Hitchcock's Suspicion: Reading Between the Lines (Alfred Hitchcock‪)‬

Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941), his fourth film in America, was based on Before the Fact, a best-seller of 1932 written by British novelist Anthony Berkeley Knox tinder the pseudonym of Francis Iles. Like the novel, the movie focuses on a plain young Englishwoman named Lina (Joan Fontaine) who gradually begins to suspect that the dashing and handsome man she has impulsively married, Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant), is not only a poor choice of husband, but a compulsive liar, gambler, embezzler, and quite possibly a murderer. In the Iles novel, Lina's suspicions about her husband's murderous intentions turn out to be correct. When she discovers that he has marked her as his next victim, having taken out a hefty life insurance policy in her name, she leaves a suicide note and drinks a glass of poisoned milk that he has given her. Since Lina is pregnant at the time, her rationale for suicide is that "he must not reproduce himself." In reproducing him for the film version, Hitchcock's strategy of adaptation was to retain the theme of Lina's near-masochistic obsession with her husband, but to render Johnnie's villainy in ambiguous terms. As he stated in an early memo to the executives at RKO, where the film was produced, Hitchcock intended to "tell the story as through the eyes of the woman and have her husband be villainous in her imagination only" (Taylor 176). Consequently, the murders that the husband actually commits in the lies novel became only the murders suspected by the Hitchcock heroine, or as Mark Crispin Miller puts it, "the novel's subject has become the movie's subtext" (Miller 255). That subtext--Lina's character psychology, her father complex, and her consequent ambivalence towards Johnnie--has been the focal point of critical discussion about Suspicion, to the neglect of the film's thematic center and its relevance for the ending of the film, which has been historically disparaged in both critical reviews and film scholarship.