DURING THE CLOSING SESSION OF the 1996 Baylor University conference on “The Late Alfred Hitchcock,” six panelists were invited to name Hitchcock’s greatest film. After the first panelist demurred on the grounds that it was impossible to select a single preeminent film from such a distinguished career, the other five, one at a time, all named a single film: Vertigo. Yet the choice, which seemed so obvious to the panelists, was met with polite bewilderment by the generally much younger audience, some of whom echoed the film’s original reviewers in pronouncing it slow moving, humorless, and not particularly mysterious or suspenseful. Their reaction made me wonder if Vertigo, even if it is Hitchcock’s greatest film, is in important ways atypical of his work because it largely eschews his trademark wit and the exhilarating changes in tone that had characterized his films since The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). And that reflection led to a further question: What is Hitchcock’s most typical film—not necessarily his most profound or accomplished or perfectly achieved, but his most Hitchcockian?
There are many candidates for this honor. Apart from Vertigo, the most obvious of them are Psycho and The Birds, the two films most likely to have been seen and remembered by viewers for whom they have come to define Hitchcock. Yet both these films, which cross the line from the suspense genre that was the director’s stock in trade to the horror genre that he largely shaped without ever fully inhabiting, are metonyms rather than synecdoches for Hitchcock’s work. In introducing his study of the Hitchcock romance, Lesley Brill has observed more generally the danger of “allow[ing] certain especially interesting but somewhat atypical films to distort our understanding of the larger shape of his work” (xiii). Films lodged more plausibly in the heart of Hitchcock’s oeuvre rather than at its fringes include Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, The 39 Steps, Blackmail, and The Lodger. Susan Smith, who uses Sabotage “to establish the overall nature of the relationship between film-maker, text and audience in Hitchcock’s cinema,” titles her chapter on the film “A Cinema Based on Sabotage” (xi, 1).
Without meaning to dislodge any of these nominees, I’d like in this essay to suggest another, perhaps more surprising, candidate: Suspicion. Although it marked the first of Hitchcock’s four collaborations with Cary Grant and the only time a lead performer in any of his films received an Academy Award, Suspicion has been widely accounted a compromise or a failure. Patrick McGilligan reports that “[e]veryone in Hollywood, including Fontaine, suspected that her Oscar was really for Rebecca” (290). And the film as a whole, with its disconcerting shifts of tone between high romance, farcical byplay, and paranoid terror, is largely accounted, along with The Birds and Marnie, as Hitchcock’s most problem-ridden.
All this is true. Suspicion is certainly marked by the collision between the ending of the novel the film was adapting, Francis Iles’s Before the Fact (1932), and the refusal to cast Cary Grant as a killer. In all likelihood, Fontaine’s Academy Award as Best Actress probably was a belated honor of her work in Rebecca, which her performance in Suspicion largely recapitulates, as even Fontaine acknowledged in a letter to Hitchcock, offering to play the role without salary: “I’m convinced it will be another ‘Rebecca’ ” (Leff 93). And the film, with its multiple screenplay drafts and multiple endings, is among Hitchcock’s most problematic. Without arguing for the film’s greatness, however, I’d like to suggest that the problems it ran into in production, like the problems it raises for latter-day critics, are quintessentially Hitchcockian. These problems arise from the taboo nature of its subject matter, a young wife’s gradually dawning awareness that her charmingly impecunious husband is a cheat, a thief, and a murderer who has decided to get the money he needs to extricate himself from his latest scrape by killing her; from the dissonance between the way the characters were written, at least in the novel under adaptation, and the way they were cast; and from the director’s struggle to make the film he wanted to make. All are utterly typical of Hitchcock’s films, at least before he set up as an independent producer-director with Rope, and all help explain his determination to remain a quasi-independent after the collapse of Transatlantic Pictures sent him into a series of production deals with Warner Bros., Paramount, MGM, and Universal. My exploration of these problems is intended not to rehabilitate Suspicion but to clarify what sort of film it is and what it is (and especially what it isn’t) attempting to do. Appreciating its typicality will ultimately provide a better understanding of Hitchcock’s work as a whole, and incidentally cast new light on the peculiar nature of Hitchcock’s standing as a moralist.
It is hardly surprising that “Hitchcock had mentioned Iles admiringly to interviewers” even before his arrival in America, “and said he’d like to film one of his books—they would make precisely ‘his type of film’ ” (McGilligan 267). Before the Fact’s ironic portrayal of a woman married to a thief and killer is especially suited to the public persona Hitchcock would display most memorably in his appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Iles, the pseudonym under which detective-story writer Anthony Berkeley had already published Malice Aforethought (1931), strikes this tone in his famous opening paragraph: “Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband for nearly eight years before she realized that she was married to a murderer” (Cerf 3).
Iles begins by showing Lina McLaidlaw, the clever but unpretty daughter of General McLaidlaw, meeting Johnnie Aysgarth, the impecunious and vaguely disreputable fourth son of an impoverished aristocrat, and falling instantly for his boyish directness and cheek. Although Iles presents their courtship from Lina’s point of view, his presentation of that point of view oscillates between intimacy and irony, as several stylistic devices reveal. He frequently summarizes Lina’s mental reactions in twitchy one-sentence paragraphs disconcertingly at odds with the situations that provoke them, from “But she was interested” to “Everything Johnnie did was right” (4, 18). He uses the word “actually” twice (13, 17) to imply Lina’s naïve surprise at Johnnie’s pursuit of her. And he emphasizes from the beginning her back-and-forth ambivalence toward her unlikely suitor’s physical advances: “Never had Lina dreamed that kisses could be so convincing. Johnnie kissed her till her jaw ached quite painfully. She was enraptured” (18). By the end of the first chapter, the couple has been married over the objections of “a resigned but still indignant General McLaidlaw” (20).
