Hitchcock’s domestic thriller runs on one question, whether Cary Grant means to kill his wife, and Joan Fontaine’s frightened face keeps it taut for ninety minutes. The final ten are another matter, and nearly everyone who has seen it knows it.
Alfred Hitchcock made this the year after Rebecca (1940), and he gave Joan Fontaine another large house and another husband she cannot read. Lina McLaidlaw is a general’s daughter in tweed and spectacles who meets John D. ‘Johnnie’ Aysgarth (Cary Grant) on a train, where he borrows the difference on his ticket from her handbag and forgets to give it back. That is the whole of his character in one scene, and the film’s cleverness is to let her see it and marry him anyway. What follows is 99 minutes of a wife adding up her husband’s lies and arriving at the worst possible total. It is tight and frightening for most of its length, and it does not know how to stop.
The screenplay, by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison and Alma Reville from Anthony Berkeley Cox’s novel, stays almost entirely on Lina’s side of every door. We see what she sees: a house furnished on credit, her father’s wedding-present chairs gone one morning, a job with cousin Captain George Melbeck (Leo G. Carroll) that ended weeks ago and not by resignation. Each discovery is small and each is worse than the one before. Johnnie has an explanation for all of them, and Grant delivers each with a lightness that is exactly as charming as it is slippery. We could not decide whether we liked him, and the film runs on that indecision.
Fontaine has the harder job and does it well. Her Lina starts buttoned to the neck, grows a spine when she falls in love, and then loses it an inch at a time. She listens at doors, reads a letter she should not, and Harry Stradling keeps the light on her eyes so that we watch a thought arrive before she has finished having it. Stradling’s other good idea is the hall: light through a tall window throws a web of shadow across the floor, and Lina walks into it more than once, which is not subtle and does not need to be.
Then there is the milk. Late one night Johnnie carries a glass of it up a dark staircase to his wife, and it is the brightest thing in the frame. We held our breath, and we are slightly embarrassed to report how frightened a glass of milk made us. Franz Waxman helps, threading a Strauss waltz that Johnnie whistles when he is happy through the score until a tune about pleasure sounds like a warning. Edward Stevenson dresses Lina in wool and glasses before the wedding and in silk after it, none of it paid for. William Hamilton cuts a dinner with the crime novelist Isobel Sedbusk (Auriol Lee), who chats about untraceable poisons over the soup, so that the camera keeps leaving the talk and returning to Lina’s face.
The supporting cast is mostly British and mostly excellent. Nigel Bruce’s Gordon Cochrane ‘Beaky’ Thwaite, all “old bean” and helpless affection, is the warmth in the film and the one person who takes Johnnie’s schemes at face value. Cedric Hardwicke and May Whitty have a handful of scenes as Lina’s parents, and the General’s remark about his daughter, overheard through a window, is what sends her out of the house and into the marriage. Isabel Jeans and Heather Angel fill the edges with gossip and worried looks.
The last ten minutes take a turn we will not describe. Most critics since 1941 have described it anyway, because they dislike it, and so do we. The film spends an hour and a half building a question and then answers it at speed, in a way that asks us to set aside a good deal of what we have just watched. The reviews have long blamed studio interference; whoever is responsible, what is on screen is an ending that arrives out of breath and leaves before it has finished explaining itself. We were gripped, and then, within a few minutes, we were annoyed, which is a poor way to send an audience home.
Against Hitchcock’s own work it sits in the middle. Rebecca let the house do the frightening; Shadow of a Doubt (1943) would take the same fear, that the person you love is not who they say, and hold its nerve to the finish. This one has the better husband and the weaker last reel. See it for Fontaine, for the staircase and for Grant being pleasant in a way that never quite settles. At home you can pause on the glass of milk and choose your own ending, which is roughly what the writers appear to have done.
