the stuttering enterprises

Film Suspicion is a close cousin of Rebecca. Both feature Joan Fontaine in a fast marriage with a distant figure whom she slowly discovers isn’t all he seems. Unlike the earlier film, she remains the lead through to the end, her spouse Cary Grant’s secrets her incessant psychological torturer. It’s a measure of Fontaine’s abilities as an actress that the trajectory of this character is almost the reverse of that in the earlier film, from a figure of confidence to human wreckage, displayed in the lines which slowly develop on her face and the shadows Hitch casts into her eyes.

This is as good a time as any to note that one of the problems I’m encountering with this particular endevour is that having discovered why Hitchcock is considered the master (after a shaky start), I’m also discovering why the older generation of film critics view newer films with such disdain and why they’re so rapturous when faced with something like There Will Be Blood and its attempts to smash through the orthodoxy of the Hollywood style. Hitch was doing that with every film ‘now’; it’s as though he understands the language of film, the expected tropes, then tosses them out with abandon because they don’t serve the story, which is something you can't always say of some of the stuttering enterprises of the time.

There was always a slight nervousness about the experiments in earlier film, in Blackmail with the prominence of the word knife on the soundtrack to show the psychological state of the murderess. Compare that to the milk scene in Suspicion; when Grant wishes his wife a good night it’s as if it's for the last time but the only evidence we have that this might be the case is the force of information information beforehand (mostly the way that Grant is shot) and the look in Fontaine’s eye. There’s nothing in Grant’s voice, he’s charming, yet we’re convinced that a slug of dairy will be the death of her. And this isn’t the conclusion – it’s all part of a structure which ramps up the tension so tightly that by the end we’re sitting in that car with Fontaine waiting for an inevitable tragedy.