Lina gradually realizes that the scapegrace she has married is far worse than even her censorious father had indicated. Following a showdown in which Lina taxes Johnnie with having seduced her best friend and he responds by spitefully enumerating half a dozen other affairs and announcing that he married her only for her money—“I never cared two straws about you. After all, I do like my women to be pretty” (99)—he stalks out of their home, and Lina, on the advice of her sister Joyce, gathers evidence that will allow her to divorce Johnnie and takes a lover, the artist Ronald Kirby, with whom her affair, fueled by her neurotic uncertainty about her desirability, is quite as tempestuous as Johnnie’s courtship of her. The affair ends abruptly with the return of Johnnie, who “swear[s] I’ll be different if you’ll come back to me” (142), as of course she does.
The discovery that Johnnie encouraged General McLaidlaw to drink too much at a Christmas dinner, urged him to exert himself fatally in attempting “the three-chair trick” (153), and left Lina providentially an heiress sends her back to Ronald, but his confession that she kept him at arm’s length for so long that he became engaged to another woman forces her to return to Johnnie. She soon allows Johnnie’s crime to be eclipsed in her mind by the land-development scheme in which he is joined by his old friend Beaky Thwaite. Gradually becoming certain that Johnnie plans to murder Beaky in order to steal £15,000 from him, Lina realizes that “only she could stop it” (180), but she is prevented from doing anything by Johnnie’s unruffled behavior, by her reluctance to trust perceptions that can only bring her further grief, and eventually by Johnnie’s role in saving Beaky from driving his car over a cliff. When Beaky dies shortly afterward during a trip to France after an unknown companion encourages him to down a full beaker of brandy, Lina, seeing herself as Johnny’s pusillanimous accomplice in arranging a death that recalls her father’s, accepts the similar circumstances this time as proof of his guilt but realizes that “[h]er panic was lest Johnnie be caught” (189).
Realizing that Johnnie has pressed her to insure her life so that he can more profitably kill her, she neither turns him over to the authorities nor confronts him with her suspicions:
Lina was not frightened any longer. After the first shock she had seen how extremely simple the solution was. She had only to buy back her life from Johnnie. She had only to tell him that she knew he was in financial trouble, forgive him once more, forgive him once more too for forging her name again, and settle his debts. That was all. And that, in time, was what she would do.
But somehow she never did it. …
For of course there was always the feeling that though Johnnie might possibly be going to try to cause her death tomorrow, it was out of the question that he should be doing so to-day. (218–19)
Certain that Johnnie will never kill her but will only “try to make her kill herself” (218), Lina is confident that she is too well-informed about his intentions to acquiesce in his plan. In the end, however, her mind, which has come to “alternate between hysteria and a strange calmness which surprised herself more than the hysterics did” (225), is changed by her extreme weariness in waiting for Johnnie to kill her and the realization that, at forty, she is going to have his baby. Determined to prevent Johnnie from reproducing himself but resolving against an illegal abortion or suicide, Lina turns all her attention to helping Johnnie cover his tracks. She leaves a suicide note to be opened in the event of her death. She frets that Johnnie will lose patience and kill her under suspicious circumstances. When he brings her a poisoned glass of milk-and-soda during a spell of influenza, she drinks it willingly, relieved that her death will be assumed to be a result of her illness and ready to accept her status as “accessory before the fact to her own murder” (231).
Appealing as this tale must have been to Hitchcock, he surely knew that any film adaptation of it would inevitably undergo substantial changes. The demands of the Hays Office would eliminate Lina’s affair with Ronald Kirby and the scene in which Johnnie boasted about his own conquests. The requirements of well-made melodrama would lengthen their tempestuous courtship, which is expanded from one-twelfth of the novel to one-quarter of the film, and exteriorize the conflicts their marriage engendered. In the screenplay Hitchcock filmed, for example, Lina sneaks out of her parents’ home, pretending to go to the post office, and elopes with Johnnie. The imperatives of Hollywood casting, which would prevent Lina from being played by an actress whose homeliness would justify the sobriquet “Letter-box McLaidlaw,” would make Johnnie’s interest in Lina less obviously mercenary. The eventual casting of Cary Grant as Johnnie and Joan Fontaine as Lina had a decisive impact on the film. Their mutual lack of cordiality gave their scenes an added tension. More fundamentally, as Hitchcock told François Truffaut, “Cary Grant could not be a murderer. … [T]he producers would surely have refused” (Truffaut 44). Most important, the ending would require special treatment.
Just how and why Suspicion came to have the ending that it did has been the focal point of the film’s many commentators. In the ending RKO released, based on a script credited to Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, and Alma Reville, Johnnie brings Lina a glass of milk lit from within to look unusually sinister. Instead of drinking it, however, she packs hurriedly the next morning and prepares to go home to her mother. After Johnnie protests angrily, he demands to drive her. As their car hurtles along the dangerous cliffside road, Lina, convinced that he is going to push her over, screams in panic and flings open the door, causing Johnnie to stop the car abruptly and seize her roughly. In the ensuing scene, he denies any intention of killing her and tells her that, threatened with prison for his debts, he had planned to commit suicide. Although she accepts responsibility for keeping him distant and vows that their marriage will change, he is still maintaining that they can never be happy because he is incapable of change when their voices are last heard. After they get into the car, however, a U-turn seen in a high-angle long shot suggests that they have reached an accord, and a second shot from behind shows his hand curling around her shoulder, before a third, a return to same camera setup as the first, shows the car returning to their home.
