Suspicion (1941)

*may contain mild spoilers*

Second viewing; first seen between 1983 and 1986.

After a brief courting period, woman gets married to a playboy, only to find out he is not what she expected. As time passes, she comes to harbor terrible suspicions about him.

Narrative works dealing with doubt about a character tend to be fairly interesting. The object of that doubt usually expresses a prevailing concern of the audience at the time of the production of said work. For example, there is the late 19th-century novel Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis, about a suspected adultery that is kept unresolved (although some argue otherwise). Recently there was the film Doubt, about sexual abuse (not an extremely successful film, though). Regarding Suspicion, many viewers were left deeply dissatisfied with its resolution; some, however, see its ending as an open one, and I tend to align with them. The dramatic strength of Suspicion resides in the careful building up of a monstrous possibility. You may call it suspense if you like, but I was more interested in what the male protagonist was than in what the female protagonist would suffer. Although the ending appears to deflate our fears, a doubt persists, and, whatever the case is, one might ask oneself whether the relationship between the protagonist couple can ever return to its initial purity. The questions posed by the narrative are not as simple as they may appear on superficial analysis. There are several angles from which one might look at it. The wife's angle is mainly structured on the decision to marry someone, and, later, on the decision to leave one's husband. Also, there is a generic value problem which questions whether it is licit to establish a correlation between lax morals on issues like work and domestic finance to the capability to murder someone. There is a case to be made that these are merely accessory narrative devices that allow one to expose a more fundamental human question, summed up in an exchange at the dinner sequence at a mystery writer's house ("Do you suppose those murderers are happy, Johnny?/I don't know, dear. I don't see why they shouldn't be."). I believe this is the real dramatic core of the movie, the possibility of completely immoral behavior, which translates into the most absolute egotism. Can happiness stem from such a position? This is a modest yet interesting, well-made film.

Rating: 61 (up from 54)