticism of charming men is not only real but also justified.
Adapted from the book Before the Fact by Anthony Berkeley Cox (under the pen name Francis Iles), Hitchcock’s second venture with Fontaine after Rebecca (1940) finds the twosome once again exploring the nature of patriarchal marriage, especially when the groom has potentially nefarious and ulterior motives. The bookish Lina meets the carefree Johnnie Aysgarth; the pair fall head over heels for each other, but tell-tale signs of deceit, financial mishandlings, and secretive behavior start to spark fear and doubt in Lina. Of course, while Laurence Olivier had cemented himself as a versatile thespian and could play ambiguously deranged with aplomb in Rebecca, Cary Grant proved difficult to sell to RKO Studios as a cold-blooded manipulator (and alleged murderer) in Suspicion just a year later. One of the most bankable male stars of the era, the magnetic Grant had managed to become typecast as a wise-cracking but ultimately harmless and even noble protagonist in Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and countless other films. “They had gone through the film in my absence and taken out every scene that indicated the possibility that Cary Grant was a murderer,” Hitchcock said in 1969 in reference to a studio cut of Suspicion that essentially forced the persnickety artist to reimagine the film’s narrative and construct a brand new cut of his own, with an ending pieced together out of unused footage.3
RKO seemingly had no issue with portraying another leading woman as distrustful or emotionally troubled, though—naturally, considering the male-dominated industry (things have changed, right?). Despite his later transgressions, and possibly out of that insidious paternal instinct, Hitchcock knew that he needed to thread the needle to do right by both the story and Fontaine. So, the director came upon some reels of a cut scene featuring a reckless coastal drive along jagged cliffs and therein found his silver bullet. “In the last shot, as romantic music rises on the soundtrack, we see the reunited couple in the car from a rear-fender vantage point, Johnnie circling his arm around Lina in a manner which could be interpreted as either a warm embrace or a death grip,” film historian Michael Pressler writes. “Finally evasive, shunning resolution, the ending of Suspicion exists on a level of abstraction. In short, we—unlike Lina, apparently—are left at the end of the movie in a state of unresolved suspicion.”4 This was subtle enough to fool the execs (and, as an unfortunate side effect, much of its audience both past and present) into thinking Lina’s misgivings about her erratic, lying husband were all unfounded, and another Hitchcock classic made its way into the world.
Never one to shy away from talking bad about studio interference in the press, Hitchcock spoke with similarly temperamental vanguard as? to? François Truffaut about the ending originally planned. “The scene I wanted, but it was never shot, was for [Johnnie] to bring [Lina] a glass of milk that’s been poisoned, and she has just finished a letter to her mother,” Hitchcock says. In the letter, Lina reveals all of Johnnie’s crimes, seals it, and hands it to Johnnie before killing herself by drinking the milk. “Fade out and fade in on one shot,” Hitchcock continues. “[Johnnie], whistling cheerfully, walks over to the mailbox and pops the letter in.”5 This was sure to make it clear to the viewer that Johnnie was indeed evil, but it would have also turned Lina into a willing victim of her mastermind husband, thus sacrificing a significant portion of her feminist agency as a character.
And yet, in the true spirit of Hitchcock, all of this conjecture and after-the-fact stated intentions are likely just another example of his long-documented obsession with fiction and control. Film scholar Donald Spoto writes of this back-and-forth about the film’s various endings, and thus determinations of the lead characters in his Hitchcock biography, “In truth, notes made during the production show that the director always intended to spotlight the wife’s paranoia.”6 Occam’s razor suggests the simplest explanation is the most probable: all the men involved in the film’s final construction are complicit in its semi-tarnished reputation as a second-class entry in the Hitchcock filmography. Only Fontaine’s performance as Lina remains standing as the beacon of truth: after all, she got the Oscar that her director never did.
Footnotes
1 Edward White. “The Dark Side of an Auteur: On Alfred Hitchcock’s Treatment of Women.” Literary Hub. 26 April 2021.
2 Selena Simmons-Duffin. “Oscar And Academy Award-Winning Actress Joan Fontaine Dead At 96.” NPR. 16 December 2013.
3 Boris Mijatović. “‘Suspicion’: Proof that a True Artist Can Create Great Things Even Under the Crippling Harness of a Profit-Driven Studio.” Cinephilia & Beyond. 11 January 2016.
4 Michael Pressler. “Hitchcock’s Suspicion: reading between the lines.” Studies in the Humanities 31, no. 1 (2004): 99+.
5 Miyako Pleines. “The Original Suspicion Ending Alfred Hitchcock Wanted Us To See.” SlashFilm. 18 November 2021.
6 Spoto, Donald. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. Little, Brown. 1983.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon
I’m not sure it’s “paradoxical” feminism, more like “accidental” or “after everything else.” Hitch wanted her to drink the poisoned milk, to swallow Grant’s act, but send a passive shot in the passing. This is the barest agency. I agree that Fontaine’s performance is what stands out. The tug of war with the studio is unfortunate and did weaken the film. Why was there never an option that she put on her glasses and leave him wallowing in the mess he’d made?