The path to this ending, a virtual whitewash of Johnnie that turns Lina from a damsel in distress to an over-imaginative paranoiac, was rocky. Bill Krohn summarizes no fewer than six endings Hitchcock and his collaborators scripted, often filmed, and sometimes previewed. In an early draft excerpted in Hitchcock’s Notebooks, Johnnie is vindicated of any intention of killing Lina and given a long monologue in which he recounts the sins of his youth and swears that he will stop gambling, cheating, and lying, even though a stage direction indicates that “we know that she cannot believe him” (Auiler 85). In a slightly later draft, Johnnie is allowed to purge his lesser sins by his heroic—and, it is hinted, ultimately self-sacrificial—duty as an RAF flier (Auiler 87–92). When Fontaine’s illness delayed the filming of the scene in which she visits him as a flier incognito after the Battle of Britain, the collaborators wrote a third ending in which Lina, although she suspects Johnnie of seeking her death, drinks the glass of milk he has left her, realizes she is not dying, and goes to him just in time to prevent him from drinking poison himself. Preview audiences booed a screening of the film that included this ending, and Hitchcock said, “I don’t blame them. They pronounced the girl stupid to willfully drink her possible destruction. With that I don’t agree. But I did agree that the necessary half-reel of explanation following the wife’s survival was deadly” (Twiggar 3). In response, Hitchcock devised a more comical fourth ending: Lina realizes that she has mistaken Johnnie’s intentions when the family dog drinks the milk without suffering any harm. She accepts Johnnie’s promise to reform, and he responds: “Do you know—I almost believe it myself” (Krohn 81).
Figure 2.1. Suspicion—glass of milk.
But this ending was scrapped when RKO tested still another version of the film in which incoming producer Sol Lesser had cut out any suggestion that Johnnie was a killer. Not surprisingly, this print, which chopped forty-four of the film’s ninety-nine minutes, also flopped with preview audiences, and Hitchcock and his collaborators prepared a sixth ending in which two scenes in which Lina suspects Johnnie of trying to kill her—the scene revolving around the glass of milk and the wild car ride along the cliffs—were transposed and partly reshot, leaving the film with the ending it has had ever since.
Nor were these the only endings the studio considered. As Krohn explains:
RKO was not at all averse to making an adaptation of Iles’s novel in which Johnnie would turn out to be a murderer: two screenplays were written before Hitchcock came to the studio in which John Aysgarth was a very bad character indeed. The fact that RKO considered casting Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, both of whom had played villains on stage, show that we have to weigh Hitchcock’s words carefully: the studio didn’t want Cary Grant to play a murderer. (71)
In the second of these two earlier screenplays, written by Nathanael West and Boris Ingster shortly before West’s death, Lady Ellen Aysgarth shoots her husband, Sir Anthony Aysgarth, dead with her father’s handgun when he offers her a poisoned drink, and the story unfolds as a series of flashbacks from her trial for murder. The story has a happy ending, but not for Tony, whose murderous attempt, despite his insouciant dying quip—“Lay you three to one—it’s a boy” (West 741)—utterly justifies his wife’s suspicion of him.
Hitchcock’s biographers offer sharply differing accounts of the history that led to the ending with which the film was released. John Russell Taylor, who describes Johnnie inaccurately as “a practiced wife-murderer,” quotes Hitchcock as telling Harry Edington, chief of production at RKO, that “he will follow the novel as to story, persons, locale and sets, excepting only that he would tell the story as through the eyes of the woman and have her husband be villainous in her imagination only” (176). According to this statement, it was Hitchcock’s idea to turn Iles’s story of a wife’s justified suspicion of her husband into a story of unjustified suspicion.
Donald Spoto contrasts this account with Hitchcock’s insistence in later interviews that he had initially wanted to film Iles’s ending but had been prevented from doing so. In the best-known of these interviews, Hitchcock described still another ending to Truffaut:
I’m not too pleased with the way Suspicion ends. I had something else in mind. The scene I wanted, but it was never shot, was for Cary Grant to bring her a glass of milk that’s been poisoned and Joan Fontaine has just finished a letter to her mother: “Dear Mother, I’m desperately in love with him, but I don’t want to live because he’s a killer. Though I’d rather die, I think society should be protected from him.” Then, Cary Grant comes in with the fatal glass and she says, “Will you mail this letter to Mother for me, dear?” She drinks the milk and dies. Fade out and fade in on one short shot: Cary Grant, whistling cheerfully, walks over to the mailbox and pops the letter in. (Truffaut 142)
Unlike Russell, who summarizes the ending and notes that it “never actually reached the script stage” (177), Spoto forthrightly asserts that “this idea did not occur to him at the time, for it cannot be found in the first treatment he submitted to RKO, and it is contradicted by memos in which he stated emphatically that he wanted to make a film about a woman’s fantasy life” (243–44).
Patrick McGilligan offers still another account of the ending’s genesis. He observes that “RKO had owned the rights to Iles’s novel since publication, but the studio had failed over the years to produce a script that satisfied the Hays Office” because “[s]uccessful murderers and willful suicides were taboo in Hollywood. But telling Hitchcock what he couldn’t do exerted a kind of aphrodisiac effect on his creativity” (278, 279). McGilligan explains the conflict between Hitchcock’s statement of intention to Edington and his later account to Truffaut by attributing to the director a deceptive strategy worthy of Johnnie Aysgarth:
Now he smoothly assured RKO that he would tell Before the Fact “through the eyes of the woman and have her husband be villainous in her imagination only” … even though this turned the very crux of the novel, the springboard which so appealed to him, on its head. … Hitchcock figured he could develop a working script, assuage the censors with petty concessions as the drafts progressed, and then slip Grant as a murderer past the authorities just before the closing bell. (279)
Presenting the evolution of the film as its succession of reformulated endings made Johnnie less and less culpable, McGilligan concludes: “As with The Lodger, another book about a serial killer, in the end Hitchcock was forced to surrender the very thing that had intrigued him most about Before the Fact” (289).
