THE UNSUSPECTED
1947
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Written by Ranald MacDougall and Bess Meredyth (based on the novel by Charlotte Armstrong)
The 1940s had been good to Michael Curtiz so far, and the director had gotten it into his head that maybe he didn't need Warner Bros. paying him a mere directorial salary when he could be making his movies, and reaping the returns thereof, with a production company of his very own. Thus in 1947 was born Michael Curtiz Productions, but despite an impressive fourteen film contract to produce movies for distribution by Warners, it did not work out the way he'd hoped; some of these films are quite memorable entries into his filmography (they include the superior Curtiz/Crawford in Flamingo Road, as well as the extraordinary debut of Doris Day in Romance On the High Seas), but times were changing, and even if I would like to give the same lecture to late 40s audiences as I would today about the economic importance of theatrical exhibition (and even if I also wonder about how Warners divided the profits), the math must not have added up sufficiently to keep going, since Curtiz's company only ever produced four films out of that fourteen (and, accordingly, only four out of the fifteen films he'd make for Warners before his final departure from his long-time home in 1954). We now have before us the first "Michael Curtiz Production," The Unsuspected, and it's the best of this tranche of Curtiz's career, even if I'm pretty certain it did the least-well.
Michael Curtiz Productions was a family affair; for one thing, you may notice dialogue director Jack Meredyth Lucas, though that would only trigger anything if you notice the writer credited for its adaptation, Bess Meredyth, and remember that Bess Meredyth was Curtiz's wife (Lucas being, of course, his stepson; Lucas would attain nerd-fame in his own right on Star Trek). Meredyth had met Curtiz in 1928 while serving uncredited as a writer on the film Curtiz had come to America to make (though Jack Warner didn't let him till he'd made five others), Noah's Ark, which means that Meredyth would've been intimately familiar with how he'd drowned several people and grievously injured several more when she said, "now that's the man for me." Well, by the time of their nuptials, Meredyth was a veteran writer at MGM, a seemingly-secure career that died with Irving Thalberg, leading to a few years of intermittent jobbing before "retiring," though the story goes—and it would make no sense if it were otherwise—that Curtiz frequently solicited his screenwriter wife's advice on his many, many movies. Meredyth's contribution would be acknowledged formally this time, with her "adaptation" credit on The Unsuspected—it was her very last credit, in fact—with Ranald MacDougall writing the screenplay, which is also quite good, though "adaptation" really could be the more crucial part here, something I'd be primed to notice because what always impressed me about Meredyth's tenure at MGM was how fearless she could be about outright mutilating a novel's structure, if that's what worked better for her movie. What The Unsuspected adapts, then, is Charlotte Armstrong's 1946 novel of the same name, and let's not beat around the bush: it's also a good novel; its premise is batshit fucking insane; and it almost feels like a challenge Armstrong presented to herself, to take something wholly unusable and use it anyway.
Nevertheless, it is, broadly-speaking, a faithful adaptation that Meredyth made here, though it begins punching things up considerably about halfway through—I'd even say it falls into the unusual category of a movie that has (in certain respects) more content than the novel upon which it was based on—and in either case the story concerns a certain Victor Grandison (Claude Rains), a broadcaster famed for his radio show peddling chilling tales of true suspense. (So far the big change from the book we'll notice is the excision of the other sources of Grandison's fame, notably his tenure as a major film director, an interesting thing to streamline.) Anyway, we begin in a home we will soon come to know quite well as Grandison's mansion, and although it's not exactly his, that too will only become clear a little bit later; for now, it is a darkened and emptied shell of a house, seemingly inhabited solely by the inky black shadow that Curtiz and his cinematographer, B-horror specialist Woody Bredell (plausibly doing his career-best work here) are throwing onto the walls and furnishings—including a painting of a pretty young woman over a fireplace—and that Bredell makes ooze so inkily across surfaces that it feels tangible, almost like some kind of special effect. Soon the shadow finds a door, behind which is Grandison's study, not occupied by Grandison, but by his secretary Roslyn (Barbara Woodell), distracted by a phone call from Grandison's trashy niece Althea (Audrey Totter), presently asking after her husband Oliver (Hurd Hatfield) from the nightclub she's at with her boyfriend. Roslyn notices the shadow some seconds after it overlaps her, and the silhoutte in the door, and the length of rope it carries. She dies on the phone, which Althea apparently dismisses, and she's hanged from a rather sturdy chandelier—seemingly, a "suicide"—though of course we know better and in the aftermath of the struggle we even see exactly who did it, his reflected in the shining black pool of the desk.
