The Unsuspected

I was sold on The Unsuspected by its teaser line on HBO Max, about a true crime radio show host committing the perfect murder and then having to talk about it on the air. I was under the impression he was being backed into a corner and would have to not give himself away. Perhaps an escalating need to commit more murders to keep the perfect murder safe, resulting in those murders getting put on the air too. What I did not expect was for the murder to book-end an hour of a campy family soap opera with the following sub-plots: The supposed death-by-shipwreck of Matilda, Victor Grandison's (the radio host) ward, despite Matilda being the rich one The supposed pre-shipwreck marriage of Matilda to complete stranger Steven Howard Victor's niece, Althea, marrying Oliver days before Matilda was set to Althea's jealousy and resentment of Matilda Oliver still pining for Althea but become an alcoholic, and Althea hating Oliver Althea openly flirting with Steven to steal him away from Matilda No joke, these inter-family squabbles take up 95% of the first hour. The murder opens the movie and then is barely mentioned again for sixty minutes, until the movie suddenly remembers what it was supposed to be and starts pulling these disparate strings together, like someone realizing they forgot milk as they're standing in the check-out line. All of these elements can be entertaining, especially anytime Audrey Totter (Althea) is on screen. Nobody told her she was in a murder noir thriller; she is doing a Joan Crawford or Bette Davis impression, a catty, ruthless, vindictive hurricane of a human being with a tongue as sharp as an executioner's axe. And Claude Rains does what Claude Rains does, playing that silky, smarmy villain that is so full of himself, he can't conceive that he made a mistake in his master plan. And the direction is full of noir hallmarks, with crooked angles, that familiar noir lighting, shady hoods, and everybody, including the protagonists, have something to hide. But it's also a confusing movie, with way too many plot threads going on at once, the murder being secondary for more than half the run time (and the motive for the murder never being quite spelled out), and the plot requiring more contrivances than a lawn has blades of grass. The Unsuspected did not need to be as over-stuffed as it is, and despite the delightful performances from Totter and Rains, it always feels like it's on the brink of collapsing. I wish I could've seen the movie the teaser line promised, instead of a weird family drama hastily retro-fitted into the middle of a murder story.