This welter of endings has offered a field day to commentators on the film. Even though Johnnie is no longer a killer—in the release print, he is exonerated of any attempt to kill Lina, and there is no suggestion in any of the screenplay’s surviving drafts that he has caused her father’s death—Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, in their pioneering study of film noir, classify Suspicion as “a murder film” because an abrupt and incongruous ending had simply been “tacked on to a rigorous crime story” (31). Robin Wood, by contrast, contends that the shot showing Lina, dressed in black and standing in front of a window “whose framework casts around her a shadow as of a huge web,” feels “the victim, the fly caught in the trap,” but is here revealed as “in reality the spider, fattening herself on her suspicions in the center of the web she has herself spun” (71–72). Stephen Heath, discussing the oddly gratuitous pair of moments in which Benson, one of the two police officers who comes to ask Lina about Beaky’s death, pauses on his way in and out to stare at an abstract painting in the front room that appears nowhere else in the film, notes “its effect as missing spectacle” that raises unanswerable questions about point of view, the law’s authority, and the film’s narrative economy and coherence (24). Ken Mogg has argued that even if he never filmed the ending he told Truffaut he would have preferred, Hitchcock planted the seeds of that ending in several earlier moments in the film he did make: “In the opening scene on the train, Johnnie ‘borrows’ a stamp from Lina; later, the camera repeatedly emphasises the pillar-box in the local village, and we even see Hitchcock himself posting a letter there” (79). These references might be seen as the film’s transformation of Letter-box McLaidlaw, the nickname Iles had given Lina.
Bill Krohn has made the most sustained attempt to reconcile the evidence that seems to support such contradictory accounts. Echoing Mark Crispin Miller’s assertion that “[t]he film’s weak ending … is actually a necessary index of the film’s extraordinary strength” (275), Krohn hails the film’s peculiar indeterminacy as a strength rather than a weakness. Reviewing the available evidence, he agrees with Mogg that the final ending of the film is necessarily ambiguous, since the only dramatically satisfying ending, one that did not merely confirm filmgoers’ suspicion that Johnnie was guilty, would be “an ending whose terrible ironies expose the ambivalence underlying the ambiguity” (109)—the ending showing that Lina cannot believe Johnnie’s confession, the ending in which he jokes about his own inability to believe it, or the ending in which he assures his own destruction by posting Lina’s accusatory letter. Krohn finds Lina’s ambivalence toward Johnnie echoed in Hitchcock’s equally radical ambivalence toward the story and its hero, which generates, “somewhere off to the side of the film … a shadow-Suspicion which Hitchcock seems to have been making with his left hand, whose traces remain … when Lina and Johnnie go driving off at the end” (108).
Despite the limited range of archival material available for the study of Suspicion, there is abundant circumstantial evidence to support this theory, from the remarkable variety of endings Hitchcock considered to his complaints when he was given only a month to edit the film, whose tone would have to be established by myriad choices among the alternate takes Krohn argues he must have been shooting (96–97). It seems clear that what originally attracted Hitchcock to the novel was not only its story and its gorgeously realized portrait of a criminal and ultimately lethal Peter Pan but its archly ironic tone. Iles’s decision to present Johnnie from Lina’s point of view, by turns breathlessly infatuated, monitory, indulgent, uncertain, and increasingly suspicious, virtually guaranteed that his presentation of Johnnie would be proof against any ending that sought to fix any single interpretation on the charming scoundrel.
Unwilling as I am to contest Krohn’s powerful reading of the film’s, and the filmmaker’s, ambivalence, I’d propose that the question of the film’s ending, which has exercised so many critics for so long, is in a fundamental sense a red herring. I do not mean that the problem of the ending is unimportant, because it does indeed illuminate the most characteristic problems of the film, but rather that trying to choose from the best ending from among the many candidates that were scripted or shot—or imagining a still better ending no one ever thought of, in the manner of Raymond Durgnat—overlooks the crucial point that the film is impossible to bring to a satisfactory conclusion. Iles’s novel, an ironic study that boldly and playfully satirizes Lina’s romantic fantasies from the beginning only to show her devotion to her impossible husband gradually deepening as she loses her ability to escape him, could end with her sadly but calmly awaiting her death at his hands. But Hitchcock’s less straightforwardly ironic film, which lodges itself somehow both inside and outside Lina’s consciousness and the generic frame of the women’s film, cannot possibly reach an ending that is logical and emotionally satisfying for viewers who demand both Lina’s happiness and Johnnie’s guilt.