And here's where I start wondering, because it is only a glimpse, but I cannot imagine that a director of Curtiz's caliber did not intend us to recognize the face, and the movie never subsequently acts like it's "revealing" anything we didn't already know—it's Grandison, who's done in his own secretary—and the effect is such that the form of a mystery is observed with an almost overbearing scrupulousness (those teasing shadows and obscuring silhouettes, of course; the fragmented obscurity of the murder itself; even the invisible transition of the first images from the usual Curtizian fetish for putting shadows on walls to a series of more-or-less POV shots) but the substance of the mystery is dumped out on a desk right in front of our eyes if we're looking and paying even half-attention. It transfers the proceedings from "mystery" into "suspense" without necessarily marking it, though it's some pretty great suspense it's got lined up; but it's also a movie about the proverbial perfect murderer—a veritable scholar of murder, who would doubtless consider his own murders perfect—who has screwed up this murder, and will continue to screw up his murders, until eventually, without even realizing it, he's gone kind of ax-crazy about murder and is just scrambling to reverse the spiraling chaos that's resulted from the very first screw-up that gave away that a "murder" had occurred at all. That, anyhow, is the effect, though it is also a movie where a camera operator is visible in another reflection for, like, eight full seconds; but let's allow a filmmaker his harmless fuck-ups, if most of what he's doing is going to be as interesting as this.
Our first "real" look at Grandison comes soon, as he takes his position in his broadcasting studio under the eyes of his producer Jane Moynihan (Constance Bennett), and, in the guise of relating another murder staged to look like a suicide, he openly gloats about how he got away with his, invoking his conceit of "the unsuspected," a murderer hypothetically stewing in the kind of guilt and fear that this sociopath, very obviously, is not. (People have basically always wrung their hands over true crime, it turns out.) With a dizzyingly show-off transition that plunges into the black hollow of a speaker that becomes a rail tunnel, we're subsequently allowed to roam, seemingly across all creation, as Grandison continues his grandiloquence, meeting a pair of individuals that may or may not fit Grandison's epithet of "unsuspected"—aboard the train Steven Howard (Ted North), and in an effects-mediated push through this moving train's window (frankly only half-successful, but successfully weird as hell, which is just as good), to the cheap hotel of a man named Press (Jack Lambert), who sits almost decaying in the undulating light, clearly harboring a secret that can be used against him.
Having completed his broadcast, Grandison heads home, where he finds a surprise birthday party waiting, as well as an uninvited guest we've already seen push his way in and do nothing but be incredibly, almost absurdly rude to everyone he's met. This is Steven Howard, and Steven hasn't come to wish Grandison a happy birthday, but to introduce himself to a man who is, functionally, his "father-in-law," and give him the good news that his ward, wealthy heiress Matilda Frazier, has married him. The bad news they each already know, however: Matilda died weeks ago aboard a burning cruise liner, and Grandison is obviously terribly suspicious that Steven is an imposter and a fraud, even if he retreats behind polite apologies when the young man asserts, apparently sincerely, that he wants nothing to do with Matilda's money. The worse news, from a certain perspective, is that Matilda (Joan Caulfield) did not die, and she's just gotten back to New York, and when Steven meets her at the airport, he acts very confused and dismayed that she doesn't remember they got married right before she got on that boat.
So that's a lot, I realize, to get to maybe twenty minutes into a 103 minute movie, and it's probably advisable to pause here, to make some general observations about it. First, Curtiz going to slightly settle down, stylistically, after so thoroughly walloping you over the head with style over the course of his film's prelude, but only slightly, because there are still several clever matches to come, and a great number of cool shots with Rains in them that include his reflection, to emphasize his duplicitous nature, and basically every shot in the movie is, at a minimum, going to be neat, and usually they're going to be exquisitely beautiful and interesting; and second, that the style Curtiz and Bredell have decided is best suited to their story is that of a house haunted by its own inhabitants, starting with that painting of a dead woman (even if she does get resurrected) hanging over the whole affair, and continuing with billowing, room-sectioning curtains shining with ethereal light and, often-associated, a pretty consistent strategy of moving mottling shadows, all aiming to bring something legitimately gothic out of a tale that, more basically, is just a murder investigation thriller about an affably loquacious asshole (and Bredell gets some nicely demonic pinpricks of fire into Rains's eyelighting, even amidst some challenging obscurity). Composer Max Steiner is playing along with ethereal noise between his doomier cues.
This follows Meredyth, who has (and to no small degree) amplified what a fucked up family Grandison's put together under this roof, escalating Althea's hungry shrewishness, magnifying Mathilda's devastated confusion, and altogether reinventing Oliver as a shambling drunk; Curtiz pulls good character turns out of the cast in support of this, including North as the new "addition" to the family (sadly a never-was, this was North's last-ever performance), who has evidently decided on Steven's behalf that affecting an air of sinister secrecy and smug condescension would endear him to this family, which it turns out is correct. Virtually the only "normal" in the whole movie is Bennett's second-best-in-show performance of a screwball archetype—so more like an abnormal that simply isn't menacing, but still slightly crazy on its own terms—that almost feels transported from 1933, thanks to some of the best material of MacDougall's snappy script, notably some rather pre-Code-feeling exchanges like, "Can I ride in with [you cops]? I'm always afraid to travel alone"/"You'll be completely safe with us"/"That's what I was afraid of." (I mean, I laughed.)
