Suspicion

Suspicion is a fantastic study in what happens when too much suspense is built, and too little is paid off in return. The movie is steeped in the gender politics of the time, so if you go in expecting anything else, you’ll be disappointed. Joan Fontaine plays Lina, a lady of high society who has shown no inclination towards getting married, much to the dismay of her parents. She meets a playboy in Johnnie (Cary Grant), and upon hearing of her parents’ sadness at her approaching spinster status, Lina and Johnny get eloped. The movie spends a significant time building the relationship pre- and post-marriage, and showing the differences between the two; before, it’s all whirlwind and heady romance. Post, and the realities crash in … especially how Johnnie is a jobless, penniless, gambling-addicted, pathological liar. Lina makes excuses for it, largely because she can’t bear the idea of this shotgun romance falling apart and going back to being (gasp!) single. It’s on this — Lina trying to make excuses for Johnnie’s lies and quell her own growing suspicions about his motives — that the movie is built, and it is certainly well acted. I don’t know that Fontaine necessarily deserved the Oscar for it (the only acting Oscar a Hitchcock movie ever won, which is a baffling idea), but she does sell the hell out of her growing paranoia and being torn between it, dedication as a wife, doubt, and fear of returning to high society as a divorcee. Grant, meanwhile, gets to use his natural charisma and charm to play something of a jerk; he lies, and then lies to get out of the lies. He negs Fontaine, and it works. He is willing to do whatever it takes to get what he wants, which is why Lina’s suspicions have validity. The movie’s fault, however, is how much time it spends building all this. 60 of the 99 minutes of runtime is build-up before Lina wonders if Johnnie is capable of murder, and even then, it’s only in passing as the movie teases it out even more until there’s only minutes left. There’s a slow build, and then there’s this, a drip-feed at half-speed. I get they didn’t want to go full-on sociopath with a matinee idol like Grant, but the way Suspicion plays out is just too slow to maintain momentum. By the time everything comes together in an ending that feels exactly like the rumors say — the studio got cold feet with the much darker ending — it feels less like a dramatic payoff and more like a slowly leaking balloon finally falling to the ground. In the end, Suspicion wants to build up a head of steam, but struggles to maintain a brisk jog, and just kind of falls at the end, leaving the viewer feeling unfulfilled in more than one way.