Miller, going still further, turns the case against the film’s weak ending into a case for its power as an indictment of the uncritical immersion in its fictions to which the culture industry invites its consumers:
Hitchcock simply was unable to devise a strong conclusion, and so even with a looser schedule, and therefore more attention to technique, he still could not have redeemed this ending, whose weakness was determined, not by temporary pressures or the requirements of the studio, but by the very quality that makes Suspicion great and challenging—its reflective subjectivity. By locating Suspicion within his heroine’s mind, Hitchcock had written himself into a corner. He was unable to end the film convincingly because any such conclusion, answering every question and dispatching all unfinished business, demands a sudden pulling-back into the light of day, a reversion that, after our immersion in Lina’s dark and too-familiar consciousness, must leave us blinking. (274–75)
Miller argues for the necessary ambivalence of any conceivable ending Hitchcock might have used for a film that had already entangled viewers far more completely than Iles’s dry-eyed novel in its heroine’s yearning for romance with an impossible mate. As Rick Worland has observed, “a film version of Before the Fact that did not make clear Johnnie’s murderous intent and Lina’s complacent death would in essence be a different story, one that did not reconcile with the book’s title” (7). But here Worland, more explicitly but not more carelessly than other commentators, conflates two elements of Iles’s novel perhaps too easily: Johnnie’s murderous intent and Lina’s acceptance of her own death. As Worland points out, every ending of the film that was actually scripted and shot on Hitchcock’s watch shows “the couple reconciled” (7). The only two exceptions are the West/Ingster screenplay, in which Lina killed her husband, and Hitchcock’s unscripted postbox ending, which would have marked them both for death. But even the different reconciliations that were actually scripted present Johnnie in such different ways that they cast very different retrospective lights over Lina’s suspicions of her husband.
An even more revealing constant through all the endings except the one in which Lina knowingly drinks what she erroneously believes is poisoned milk is that in none of the others does Lina accept even momentarily the prospect of her own death. It is especially telling that, as Hitchcock told Truffaut, members of the preview audience for this ending pronounced Lina “stupid to willfully drink her possible destruction.” If the film had followed the novel more closely, of course, viewers would presumably have accepted Lina’s implication in her own murder as the ultimate expression of the self-sacrificing subordination of her own will to Johnnie’s that she had been showing through the whole film. But Hitchcock seems never to have seen the project primarily in terms of its heroine’s conscious acceptance of her death. Despite his well-publicized preference for Iles’s title over Suspicion, a title he told George Schaefer was “cheap and dull” (Auiler 95), Before the Fact would have been a puzzling and misleading title for virtually every proposed adaptation of the novel, from the West/Ingster screenplay to the final release print.
Whatever possibilities Hitchcock saw in Iles’s novel did not focus on the novel’s most original figure—not the murderous husband, a figure Iles had already explored to considerable acclaim in Malice Aforethought, but the wife driven to acquiesce in her own destruction by her infatuation, lassitude, and habit. Given the vicissitudes of the film’s ending, it is no wonder McGilligan has remarked that Hitchcock’s initial assurance to RKO that Lina’s suspicions that Johnnie had killed Beaky and planned to kill her were baseless “turned the very crux of the novel, the springboard which so appealed to him, on its head” (279). McGilligan is surely correct in identifying Lina’s acceptance of her death at Johnny’s hands as the crux of Iles’s novel. But since he offers no evidence that this crux constituted Hitchcock’s primary interest in the novel, it is quite possible that that interest lay elsewhere.
Analyzing Hitchcock’s adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger, another novel that revolves around a suspected killer who turns out to be innocent in the adaptation, Richard Allen observes:
Either Mrs. Bunting or Daisy may be deceiving themselves about the Lodger, but Hitchcock is not interested in exploring motivation. Depth in Hitchcock’s film is a matter or surface, as it were. Ambiguity resides not in the motivations of character but in visual narration, in the legibility of appearances. The pleasures of narrative suspense are not subservient to moral insight, as in Belloc Lowndes’s novel, but become an end in themselves. A deadly serious question—“Is the Lodger a psychotic killer?”—becomes for Hitchcock a source of entertainment, a macabre joke. … It is fun to think that the Lodger might be a psychotic killer. (52)
This description applies even more pointedly to Suspicion than to The Lodger. In both cases, the novel under adaptation defines its heroine through her ambivalent response to a murderer who lives in her household. In both cases, the heroine becomes convinced that the mysterious man in question is indeed a killer but covers up for him. Although the mystery man is the most intriguing character in either novel, the focus in both cases is on the moral development of the heroine through her increasingly maternal and self-sacrificing solicitude. This focus vanishes in both films, to be replaced by the far more problematic suspicion of what Ken Mogg aptly describes as “men who may, or may not, be murderers” (Krohn 109)—a suspicion that can be resolved only in the sort of anticlimactic finale Hitchcock provides for both films (someone besides the lodger is the Avenger, some never-identified Englishman must have been present at Beaky’s death), since any resolution will end the fun of suspecting without knowing.
The condition of suspecting without knowing—that is, of wondering—is characteristic of many more Hitchcock films. Just as Mrs. Bunting wonders whether her lodger really is the Avenger and Lina wonders whether Johnnie is a murderer who is planning to kill her, Iris Henderson and Gilbert wonder what has become of Miss Froy, the second Mrs. de Winter wonders what sort of person her predecessor was, Charlie Newton wonders why her Uncle Charlie is behaving so suspiciously, Dr. Constance Peterson wonders why Dr. Anthony Edwardes is acting so strangely, Charles Adare wonders why Lady Henrietta Flusky has descended into an alcoholic fog, Sam Marlowe wonders how Harry Warp came to meet his untimely end, Scottie Ferguson wonders what secret is accounting for Madeleine Elster’s trancelike behavior, Sarah Sherman wonders what has gotten into her fiancé Dr. Michael Armstrong, and virtually everyone in The Birds wonders why the birds are suddenly attacking people. Rear Window might be described as an epitome of wondering, as L.B. Jefferies laboriously assembles the evidence that will reveal not only whether Lars Thorwald murdered his wife but what all his neighbors are really like. In practically all these cases, of course, the film eventually provides an answer, sometimes within only a few minutes of posing the question. But those few minutes, like the moment in The Wrong Man when the clerk at the insurance office sees Manny Balestrero reach into his coat pocket to take out his policy and wonders whether he is the man who robbed the office, are pivotal.
