A Textual Approach to Suspicion (1941)
[Contains spoilers]
Suspicion (1941) – Textual
Happy Halloweek, ya spooky nerds! I can’t let an October fly by without reviewing a Hitchcock, so this week I watched Suspicion (1941) a film so enraging it doubles as an election film for next week.
Suspicion is a film about Lina (Joan Fontaine) in a situation that predated the film and term “gaslight” but is very much in the conversation.
Side bar: I reviewed Gaslight (1944) last year and still viscerally remember the uncomfortable physical sensations of watching that poor woman be gaslit. That movie is phenomenal but girl, woof, my god.
So, Lina is a super lovely lady who’s independent and smart and kind, and she unfortunately falls under the wily charms of a young Cary Grant, the prick. Johnnie Aysgarth (Grant) is a playboy gambler and a terrible conman. And by “terrible” I don’t mean like morally, although, yes; I mean he’s so bad at it, just god awful thieving instincts. He’s lazy and corrupt and embezzles money so poorly he immediately gets caught. And he’s an asshole, just a total loser with the ladies, working angles like Mel Gibson in What Women Want (2000) pre-lightning. Yeah, that’s right. Johnnie sucks so bad I’m comparing him to Mel Gibson. Sit with it.
Their acquaintance leads to a rapid courtship and them eloping with Lina only learning promptly upon moving into their marital home after an extensive French honeymoon that Johnnie is a little baby bitch who can’t take care of himself or her and who thinks working is for suckers. Johnnie thinks that “the secret of success is to start at the top.” What a groundbreaking genius.
If you’re a consistent reader, you might know where I’m going with this. The Review Roulette wheel landed on Textual for our approach, and girl, is there some text for us to talk about with this fuckin guy.
When Lina learns that she married an absolute loser, she has the dawning realization that she says out loud, “Oh, Johnnie. I’m just beginning to understand you! You’re a baby.” And, girl, yes. He is a little baby child with no understanding of responsibility in anything. He’s broke and had borrowed thousands for their honeymoon and was expecting to live off of Lina’s allowance from her father until that guy died and left her an inheritance which (spoiler) didn’t happen. And she’s like, ‘my guy get a job’, and he’s like ‘who? Little ol’ me?’ and she’s like ‘YES. You’re a grown ass man.’ So he gets a job and immediately steals a bunch of money that he can’t pay back and when she’s like ‘where’d this money come from?’ he’s like ‘gambling, of course’ to hide the embezzlement. My brother in Christ.
But in her realization that she married a baby, Lina says something so important we need to talk about it. When he laughs off the horrific financial situation he has plunged her into without her knowledge, Lina says “how can you be so – so gay about something you should be – yes, ashamed of?”
Ultimately, this film is about Lina’s growing suspicion that Johnnie is in so deep with his debts that he is capable of murdering not only his best friend/business partner but also, potentially, her in order to procure funding from business ventures or her life insurance policy.
Here comes the spoiler. As I wrote about in my review of Charade (1963) and alluded to in my reviews of An Affair to Remember (1957) and Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), you’re gonna be hard pressed to find a film in which Cary Grant is the ultimate bad guy. He can play aggressively and problematically charming, but he’s not the murderer. And in this film, despite her suspicions, he is not the murderer. But he is, as I said to Ben several minutes into the movie, an insufferable cunt.
I have never seen Cary Grant so unlikeable, and the movie insists in the last two minutes that Lina was wrong to ever suspect her beau of being a bad person, but I’m gonna call bullshit on this one. He is a baby and a loser and a self-aggrandizing jackass who thinks he can skate on being handsome, and he’s so bad at all of it and somehow has zero shame until, it is suggested, the very end. But, he built his persona well, and Hitchcock used misdirection and promise to create this character who is a lousy liar but who also, sometimes, plays it straight. While they’re “courting” the two have this exchange after he asks her if she’s ever been kissed in a car and would like to be:
[exact language and directions taken from the screenplay]
Johnnie: You’re the first woman I ever met in all my life who said yes when she meant yes.
Lina: (with the solemnity of a child) What do most of them say?
Johnnie: Hanged if I know. They say anything except yes.
Lina: But they kiss you?
Johnnie: Usually.
Lina: Have there been many?
Johnnie: One night when I couldn’t fall asleep, I started to count them – the way one counts sheep jumping over a fence – and I passed out on the number seventy-three.
Lina: Are you always honest – like this – with the others?
Johnnie: No…
Lina: Why are you honest with me – because I’m different?
Johnnie: (slowly) Not exactly. I’m honest with you because I think that’s the best way to get results.
They look at each other for a moment in silence, and then, with a mutual impulse, they kiss.
Lina: I hope I’m not saying the wrong thing – but I love you.
Oh girl. Sweet precious Lina, my darling. He’s a bad man. Bottom of the bucket, dripping in week-old garbage juice trash man. This scene is almost as viscerally jarring as Gaslight because I can feel that patriarchal sheen from my own teenage years, and I get it and I hate it. My sweet Lina, no. “I’m honest with you because I think that’s the best way to get results” is one of the most offensive lines I’ve ever heard, and I’m sad for her that it took her until they were married to realize she deserves better and he deserves shame. (I should say, she is under his charismatic Cary Grant spell the whole film, even when she thinks he could murder her, so she never truly acts on the fact that she deserves better, but she does realize it.) He also then spends the rest of their courtship and marriage lying to her anyway.
So, Johnnie sucks so bad, but he’s ultimately forgiven for all of his awful characteristics because he’s allegedly not trying to murder her for profit, and I just feel like that’s an awfully low bar. And he really reminds me of all the chuds running our government right now.
I saw a clip today that could be from any day in the last 2-10 years from any of the revolving door of adult-sized baby imbeciles following their leader like grotesque little horror ducklings. Our esteemed Vice President of these United States of America in the year of his Lord 2026, said some racist shit that is not worth repeating but boiled down to him saying he can’t read. He said he can’t pronounce certain foreign words. The Vice President. Who went to Yale.
Here’s where Lina’s shame line comes in, and also the US Army’s counsel Joseph Welch in the Army-McCarthy Hearings in June 1954 when he said to Joseph McCarthy “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency left?” Like a baller. Obviously the answer is no for these people. Vance is so bigoted and hate-filled that he’s willing to suggest he’s illiterate simply to be hateful, and that should be (among many things like “disqualifying” but we can’t ask for the world, evidently) deeply, tragically embarrassing for him and Yale University. But shame doesn’t occur to these people who have skated their whole lives on making their problems other people’s problems, shifting blame, and accepting no responsibility for the shitty things they’ve said, done, and implicated or embroiled others in.
So, for this Halloween, as it has been all too many times in American history, the scariest thing is the confidence of mediocre white men who have never once considered the possibility that they, in fact, are the worst of the worst garbage undesirables ruining life for everyone else. Especially the ones who get a pass for their misogynistic, bigoted, inhumane behaviors simply because there are worse guys out there, and at least they’re not them.
Don’t vote for those fuckers next Tuesday. For the love of all that good in this world, please do not vote for more of these pricks. Though, if you’re still reading this, I imagine you wouldn’t be anyway, so solidarity with everyone left who can recognize the severe lack of shame left in this world. Enjoy your Halloween celebrations, and may next Tuesday be a blessing and an opportunity to rejuvenate hope, fight, and empathy.
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