Robert Siodmak (1944)
Robert Siodmak and his cameraman Paul Ivano create a world of shadowed claustrophobia. Charles Laughton’s portrait of the main character is psychologically penetrating. The combined efforts of the director and the star of this noir drama are persuasive in expressing the mind of the titular suspect. A mild-mannered, henpecked husband in Edwardian London, Philip Marshall is driven to kill his wife and, when blackmail threatens, his egregious neighbour. Because his victims are so dislikeable – a shrew and a snake – and their killer is a lot more decent than either, the viewer becomes an accessory, before and after the fact. You want Marshall to get away with murder – although you know that he can’t. The unreasonableness of Marshall’s wife Cora (Rosalind Ivan) drives the couple’s only son (Dean Harens) away from home at the start of The Suspect. Marshall’s marriage becomes wholly intolerable once an attractive younger woman enters his life. Mary (Ella Raines) first appears, looking for a secretarial job, at the tobacco merchant’s shop that Marshall manages. She and he are very soon enjoying a platonic relationship, spending most evenings together. Mary doesn’t know that Marshall is married but Cora (who shares her forename with the first Mrs Crippen) finds out about Mary and confronts her husband as they prepare for a miserable Christmas. Marshall kills Cora, making her death look like an accident, but a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Huxley (Stanley Ridges), is suspicious and keeps turning up to ask difficult questions. Marshall swiftly marries Mary. A wife, thanks to the law of spousal privilege, can’t be forced to give evidence against her husband but Huxley, undaunted, turns his attentions to Marshall’s venal neighbour Simmons (Henry Daniell). This self-confessed rotter next door, who is also a wife-beater, can’t wait to demand that Marshall pay him to keep silent. (Simmons claims that he heard the Christmas Eve row between the Marshalls, through the thin walls.)
The sole regret you feel for Marshall’s dispatching Cora and Simmons is that Rosalind Ivan and Henry Daniell are the best supporting actors in The Suspect. (There are moments when Ivan gives the shrill scold of a wife a startling hysterical power.) Raymond Severn, as Marshall’s shop boy, has an innocence that, in the end, is poignant but the other players are adequate at best (and the mixed British and American cast makes it harder to ignore the more incongruous accents in evidence). Ella Raines, although appealing in the early stages, develops an oddly impersonal, businesslike quality – as a result, the new lease of life that Mary gives Marshall seems to be not because she’s delightful, only because she’s not as hateful as Cora. Marshall is much older than Mary and Ella Raines is much easier on the eye than Charles Laughton. The mystery of their mutual attraction is interesting yet it doesn’t fit in the otherwise conventional plot of The Suspect – and there’s more of a spark between Laughton and Molly Lamont, who plays the gracious, unfortunate Mrs Simmons, than between him and Raines. Marshall’s esteem for Mrs Simmons ensures that Inspector Huxley’s final trick, which seals the murderer’s fate, is plausible. Until then, the detective’s mind games with the suspect are an efficient but a mechanical means of spinning out the story as necessary. (So are other aspects of the plotting. I didn’t understand why Mary and other family and friends returned home, after only one day of a planned weekend at the seaside, just as Marshall had fatally poisoned Simmons. The explanation that it’s raining in Margate is feeble.)
According to Deborah Lazaroff Alpi’s biography of Robert Siodmak, he believed that:
‘In cinema I find the best way of approaching the crime film is to let your audience in on the secret. Not to ask them who did it, but rather to let them follow the story from one character’s point of view. … A few years ago, the director would have asked ‘how was it done?’ Today the much more important question is ‘why was it done?’’
Although I found myself hoping for an explanation of Cora Marshall’s death other than the obvious one, it’s clear enough that her husband has caused it. Charles Laughton’s fine, understated acting guarantees that you stay interested in Philip Marshall but his motives are neither complex nor initially deceptive. The question in The Suspect is not ‘why was it done?’ but ‘will he get away with it?’ You understand the Hollywood production code won’t allow that but Siodmak presents Marshall’s being brought to justice without relish. The film is written (Bertram Millhauser’s screenplay is adapted from a novel, This Way Out, by James Ronald) and directed in ways that make the audience sympathetic towards the protagonist but Siodmak virtually ignores this. Manny Farber, in his contemporary review, had good things to say about The Suspect but he was right to query this aspect of the direction:
‘[The] condoning of the first murder – of an awful, nagging wife – is a radical enough moral attitude to call for more argument than it gets in the film. The second murder – of an ineffectual blackmailer – is also condoned in what seems to me an even more cold-blooded way, and has so little motive that both the action and the leniency toward it seem fruitless.’
Farber is right too about the relatively weak motivation of the second murder. Philip Marshall’s reaction to Simmons’s threats is the only less than convincing part of Charles Laughton’s performance. In other respects, this exchange between Marshall and Simmons is perhaps the best of several good, tense scenes in The Suspect. Henry Daniell does Simmons’s effortless nastiness, then his slipping into unconsciousness, very well. The contribution of a kitten to the suspense of this sequence and the following one, when Mary et al unexpectedly return home, is pretty good too.
1 May 2015
