Last night, in a rare act of mental submissiveness, I flipped on the television. We had spent all Easter day eating and socializing, and it seemed cruel to subject my brain to French-language exercises. So I settled on the couch and looked in vain for the annual broadcast of the Ten Commandments. I remember watching the Ten Commandments when I was young, memories that cannot quite be classified as fond but are certainly vivid. “Those who will not live by the law…shall die by the law!” Cut to commercial.
Instead, PBS was broadcasting Suspicion, a 1941 Alfred Hitchock movie. It starred Cary Grant as a gold-digging gambling playboy who charms Joan Fontaine into defying her family and marrying him. But does he love her… or her father’s money? Right off the bat, Cary is upset that her father isn’t supporting the lavish lifestyle that he has imagined for them. And as the extent of his money woes becomes apparent to Joan, she begins to have… suspicions.
“Those who will not get a real job… shall kill their wives for the insurance money!” Like Joan, the audience is convinced that Cary will kill her. For me, the clincher was that Cary’s pet name for Joan is “Monkey Face.” In climax of the movie, Cary is driving them wildly along a coastal road when Joan’s car door opens. She screams. Cary reaches for her, seemingly to push her out. Instead, he closes the door and stops the car. Joan confronts Cary, and he has a pat explanation for his actions that make all those suspicions seem crazy and paranoid. Joan suddenly realizes that her husband isn’t a murderer… he’s the best husband in the world! (Ladies, aren’t they all either one or the other?)
Wikipedia says, “Suspicion is one of the famous examples where, in the process of rewriting the novel for the big screen, the plot was tampered with… Suspicion was supposed to be the study of a murder as seen through the eyes of the eventual victim. However, because Cary Grant was to be the killer and Joan Fontaine the person killed, the studio – RKO – decreed a different ending, which Hitchcock supplied and then spent the rest of his life complaining about.”
The ending of Suspicion displeased me on so many levels. First of all, it deprived the audience of the Hitchcockian moneyshot: when suave Cary Grant transforms into a menacing murderer! Second, it carried a subtle male chaunvinstic message (Ladies, your husband’s faults are all in your head). And third, it precluded Hitchcock from filming a sequel called Monkey Face’s Revenge.
