THE SUSPECT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 325, 14 September 1945, Page 16

THE SUSPECT

| (Universal)

O screen wrongdoers, retribution comes remorselessly. That is an axiom known to every film fan. When you see sin in the

cinema you can predict the eventual punishment of the sinner with all the assurance of an Early Father of the Church-provided, of course, that it is the kind of sin that is on the Hay’s Office Index. It is this. that makes so much movie melodrama so artificial, so divorced from real life. But sometimes Hollywood is able to ring the changes and still keép in tune with Mr. Hays (and the Early Fathers). Universal has done this in The Suspect. Indeed it has done rather more, for the film not only observes the rules, but even turns the onlooker’s familiarity with them to its own advantage. This is accomplished by making the hero of the tale a genial middle-aged man who commits two murders in desperation, He is presented as such a kindly, honest, and even lovable fellow, and he has such apparent justification for both his crimes that, when he finally meets the retribution which every member of the audience must have known was in store for him, you are likely to come out of the theatre pondering the moral problem of whether murder may not in some circumstances be pardonable, er even commendable. For any film to stir such doubts is possibly reprehensible, but I have no qualms about declaring that I found The’ Suspect a first-rate melodrama. In a role similar to that he played in Payment Deferred (1932), Charles Laughton returns to something like his old top form as Philip Marshall, the quiet little middle-aged shopkeeper who is goaded beyond endurance into killing his shrewish wife (Rosalind Ivan) and then finds it necessary to rid the world of an equally unpleasant and useless neighbour (Henry Daniell) who is blackmailing ‘him. Acting with much more sureness and much less "mugging" than in some regent roles, Laughton not only succeeds in making you feel intensely sorry for Philip Marshall; but also achieves the difficult job of making a romance between an unhandsome, middleaged man and a beautiful young girl appealing as well as credible. In this, Laughton has fine co-operation from Ella Raines, as the girl he marries and lives with happily after his first wife has met with an "accident" on the stairs. On the other side of the moral equation, Rosalind Ivan and Henry Daniell act with such. venomous competence that they seem well deserving of their illegal fate. And finally there is Stanley Ridges as a Scotland Yard detective who is so cruelly efficient, so remorseless a bloodhound, that you will need to have a heart of stone not to find yourself wishing that for once the law could be cheated of its prey. I think myself that the Early Fathers might,

in this case, have been content to leave Mr. Marshall to a higher judgment: Mr, Hays, being what he is, whsists that he shall return to face the temporal music. And so, in the final scene, there is Mr. Marshall deciding to give himself up and walking off the ship which is about to take him and his wife to Canada, a victim of his own conscience and the detective’s guile. Since this ending was foreordained, it is left to the director, Robert Siodmak, to extract what suspense he can from incidental situations in the narrative rather than from the climax. He does it with considerable success on several occasions, mostly by letting the camera and the furnishings rather than the. players create the mood of tension. He is helped by the setting of the story, which is in the gaslight era of London (the year is 1902). Those who remember Phantom Lady will know the effects he can achieve with rain-soaked pavements in midnight streets.