A Note on SUSPICION (1941)

I'm continuing my big Cary Grant rewatch, and tonight I caught up with SUSPICION. Something occurred to me as I watched it that I wanted to make note of.

Before I get to that, it's important to say that one of the reasons that Grant has come to pretty much embody the idea of Movie Star for a lot of people is that he managed to play a range of roles while always staying Cary Grant.

For instance: look at him in THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937), HOLIDAY (1938), and BRINGING UP BABY (1938). Three romantic comedies released within the space of two years, and yet Grant is playing very different characters--a blithe ladies man in the first, a guileless idealist in the second, and a befuddled professor in the third--and yet two things are true. 1) He plays each role differently, and 2) Each performance fits within the persona we understand to be "Cary Grant." He could play many different variations on that persona.

Which brings us back to SUSPICION. This film is famous for being a 'nearly great' movie that was sabotaged when the studio made Hitchcock change the ending. The film concerns a shy young woman (played by everyone's shy young woman Joan Fontaine) who meets and marries a handsome rake, played, of course, by Cary Grant. As the film progresses, Fontaine and the audience start to suspect that Grant is more than just irresponsible and loose with money. We start to worry that he might be dangerous. We start to worry that he might even want to murder his wife. 1941 Spoiler Alert: in the original conception of the film, Grant was indeed the killer, and Hitchcock devised a wickedly smart finale in which the lovesick Fontaine lets Grant murder her but tricks him into mailing a letter to the police in which she fingers him for the killing. (You can see this idea being set up in the movie's opening moments when there is much ado about Grant borrowing some stamps from Fontaine.) In the revised ending, however, Grant turns out NOT to be the dangerous man that the rest of the film has painstakiningly prepared us for him to be. 

Opinions differ as to how much the new ending was the result of studio interference and how much was Hitchcock. Either way, Hitch would openly lament the revised ending, and just about everyone who sees the movie agrees. Grant should have been the bad guy. My feeling is that if Hitchcock had gone ahead and kept the original ending (it was never filmed), SUSPICION would certainly rank as one of Cary Grant's finest performances, and might even be considered his pinnacle. 

He's charming but cold, smooth but scary. He's a villain, but he's still somehow Cary Grant. What's interesting is that the ending was rewritten because, the thinking went, "Cary Grant can't be the bad guy." In other words, Cary Grant can be dashing, heroic, comic, goofy, innocent, or sophisticated, but he can't be evil. The great loss of SUSPICION is that the movie itself shows the opposite. His performance here is sheer Cary Grant. You see what she sees in him. Of course you can. After all, he's Cary Grant. And yet as the film goes on, you start to dread him, first because he's such a liar and a sneak, and then as the film progresses, because he seems like he's hiding even darker secrets.

In the fifties, stars like Wayne, Bogart, Stewart, and Cooper all played darker variations on their basic screen personas. Grant really didn't. And, tellingly, he was a marquee romantic leading man longer than anyone else. People just seemed to want him to keep being Cary Grant. So he did. It was good business and a legendary career.

But SUSPICION shows that, if he'd wanted, he could have played a much darker variation on that same persona. This a flawed film, but it contains fascinating hints of what might have been.