Suspicion



Lina, the daughter of a wealthy aristocrat, falls in love with Johnnie, a smooth-talking playboy, and the two of them elope mere weeks after meeting one another. But it doesn’t take long for Lina to discover that her new husband’s own fame and fortune is nothing more than a facade. The house and most of the furniture are rented, the cars are leased… He basically owns nothing beyond perhaps some books, the clothes on his back, and an unsavory gambling habit. He was actually kinda hoping to live off her money for the rest of their lives, which turns out not to be feasible since it all belongs to her father. The only person who even seems to like Johnnie is his old pal Beaky, but that’s only because he seems to be just as naive and carefree with his money as Johnnie is. As the revelations about her Johnnie and the lies he’s told begin to steadily mount, Lina begins to suspect that her new husband not only married her for her money, but that he also plans to do away with her in order to get his hands on it.


Goodness, but she has an imagination, doesn’t she?

And this week we have yet another inexplicable remake of a classic film. Suspicion is a suspense film from 1988, and is a remake of none other than Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 film of the same name. A lot of people may forget about good old Suspicion when they think about their favorite Hitchcock films, and it’s true that at the time of its release it was considered one of the director’s more middling efforts. But it has a rating of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes now, and also stars Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Lina in this film, which was the only time an Oscar winning performance was ever handed out to a Hitchcock film (shocking I know.) So you know it has to be good, no matter what your familiarity with it is. Which again begs the question: why the hell did they make this?


Hello? Production team? Maybe you can tell me?

And just like before, I don’t know. Much like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane…?, this one also happens to be a Made-for-TV movie. Except this one was produced by American Playhouse, which was an anthology television series that ran for 13 seasons. Some of you old-timers may even remember watching episodes of it back in the day when it aired on PBS. Moreover, it was an award winning program that includes several Emmys, Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and even a Peabody award among its accolades. So clearly in their 13-year history they (at least occasionally) made some very good things. Sadly though, this film was not one of them. Though that’s not to say that the movie was altogether bad. It’s just that…. Well, mistakes were made.



The first problem is that this is basically the exact same movie from 1941. Sure the actors and locations have changed and the technology is newer, but the plot is nearly identical, most of the scenes being exactly the same, and they even kept the same damn twist ending. I think the only thing they really changed was varying the length of certain scenes, making some shorter and some longer, but beyond that this is basically the same movie. In fact they’re so close that I suspect that if I went back and watched the two films side by side that several dialogue scenes would even match up. I’m beginning to think that the only reason some of these remakes get made is because the stations wanted to air the original films, but were too cheap to buy the appropriate rights.


Well, if you’re going to rip off one movie, might as well rip off another while you’re at it.

The other thing is…. Goodness was this movie miscast. And I feel kinda bad for saying that, because I generally really like Jane Curtin and Anthony Andrews. Really, I do. It’s just that I don’t particularly like them in this movie. I’m really not sure what my problem is with Curtin, specifically. Maybe it’s that she seems more comfortable in comedy, because she looked decidedly out of her element here. I mean, I think she was okay and she was trying but…meh. And Andrews… Ugh. Johnnie is supposed to be a charming character. Or at least charming enough that it would be believable for an educated gal like Lina to fall for his near constant lines of BS. But Andrews makes him come across as a smarmy jackass that most women wouldn’t give the time of day to, much less be fawning all over. He gave the impression that he once watched an old episode of that “The Pickup Artist” show from back in the day – You remember that? The one where the guy in the ridiculous outfits would train other, less lady successful guys, how to pick up girls by ignoring and insulting them? Yeah, that thing – Anyway, it’s like he watched some of that and took the garbage that guy spewed as some kind of gospel, to the point he based much of his life around it. It just doesn’t seem believable that Curtin’s character would fall blindly in love with this guy. Nor does it help that neither of them has an ounce of chemistry with one other. They just look stiff and awkward together and it’s just…no. Me thinks the casting director (Elizabeth Jeffreys, I looked it up!) was just looking for a couple of familiar faces and didn’t care who they were or bother to do a screen test. Shame, Elizabeth! Shame!


Look, I don’t blame you two for it…


…okay, maybe I blame you a little.

Other than that it’s a fine little adaptation I suppose. I mean, the story is fine, the script is fine, it looks especially nice for a TV film and I also enjoyed the soundtrack, even though I think they only paid the composer for two songs, because boy was I getting sick of those same music cues by the end (though I did laugh when one of them got cut off abruptly. That was amusing.) But like a lot of remakes it feels like there was little point in making it. The story is exactly the same, the acting isn’t any better than the original film, and the direction couldn’t have surpassed Hitchcock if they tried. So in the end it’s a decent little adaptation, but like most things, if you want the superior product, you can’t go wrong with the original.

Suspicion is (shockingly) available on a variety of streaming services, either by itself or under the American Playhouse name. Though you may have to type it into your streaming service manually, as it doesn’t always come up in a Google search.

Suspicion appears to be available on DVD in various forms, but just know that if you want to look for it that it’s long, long out of print.

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