Suspicion
1941, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
A lot of fuss gets made over the ending of Suspicion. For many years Hitchcock bemoaned the studio forcing him to alter the novel’s dark ending, redeeming Johnnie (Cary Grant) while saving the life of Lina (Joan Fontaine) and the couple’s marriage. On the other hand, the director’s biographer Donald Spoto showed that Hitchcock had planned an upbeat ending all along. On close examination though, the realized ending is ambiguous. Lina only has Johnnie’s word for his innocence, and he’s lied to her before. Even if he wanted her dead, he probably didn’t want her falling out of his car, and we’ll never know what was in the glass of milk. Johnnie’s role in Beaky’s death is equally ambiguous. A French waiter had heard Beaky call an Englishman “Allbeam” or “Holbeam”, much like the affectionate “Old Bean” Beaky used for Johnnie. Suspicion is a long series of reversals in Johnnie’s appearance of guilt or innocence, and it would fit Hitchcock’s style of humor to extend that pattern past the ending.
These questions, however, should not distract us from the opening, which tells us exactly how to view the film. Suspicion opens in a dark railroad tunnel, quickly fading from black as Johnnie Aysgarth finds himself sharing a compartment with Lina McLaidlaw. Lina wears glasses, and in Hitchcock’s code a woman with glasses usually possesses some superior insight. More tellingly, she’s reading a book titled Child Psychology, which is remarkable because she neither has children nor works in psychology. She will however deal in child psychology for the rest of the movie, because like so many Hitchcock males, Johnnie is an overgrown child. Almost precisely half an hour in, Lina will exclaim, “Johnnie! I’m just beginning to understand you. You’re a baby!”
If we pick up the cue from Lina’s reading material, along with the more abstract and ominous cue from the opening ten seconds of darkness, we can hardly escape noticing that Johnnie’s childlike behavior is the movie’s common denominator. He gets in the wrong train compartment and mocks the conductor. He pursues Lina like an entitled boy going after what he wants, and he wrestles with her trying to get a kiss. He calls her “monkeyface”, elopes with her, lives on borrowed money, puts his feet up on the heirloom chairs, gets fired for embezzling, gambles recklessly, hides his behavior from Lina, spends extravagantly, and brings home a best friend who’s just as childlike as he is.
The scene where Beaky makes faces and quacks like a duck while Johnnie tickles Lina under her chin, trying to make her smile, would veer into outright comedy if it weren’t so disturbing. Johnnie is not merely fooling around, he’s manipulating his wife, trying to get her to accept his betting on horse races. It’s a perversion of humor, a form of bullying, and a brazen display of juvenile behavior. The scene quickly sheds all pretense of comedy, foreshadowing Beaky’s death as a glass of brandy triggers anaphylaxis. It’s a double foreshadowing, because as Beaky sputters he walks between Lina and Johnnie, just as his later death will come between the couple. It’s almost a triple foreshadowing, because the nearly fatal glass of brandy will be echoed in the ominous glass of milk.
These forebodings precede the halfway point by about three minutes. Afterward Lina visits Melbeck to learn that Johnnie got fired, and her father dies. The reading of General McLaidlaw’s last will leads to a pair of scenes that prefigures the last two scenes of Suspicion. First Johnnie raises a toast to the portrait of his deceased father-in-law, then he and Lina drive along the coast. The toast is a gesture of grave disrespect: “You win, old boy,” alluding to the inheritance that Johnnie had hoped to receive, so that the glass he raises is as poisonous as the glass of milk – one figuratively toxic, the other toxic at least in Lina’s imagination. The drive along the coast ends with the car stopping, just as they’ll stop and turn around at the movie’s end. If there’s anything to this symmetry, these scenes in the middle of Suspicion ought to clarify the ending.
