Day 83: Suspicion (1941)

Continuing on with my watching of Hitchcock's films. This one is the only time an actor won an Academy Award in a Hitchcock film - Joan Fontaine won for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The film itself was nominated for Best Picture, but lost to How Green Was My Valley. Considering that both Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon were nominated as well, I can't see Suspicion ever having a chance.

A shy young woman, Lina (Fontaine), marries a charming gentleman, Johnnie (Cary Grant), but once married she discovers that he is broke, has a gambling problem, and is unable to keep a job. She then starts to suspect that he is trying to kill her.

Spoiler Alert: I'm going to discuss the ending.

In the end, it turns out that Johnnie has no intention of killing Lina, but rather was intending to kill himself so she could be free of his debt and gain his life insurance. Yet, Hitchcock wanted him to actually be guilty, and in the original cut he succeeds in killing Lina. Apparently the studio and test audiences could not accept Grant as a murdered, so the ending was changed. It's a shame that Hitchcock lost his creative control, and the film's ending, in my opinion, feels fake. On a similar note, apparently the studio asked Hitchcock to remove all scenes in which Grant looked menacing. This "edited" version ran 55 minutes, and so the studio had to let Hitchcock put them back in. This was classic Hitchcock, in that he shot things so they could only be edited one way so that his vision wouldn't be lost in the editing room.

This wonderfully produced, directed, acted and written suspense thriller turns out to be nothing more than a neurotic aristocrat who assumes the worst about her husband despite not doing any wrong, and that convincing herself (and us) that he's killed before and now is about to kill her is all just her imagination? The ending is such a slap in the face to the audience, along the lines of "How could you be so silly for believing this?" The original ending would have made this a significantly better film.