- Robert Siodmak's The Suspect sets itself apart from the average film noir by happily making its protagonist a murderer...wait, make that a double-murderer. Although the film doesn't explicitly depict the deed, Philip Marshall (Charles Laughton) clearly killed his wife Cora (Rosalind Ivan) by clobbering her over the head with his walking stick. His motive? Well, Cora recently discovered that Marshall had been meeting up regularly with a young attractive woman named Mary (Ella Raines) and lying about his whereabouts. Did I mention that Marshall is the hero of the piece?
- Truth be told, Cora's murder comes fairly close to a case of justifiable homicide. Her acidic personality already drove their son (Dean Harens) out of the house, and Marshall himself is subjected to a constant stream of hateful invective. (As a side note, Ivan went on to play Edward G. Robinson's quarrelsome wife in the following year's broadly similar noir Scarlet Street.) Rightly or wrongly, killing Cora actually works out pretty well for Marshall, who soon finds himself married to the much younger and more charming Mary. Only two problems remain. One is the lingering Scotland Yard detective (Stanley Ridges) who has correctly inferred Marshall's guilt in Cora's murder. The other complication is Marshall's shiftless inebriate neighbor (Henry Daniell) who blackmails Marshall by threatening to fabricate testimony against him. Sounds like another completely horrible person is in need of a well-deserved murdering!
- What impressed me most about The Suspect was how effectively it maintains audience sympathy for Marshall throughout the entire film. In the case of Cora's murder, the film wisely has the detective reconstruct the crime rather than actually showing Marshall bludgeon her, which would have been an unsympathetic act to watch under any circumstances. Likewise, the poisoning of Marshall's neighbor is accomplished so gently that it's not initially clear whether the man is sleeping or dead. It also helps that Siodmak injects some Hitchcockian humor into the affair when Marshall is forced to entertain some guests with his neighbor's body stuffed behind the couch. Although Marshall's conscience catches up with him in the end, the movie is honestly much more fun when it permits Laughton to play a man who may actually be improving society, one murder at a time.