In each of these films, the suspicions of the characters are ultimately subordinate to the suspicions of the audience, which they are designed specifically to arouse. Even when the characters are too benighted to suspect each other or wonder how to read the sinister portents that surround them, Hitchcock still plays on the audience’s suspicions. We wonder whom Hannay can trust in The 39 Steps, whether something will prevent the bomb from exploding in Sabotage, and then why it hasn’t exploded already. We wonder how Rowley will try to kill Huntley Haverstock in Foreign Correspondent and how long it will take Alexander Sebastian to notice that his wife has pinched his key to the wine cellar in Notorious. We wonder when Rupert Cadell will put together the clues to David Kentley’s disappearance in Rope. We wonder how long it will take Guy Haines to realize that Bruno Anthony really wants to kill his wife in Strangers on a Train, Margot Wendice to realize that her husband is setting her up to be killed in Dial M for Murder, and Richard Blaney to realize that Bob Rusk is using him as a patsy in Frenzy. We wonder whether Marnie is going to get away with her robbery of the Rutland safe and how many people will have to vanish from the Bates Motel before someone realizes that it is a dangerous place. Hitchcock’s well-known preference for suspense over surprise means that viewers of his films are often far more suspicious than his unwitting characters. In fact, the audience’s suspicions are primary; the characters’ suspicions are only a means toward the end of arousing and shaping them, and a means that can readily be dispensed with in films that favor dramatic irony over mystery.
When Allen says that it is fun to think that the Lodger might be a psychotic killer, he does not of course mean that it is fun for the other characters to think so. Daisy scarcely suspects the lodger until the film has nearly run its course; her suspicions are finally awakened only to be swiftly reassured; and her mother’s suspicions are anything but fun for her. Although characters like Bob Lawrence, Richard Hannay, and the characters in The Trouble with Harry and Family Plot may enjoy particular episodes in their adventures, it is only Hitchcock’s audience for whom suspicion is generally fun. The discrepancy between the audience’s pleasurable experience of the stories’ vicissitudes and the generally unalleviated anxiety of their apparent identification figures is a hallmark of Hitchcock’s work. His audience shares the characters’ anxiety, but the wit of the film’s auditory and visual exposition, the ways their anxiety is produced, makes it a pleasurable anxiety, a nightmare from which we never want to awaken. Although, as the intertitle that introduces The Lodger’s epilogue reminds us, “All stories must have an end,” Hitchcock’s films, however swiftly they hurtle to their endings, are not made for the sake of those endings. They are made for the sake of their middles, those deliciously extended second acts characterized by the fun of indulging in unresolved suspicions before they are inevitably resolved.
The single most important change Hitchcock’s film makes in adapting Before the Fact is not in disproving Lina’s suspicions of Johnnie, or even leaving them ambiguous. It is in transforming Iles’s resolutely end-oriented novel, whose direction is predicted in surprising detail by its opening paragraph, into a film that could have accommodated any of a number of endings, even though none of them would have resolved its problems completely. However frustrated or disappointed Hitchcock may have grown with the project, it made sense for him to persist in it through ending after ending because he was not making it for the sake of the ending but for the sake of the middle.
Thinking of Hitchcock as a director of middles shows why the Master of Suspense had so little interest in filming detective stories, in which all the clues lead to an ending that serves as the fulcrum of the story. It illuminates his well-known impatience with “the plausibles,” those inconvenient explanations that provided a rational basis for the shocks and suspicions that were his stock in trade. It helps explain why such a highly regarded film as Vertigo ends so abruptly and, even for many of the film’s most ardent admirers, so unsatisfyingly. And it indicates why films like The Birds, The Lodger, and Suspicion are so central to Hitchcock’s career: because they explore, more fully than any of his other films, the problems and consequences of awakening suspicions than can never be fully resolved. Suspicion especially casts Hitchcock as a director of entertaining possibilities rather than often climactic certainties and his world as one in which anything is possible and every telltale gesture is a potential clue.
Allen’s observation that depth in The Lodger is a matter of surface—“the pleasures of narrative suspense are not subservient to moral insight, as in Belloc Lowndes’s novel, but become an end in themselves”—opposes morality and entertainment in a way that is familiar to anyone conversant with the history of Hitchcock commentary. Even analysts who do not share Keats’s view that poetry is not so fine a thing as philosophy may well share Allen’s view that Hitchcock’s status as entertainer inevitably compromises his claims as moralist. Yet the opposite is the case. Hitchcock the moralist depends on Hitchcock the entertainer. It is precisely because he makes it fun to suspect characters like Johnnie Aysgarth that his films provide stellar examples of morally consequential experience. The reason Hitchcock commentators have been so ready to overlook this connection is that they have persistently looked in the wrong place for the moral experience the films provide.
Reviewing Suspicion’s production difficulties, Donald Spoto contends that because “[n]o one had any idea how the picture would end … no scene or line of dialogue had a sure purpose” as it was written or shot (245)—a summary that contrasts amusingly with Samson Raphaelson’s recollection that “[t]hat story broke more easily for me than anything I have ever written” (McGilligan 279). The assumption behind Spoto’s assessment is the Aristotelian belief, shared alike by the authors of Athenian tragedy and detective fiction, that because the meaning of each story resides in an ending that casts a retrospective and definitive light over the whole story, every detail of the story has its own meaning only in the light of that ending. Without knowing the ending, the filmmakers cannot know the meaning of any speech or shot that precedes it. Uncertain whether Johnnie would turn out to be innocent or guilty, Hitchcock literally did not know what he was doing in making the film.