It's probably needless to say the best-in-show is Rains, for all the reasons you'd expect—literally all: it presumably won't surprise you if you've ever seen Rains play villains that he's playing this villain gay, which is more-or-less explicit in the script anyway, albeit largely separate from any of the things that make his queer evil—but especially in the way he's so pleased to play this game that he's sure he's going to win that he's barely remembering to not actually say, aloud, "of course, you'll never catch me."
But that has brought us to Meredyth's adaptation, and a plot that, like I said, is in-fucking-sane in any iteration, and the first time I watched the movie one of its pleasures was beholding in realtime how giddily this story was risking exploding into pure-ass nonsense, a peril that, having seen it twice now and having read the novel, I'm still not entirely sure it does avoid, though it's immense fun getting there. Without any express statement to back this up, I believe it's still clear that Armstrong must've been writing her novel in conversation with Gaslight (any version, but the most proximate is of course the 1944 MGM adaptation), and it's a little unfortunate that some of that gets lost in translation even if Meredyth or at least Curtiz must've been aware of it, given the homage of a near-exact replication of a shot from the 1944 Gaslight, only this time with our victimized woman seen through the metalwork of an electric chandelier and staring back for distinctive reasons. Armstrong, anyway, is doing something relatively sophisticated, discussion of which will "spoil"—I'm frankly not sure!—a "reveal" of the movie's plot, though Armstrong's plot starts with this all laid out before us, namely that Steven is (oh, get this) a lying fraud. Like, obviously he is, but I honestly don't know if it's the movie making it obvious or if it's just so preposterous one doesn't believe it, even in a movie's context. Whatever the case, what Armstrong's novel is doing is counterposing her hero's fake, faintly-idiotic "thriller" gaslighting—an "oh, we got married, guess it slipped your mind" bald-faced lie that her heroine doesn't ever remotely believe—with the kind of long-term, low-intensity degradation of one's sense of reality such as actually happens, inflicted upon Matilda by her dear "Grandy," a murderer now but a smiling parasite for her whole life, who's subtly convinced his ward that she's weak and ugly, and an appealing target only for the wealth that, not that he would be so vulgar as to mention this, is paying his bills.
Meredyth's adaptation doesn't make space for that—it could be as simple as the perennial movie problem of every actress being too hot to even credibly think herself unattractive, and Grandison is thus rather more generically exploiting her filial trust here—but the better news is that Matilda's reaction to Steven's crazy scheme is more cognitively plausible (Meredyth posits a traumatized nervous breakdown immediately preceding Matilda's return that Armstrong doesn't) when Armstrong only made it more psychologically so (Matilda much more clearly semi-consciously despises her "family" there, even if they're much more objectively detestable here; let's not forget these ghouls threw a fucking party when two members of their household had recently died).
For his part, Steven's goal was always simply to catch Grandison, and in any version I almost feel like they missed an opportunity—in a story always still chiefly "about" its own tortured convolutions—to make him a conman who did get way in over his head; for one thing, this would probably even be more sensible, but he's also a little dramatically inert as it stands, and one weird thing about either version is that neither quite establishes a clearly-cut "protagonist." That's even productive—the movie, perversely, marshals Rains's own dark charisma to fill that void—though, nettlesomely, the movie abandons something like the novel's damn point, deciding that although the novel climaxes with Matilda committing herself to a physically heroic action, the movie shall require her to half-stupidly faceplant into the danger that previously claimed the life of one of the novel's less-robust secondary characters. On the plus side, the thrills inhering to that scene as her "Grandy" paternally orchestrates her death are impeccable. (Curtiz being a vastly better and more flamboyant technical filmmaker than George Cukor, well, matters.)
So Meredyth breaks apart the beginning without changing its events, to plunge you as fully into the insane plot machinations as possible; she ends in the same place, at least, retaining the new outdoor bigness and particularized horror of the novel's climax (and Curtiz foreshadows it even better) even if the specific events are shifted; she most liberally departs in the middle, increasing the body count and innovating a technological terror based in Grandison's profession (he's wired his whole house for sound, controlled from his soundproofed and death-haunted private room at the heart of it) that gets very excitingly close to the perfect murder he keeps gesturing towards. But it's all terrific stuff here, button-down and mechanically-precise even if it's surging with an amazing messiness, the kind that, I think, necessarily removes it from the very top rank of its genre, but there are few thrillers that manage to make their messiness as structurally useful as The Unsuspected does, in form and structure always reflecting the hubris of a maniac afflicted with such self-confidence that he believes his meticulous genius renders him untouchable, when frankly I think the perfect murder would probably entail waiting until the victim was off the fucking phone first. And it ends on a wonderful note in this regard, something you'll have already predicted from the first scenes, even if you couldn't have begun predicting anything in the middle; this is likewise Meredyth's innovation, and you'd be disappointed if it didn't end that way, so thankfully it very much does.
Score: 9/10
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