The Noir File: Hitchcock, Grant, Fontaine fill us with ‘Suspicion’

By Michael Wilmington and Film Noir Blonde

A guide to classic film noir and neo-noir on cable TV. All the movies are from the current schedule of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

PICK OF THE WEEK

Suspicion” (1941, Alfred Hitchcock). Thursday, Sept. 27, 8 a.m. (5 a.m.):

Cary Grant bringing the glass of milk is an unforgettable moment.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s glossy, shivery 1941 domestic thriller, British provincial wallflower Joan Fontaine marries the gorgeous but irresponsible Cary Grant and begins to suspect, more and more strongly, that he intends to murder her. Hitchcock builds the suspicion, and the suspense, beautifully.

And the lovely might-be victim Fontaine, whom Hitch had made a first-rank star the year before by casting her as the shy, nameless heroine of his Best Picture Oscar winner “Rebecca,” this time won the Best Actress Oscar herself.

“Suspicion” is one of Hitchcock’s most polished and well-executed thrillers, and there are scenes and shots in the film – such as the sinister, glowing glass of milk Grant carries upstairs to his sick wife – that have become famous. But the movie has one big flaw, dictated by the culture of the time and by the Production Code. You’ll know what it is by the end of the film.

The classy British émigré cast includes Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Dame May Whitty, Nigel Bruce and Leo G. Carroll. The screenwriting team – Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison and Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville – adapted “Suspicion” from Francis Iles’ classic suspense novel “Before the Fact,” and they should have kept Iles’ shocking original ending.

Friday, Sept. 21

5:15 p.m. (2:15 p.m.): “Lolita” (1962, Stanley Kubrick).

4 a.m. (1 a.m.): “10 Rillington Place” (1971, Richard Fleischer). Noir expert Richard Fleischer specialized in true-crime movies (“Compulsion,” “The Boston Strangler”) and this is one of his best: a chilling realistic thriller modeled on the famous case of British serial killer Dr. John Christie (brilliantly underplayed by Richard Attenborough), and the hapless man he frames for one of his murders, (a brilliant job by John Hurt). Also with Judy Geeson, Andre Morell and Bernard Lee.

Saturday, Sept. 22

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Gilda” (1946, Charles Vidor).

Tuesday, Sept. 25

1 p.m. (10 a.m.): “Nightfall” (1956, Jacques Tourneur).

Paul Newman as Lew Harper

Wednesday, Sept. 26

12 a.m. (9 p.m.): “Harper” (1966, Jack Smight). Paul Newman, at his most attractively laid-back, plays one of detective literature’s most celebrated private eyes, Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer, in this brainy thriller based on MacDonald’s novel “The Moving Target.”

One catch: Archer has been renamed “Lew Harper,” so Newman could have (he hoped) another hit movie with an “H” title, like “The Hustler” and “Hud.” He got one. The stellar cast includes Lauren Bacall, Janet Leigh, Julie Harris, Shelley Winters, Robert Wagner, Arthur Hill, Robert Webber and Strother Martin. Scripted by William Goldman.

Thurs., Sept. 27

9:45 a.m. (6:45 a.m.): “Murder, My Sweet” (1944, Edward Dmytryk).

In ‘The Lady Vanishes,’ Hitch pushes form to near perfection

The Lady Vanishes/1938/GB Pictures/96 min.

By Michael Wilmington

Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood are an utterly beguiling English couple.

In “The Lady Vanishes,” his marvelous 1938 mystery classic set aboard a train racing though the Balkans, Alfred Hitchcock pushes the romantic-comedy-thriller form to near perfection. It’s one of the most purely entertaining movies he ever made, and it can be watched over and over again with no diminution of pleasure.

Arguably funnier than Hitchcock’s other train classics – “The 39 Steps” (1935), “Strangers on a Train” (1951) and “North By Northwest” (1959) – “The Lady Vanishes” offers one of Hitchcock’s greatest assemblies of characters and actors: Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Paul Lukas, Dame May Whitty, Cecil Parker, Linden Travers, Catherine Lacey, Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford.

Hitchcock loved trains, in life as well as in his movies. In “The Lady Vanishes” we can see why. Though shot mostly on a sound stage, this locomotive is somehow supremely convincing – with its cozy yet menacing cars, jiggling tables, rushing train-sounds, compartments full of strangely cool or deceptively amiable passengers and that wonderful dining car, where so much tea is sipped, so much suspense generated and where the final crackerjack gun battle takes place.

Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder (“The Rake’s Progress,” “Night Train to Munich,” “Green for Danger”) wrote the script from a novel called “The Wheel Spins,” by Ethel Lina White. But the Gilliat-Launder stamp, a special brand of breezy and irreverent class-puncturing humor, is all over this film, almost as much as Hitchcock’s flair for tension, perverse romance, dark humor and similar irreverence toward class.

“The Lady Vanishes” offers one of Hitchcock’s greatest assemblies of actors.

The ingenious story is in line with brainy mysteries by writers like Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr. What happens? A congenial old lady named Miss Froy (played by the irresistible Dame May Whitty) disappears from the train and, when her pretty and saucy fellow passenger Iris (Margaret Lockwood) tries to find her, everyone who saw Miss Froy denies she existed.

Only Michael Redgrave as Gilbert, an amorous young musicologist, believes her. As Iris and Gilbert put their nimble wits together, love and melody and mystery bloom, even as the vanished lady remains peculiarly elusive. The train’s odd-lot passengers – including a suave doctor (Paul Lukas), a philandering politico and his inamorata (Cecil Parker and Linden Travers), a nun in high heels (Catherine Lacey) and those ineffable cricket fans Caldicott and Charters (played by the immortal Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford) – keep denying Miss Froy was ever there. Things get progressively stranger, faster, funnier and more dangerous.

Besides human passengers, a magician’s bunnies are aboard this mystery-filled train.

If Hitchcock loved trains, he makes us fall in love with this one, too – and with many of the people aboard, including some of the villains. And non-villains like Caldicott and Charters, who became so popular that they began making appearances, as the same characters, in other films (“Night Train to Munich” and “Crook’s Tour”). And Miss Froy, who looks a bit like Agatha Christie, or the way we envision Miss Marple to look. And of course Gilbert and Iris, an intrepid, utterly beguiling, English couple if ever there was one.

As I said, “The Lady Vanishes” is one movie classic that most audiences are sure to enjoy. If you don’t enjoy it, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Maybe what you need is a long train ride in the Balkans.

“The Lady Vanishes” plays on the big screen this Wednesday, March 14, at 7:30 p.m. at the Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave. in Santa Monica.