Spoto’s argument has a corollary that becomes more explicit in Chapter 6 of Aristotle’s Poetics:
Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of action, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse. In a play accordingly they do not act in order to portray the Characters; they include the Characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the action in it, i.e. its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy; and the end is everywhere the chief thing. (1461)
Because actions, and life in general, are conceived in terms of their ends, it is only their ends that reveal their true moral import. The tragedies Aristotle considers often seem to be tending toward one moral conclusion, but this apparent conclusion is as untrustworthy as a Hitchcock character’s suspicions until a reversal or a recognition redirects them to their true meaning. The morality of these stories is incarnated in the experiences of their characters, whose actions, because they are purposive and freely chosen, provide an idealized image of life.
This analysis of fictional characters’ actions as images of moral decision and moral consequence has been so influential in Western aesthetics for the past twenty-five hundred years that it is hardly surprising to see it applied to Hitchcock as well, even by commentators like Raymond Durgnat, who complained a generation ago that “[o]ne critical trick with Hitchcock’s minor movies is to suggest that the suspense is created principally out of our moral criticisms of the hero (and of ourselves), and only secondarily out of our anxiety that the hero and his conformist morality should enjoy their happy and reassuring triumph over the villain and his villainy” (32). This unfair attempt to inflate the director’s reputation, Durgnat noted, treated him as a special case instead of acknowledging the ways their pleasures were simply the pleasures of mainstream commercial cinema:
[I]t’s doubtful whether Hitchcock’s movies provide reflections on the duplicity or opacity of human nature any more effectively than, say, Michael Anderson’s The Naked Edge, an efficient, perfectly unimportant thriller, in which Deborah Kerr, worried about her husband Gary Cooper, wonders, “Can you sleep with a man for seven years without realizing he’s a murderer?” The answer, obviously, is Yes, though the answer matters less than the sense of alienation which it induces. (32)
Despite his sharp disagreement with Robin Wood, who pronounces Hitchcock a moralist, Durgnat largely agrees with Wood that the moral significance of a fictional story is found in the behavior of its characters. In two qualifying phrases he casually drops, however, he indicates another possibility. “And of ourselves” and “the answer matter less than the sense of alienation which it induces” both redirect attention from the characters’ experience to the audience’s experience. This latter experience is the focus of Suspicion, and indeed of all Hitchcock’s films. When the director spoke, as he often did, of playing the audience like a piano or putting them through it, his language accurately reflected his paramount concern. Throughout his career, he is interested in the relations among his fictional characters only as a means of developing the primary relationship between his very real audience and himself. Lina Aysgarth’s shifting attitude toward her husband, morally fraught as it may be, is never as important as the audience’s attitude toward them both.
This attitude is not only more complex than that of the audience for The Naked Edge, whose anxieties are reducible to a simple did-he-or-didn’t-he coin toss, but considerably more complex than that of Lina herself because of the multiple and often contradictory interpretive frames we are invited to bring to the film. Despite Robin Wood’s ingenious suggestion that in the absence of a definitive ending, “the only way the film could possibly be shot was to deny all access to [Johnnie’s] consciousness, showing him exclusively through [Lina’s]” (230), the film presents Johnnie apart from Lina’s mediating consciousness any number of times. If its first sequence presented him from her point of view, the second sequence, in which Johnnie, surrounded by attendant women, refuses to smile for a photographer taking his picture at a local hunt until he suddenly glimpses Lina astride a horse, presents her, entirely unaware of his presence, from his point of view. Two brief but important scenes in the film—Johnnie’s rueful salute to the dead General McLaidlaw’s portrait (“You win, old boy”) after he has learned that the General’s will restricts Lina to a small annual income, and his ascent of the stairs with the sinister glass of milk—take place in Lina’s absence. The second may well be an echo of the moment in The Lodger when a shot of the lodger descending the stairs seems to visualize the landlady’s thoughts, but the first is clearly designed as an objective presentation of a moment to which Lina is not privy. In addition, many scenes between Lina and Johnnie emphasize facial reactions Lina does not see, like the troubled expression he makes over her shoulder in reaction to the announcement she makes from the shelter of a wing chair that the police have visited to ask about Beaky’s death. Despite its much greater intimacy with Lina than with Johnnie, the film does not lock viewers inside Lina’s consciousness; it places us both inside and outside.
In addition to knowing everything that Lina knows about her husband, the audience for Suspicion knows a great deal more. When we see a long shot of Johnnie pushing Beaky over the edge of a cliff superimposed on a closeup of Lina’s fingers forming the word “MURDER” from her Anagram tiles, we can readily identify the image as subjective without being consumed by it; that is, the means by which it is identifying as Lina’s imagining allows us both to identify with Lina and to detach ourselves from her. The costumes we see Lina wear not only express her sense of herself but identify her supposedly private emotions in terms of a long-standing code of Hollywood costuming, from the mannish suit she wears in the opening sequence to the artless off-the-shoulder dress she wears to the Hunt Ball to the severe pinstripe suit she dons for the final scene. The background music we hear not only telegraphs Lina’s rollercoaster emotional reactions but muddles the distinction between what Lina hears and what she only imagines, most memorably in the conclusion to the scene in which Johnnie, having playfully asked permission of the General’s portrait to marry his daughter, asks her, “Do you hear that music?” and the soundtrack obliges with a reprise of the couple’s signature tune, the Strauss waltz “Wiener Blut,” even though we cannot tell whether Lina is hearing it from the distant Hunt Ball, where it was played earlier in the evening, or merely imagining it, as she clearly imagined the interdiction of her father’s portrait.
