1941
Director:Alfred Hitchcok Writers: Francis Iles, Samson Raphaelson Actors: Joan Fontaine, Cary Grant, Nigel Bruce, Dame May Whitty
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Fluttery, peaches and cream spinster Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) meets cute with suave Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant). They fall in love to the sound of ooey gooey violin music and get married. It's not long, however, before Lina begins to suspect that Johnnie wants to kill her in order to rake in some serious insurance money. Ugly thoughts like that invariably pop up when your husband buys a life insurance policy for you without your knowledge, acts like a man desperately trying to hide something, and generally looks vaguely sinister most of the time.
For some reason, this movie seems to be fairly well liked, but I can't imagine why. While the story sounds like classic Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense is clearly still struggling to crystalize his style in this one. There are all sorts of proto-Hitchcockian tricks in this one, but they're all hamfisted. For instance, when Lina finds a damning sentence in one of Johnnie's letters, the sentence is highlighted by placing it in an obvious "block" of light. There's also a scene of Lina "seeing" waves angrily crashing against a nearby cliff, superimposed over her pensive face, which got laughs from the people I was watching it with. Then, as if that wasn't enough, she keels over in a very melodramatic, fake looking faint. By the end, I didn't even care that the climax was an anticlimax, filmed against some of the worst rear projection shots I've ever seen.
Joan Fontaine gives the worst performance of the movie, chewing the scenery like you wouldn't believe in a prime "idiot plot" role. Amazingly, she won an Oscar and and NYFCC Award for this. Cary Grant is competent, but not really engaging. The soundtrack represents all the worst excesses of bombastic, over sentimental old movie scores, and the pace dragged severely, even discounting the lengthy "love story" plotline that inches along for quite some time before we actually get to the real story. The one bright spot is Nigel Hawthorne as Johnnie's dense, but sweet and amusing, buddy. Overall, this movie shows none of Alfred Hitchcock's trademark style and wit. If he hadn't directed it, it probably wouldn't even be remembered today.
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