After Johnnie’s insolent toast, his conversation with Lina in the car turns from their marriage to his lost job to the prospective land development. Lina affirms her love for Johnnie and reveals that she knows he’s been fired, and the scene plants the seed that will lead to Beaky’s death… but it also does two other things without fanfare. First, when Johnnie can’t finish his sentence “…and if you were to die first, I….” …we get the first hint of an intention to kill her. Second, he calls Captain Melbeck “a bit of an old fogey”. Here is where the film gets tricky, but if we stop to analyze the stray pieces of evidence, we can put together a whole picture that answers all the questions about the ending while accounting for Hitchcock’s professions of regret.
Looking across Hitchcock’s career, his juvenile males tend to be oedipal in one way or another – the most obvious being Bruno Antony in Strangers on a Train and Norman Bates in Psycho. There’s not even a mention, however, of Johnnie Aysgarth’s mother. To draw a line from his juvenile behavior to juvenile sexuality would be a stretch for most viewers – but not for Hitchcock. The first hint is in Johnnie’s out-of-place remark to the train conductor, “Write to your mother.” The word will surface almost an hour later when Lina draws the letters “MUDDER” in an anagrams game and changes them to “MURDER”. These odd details stand out, but they’re only hints. In Suspicion there is more to learn from the other side of the oedipal triangle.
There’s barely any mention of Johnnie’s father either, only Lina’s parents recognizing him as Tom Aysgarth’s son, but when Johnnie describes his erstwhile boss as an “old fogey” he betrays the intergenerational contempt so typical of oedipal men who project their childhood rivalry onto perceived father figures. We may not get to see his filial relationship directly, but we see plenty between him and his father-in-law – none of it amicable. In this light the full meaning of Lina’s book on child psychology starts to emerge.
In the end it’s not the perversions of child psychology, the oedipal or elektral incest, that interest Hitchcock so much as the way these elementary passions warp the minds and behavior of the adults who carry them unchanged past adolescence. There are pleasant and harmless ways for an adult to be childlike, and Johnnie certainly manages to charm a lot of people, but his immaturity also comes out in a lack of self-control, a headstrong insistence on his own way, and his selfish use of other people for his own ends. His single-minded pursuit of Lina before she ever warms up to him, his insistence on having her at any cost, implies that there may be something in her that reminds him of his mother. To the oedipal child (or adult), the desired parent is an object rather than a fully realized human. The bond is not what a mature adult would call love, and any disillusion can lead to violence. Lina, in turn, gives in to Johnny only when she overhears her parents calling her “spinsterish”. Unlike Johnny she wishes to be psychologically independent of her parents.
All of this shifts the weight of the film, so that the open questions at the end no longer matter so much. Certainly they matter to Lina, because her life and her love depend on whether Johnnie truly grows up, but the audience can have its ambiguity. Whether Johnnie’s a murderer, or whether Lina’s well founded suspicions inflated him into an imaginary murderer, the movie has made its point. We can see Johnnie’s faults, appreciate the extremes they might lead to, and connect the lessons to the real world where the outcome is actually important.
Nevertheless, we can also appreciate why Hitchcock might have declared his misgivings about the outwardly happy ending. For the next seventeen years he would strive to make a film that would warn society of the dangers in stunted sexuality, just as he had spent the 1930s correctly warning a British audience of political currents shaping up on the European continent. Sometimes his characters would outgrow their childhood complexes, modeling the normal course of development that leads to maturity; other times his characters would remain stuck in their childhood psychology, serving as warnings. When he told people that Suspicion should have followed the novel, making Johnny a murderer, he was probably being provocative as usual, challenging viewers to see the dark side in Johnny that they were usually so willing to overlook.
CONNECTIONS:
Shadow of a Doubt – Hitchcock film with a recurring waltz melody; story of a woman suspicious of a man; undercurrent of juvenile sexuality
Chase a Crooked Shadow – Plot with sustained uncertainty; sinister glass of milk; suspenseful drive on a rugged coast
Vertigo – Story of a juvenile man nicknamed “Johnnie” or “Johnny”; painting of an ancestor; woman tears up a letter to the male lead