The ambiguous valence of “Wiener Blut,” which many critics of the film have pointed out, is linked to a larger pattern that implicates the audience’s interpretation in Lina’s suspicions without making them congruent. Beginning with the first time she meets Johnnie on the train, Lina, who after the opening scene never wears glasses unless she has put them on expressly in order to read something she considers important in making sense of her present situation, typically interprets what she sees in terms of preexisting visual categories. Her initial indifference to her train companion changes to interest when she recognizes him from a photograph in a magazine she is reading. She takes the photo, which presents him as an eligible bachelor, as an index of his true nature. Later she will do the same thing with the General’s portrait, which she is certain is forbidding her to marry Johnnie; with the letter tiles that spell “MURDER,” which literally bring to life a photo of the proposed seaside development, to which she adds two tiny figures, one throwing the other off a cliff; with the newspaper story headlined “ENGLISHMAN FOUND DEAD,” which persuades her that Johnnie has murdered Beaky; and with the letter Johnnie has written about repaying his debts in which the words “some other way” are highlighted for the audience’s benefit. Hitchcock shows how images shape perceptions still further in two shots in which Lina’s point of view is subordinated to the audience’s: first when Johnnie suggests purchasing some cliffside land on which to build and Lina’s reaction shot is a still photograph in which the crashing waves are frozen in time, then later when mystery writer Isobel Sedbusk’s brother Bertram, the Home Office pathologist played by Gavin Gordon in impossibly thick eyeglasses, is first introduced by a photo on Isobel’s desk that shows exactly how geeky he is.
More generally still, we know at every moment of the film, as Lina cannot know, that we are watching a movie designed to entertain us, and a movie whose allegiances to the genres of romance and suspense license us to enjoy Lina’s agonized uncertainty about her husband in ways she never can. We know, as Lina never knows (although Joan Fontaine certainly does), that Johnnie is played by Cary Grant, best known as a peerless light comedian who has accepted the role in hopes of extending his range. We know that Lina is played by Joan Fontaine, who is largely reprising her role as the sorely used young wife in Rebecca, in hopes of stealing the picture from her better-known costar. And if we have read Iles’s novel, we know that Johnnie is a killer—know it so unshakably that many of us, like Borde and Chaumeton, will go right on knowing it no matter what the film tells us. Although Lina at no point offers herself as an accessory before the fact of her own murder, the audience is frequently in that position. True, we do not actively conspire to cover it up, as Iles’s Lina does but Hitchcock’s Lina generally does not. But we take a perverse pleasure in the revelation of Johnnie’s unquestioned perfidy (his irresponsibility about money, his guileless determination to live off his wife, his embezzlement from his cousin Captain Melbeck, his inveterate gambling) and allow ourselves the still more perverse pleasure of contemplating the possibility of still greater crimes (the velvety moment when he ascends the stairs with that glowing glass of milk). Our demand to be entertained whatever the price to the characters’ lives and happiness makes us accessories before the fact.
Our own assessment of both Johnnie and Lina therefore requires us to analyze a much wider range of clues than Lina ever considers as we shift among a number of contextual frames which are neither consistent nor logically parallel. From its opening shot, a black frame that makes many viewers wonder if something is wrong with the picture, we shift back and forth between interpreting the story of Johnnie and Lina as the history of a romance realistic enough to be compelling and our ineradicable knowledge that it is only a movie, and a romantic thriller, and a Hitchcock thriller, and a thriller starring Cary Grant. Our demand for entertainment assures us that Lina’s suspicions must come to something (else the heroine would be intolerably diminished) but that the film must provide a climactic reversal or surprise (else its structure would be insufficiently dramatic). We want to see Cary Grant expand his range at the same time we want the Cary Grant we know and love. Above all, we want every clue to both Johnnie’s guilt and innocence, Lina’s rational detective work and paranoia, to be explained in the end. It is only on that basis that we are prepared to enjoy her tribulations. Each of the film’s several endings, more or less satisfactorily, tells us that we cannot have all the things we want, not even from popular entertainment. In refusing to resolve the nature of Lina’s suspicions satisfactorily within its fictional frame, these endings all force us to refer back to other frames we are used to taking for granted, ultimately indicting the complicity of our demand for entertainment.
Even in Aristotelian tragedy, moral wisdom is primarily for the audience and only incidentally for the hero whose sufferings pay the price for that wisdom so that the audience can get it at a steep discount. In Suspicion, Hitchcock presents a story and a heroine so resistant to rational integration that viewers are encouraged to bypass them as a source of wisdom and fall back on the primary relationship between the storyteller and his audience. Tempting as it is to claim that this model of moral instruction is bold, novel, and postmodern, it is far older than the Aristotelian model it displaces. As Walter Benjamin noted, the modern storyteller “in his living immediacy is by no means a present force” (83) because he no longer commands a breadth and depth of experience more comprehensive than our own. Hitchcock, who is neither Sophocles nor Aesop, does not end his nightmares by tendering morals that are useful or authoritative. Instead, he offers through all his films—especially through Suspicion, the most Hitchcockian of them all—the more archaic wisdom of the storyteller: Suspicion may be fun, especially for an audience that has paid for the privilege of indulging it, but it always carries a price.
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