Suspicion
Short description
Suspicion follows Lina McLaidlaw, a shy, wealthy young woman in England who meets the charming Johnnie Aysgarth on a train, where he is travelling in first class on a third-class ticket. Despite her parents' opposition, she marries him, only to find after their honeymoon that he is a compulsive gambler with no income and heavy debts. When Johnnie's friend and business partner Beaky Thwaite dies under mysterious circumstances, Lina begins to wonder whether her husband's affection is genuine or whether she may be his next victim.
Alfred Hitchcock directed the film, the fifteenth of the forty-three features he made in chronological order, following Foreign Correspondent and preceding Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Samson Raphaelson, Alma Reville and Joan Harrison wrote the screenplay, and Harry E. Edington produced it for RKO Radio Pictures. Cary Grant plays Johnnie opposite Joan Fontaine as Lina, with Cedric Hardwicke and May Whitty as her parents, Nigel Bruce as Beaky and Isabel Jeans as Mrs. Newsham. Thirty-nine performers receive credit.
The film cost about two million dollars and returned roughly five million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.2 out of 10 from 46,000 votes, while TMDB users give it 7.1 from a much smaller base of 921. A critics' rating of 7.7 from 34 reviews places it slightly above both audience scores, indicating steadier approval among reviewers than among the wider public.
What's left behind the scenes
- Hitchcock's original idea was that Johnny was guilty, but the studio insisted that the audience wouldn't accept Cary Grant in the role of a murderer. In the original ending, Johnny kills Lynn by poisoning her milk, but gives himself away by sending a letter she had written.
- The film features a famous scene where the main character climbs the stairs in the dark carrying a glass of milk for his wife, and in complete darkness, the glass literally glows, drawing the viewers’ attention. Hitchcock achieved this effect by placing a light source inside the glass.
- Subsequently, director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) recounted in numerous interviews that a high-ranking employee of "RKO Pictures" ordered the removal of all scenes from the film in which the character Cary Grant (1904-1986) appeared menacing. Once all such scenes were cut, it turned out that the film's duration was reduced to 55 minutes. They had to be restored to the film, because, according to Hitchcock himself, he shot all parts of the film in such a way that it could only be normally assembled in one way. This shooting technique was called "in-camera editing" (instead of editing the footage sequentially after shooting, the director or cinematographer shoots sequences in strict order), and Hitchcock used it while working on the thriller "Rebecca" (1940) to prevent producer David O. Selznick (1902-1965) from interfering with the film's editing process.
- Joan Fontaine (1917-2013) was so captivated by Lina from the 1932 novel by Anthony Berkeley (1893-1971), writing under the pseudonym Francis Iles, that after reading the novel she wrote to Hitchcock stating she was willing to play the role even without a fee if he ever decided to adapt it for the screen.
- Hitchcock can be seen mid-film – he is throwing a letter into a rural mailbox.
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