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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 18 |
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BOOK & FILM |
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THE UNSUSPECTED |
 CLAUDE RAINS with JOAN CAULFIELD |
Rains and Curtiz elevate
complex Armstrong tale
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Charlotte Armstrong was one of the most prolific and popular mystery writers of the 1940s. She never created a running series detective, contributing instead to the rising tide of the suspense or thriller genre that stretches back to the old dark house novels of Mary Roberts Rinehart and her many imitators.
Among her most successful novels was "The Unsuspected," which was first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1945, then came out in 1946 as a book. Warner Bros. grabbed the film rights and turned it over to one of its most reliable in-house contract directors, the great Michael Curtiz, whose previous works included "Casblanca," "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and many other classic films.
The story is almost impossibly contrived poppycock with plot holes big enough for Godzilla to skip right through without touching the edges. Still, Armstrong was an engaging writer whose dialogue was snappy and her leading character, radio mystery host Luther Grandison, was a fascinating character, even if all the rest of the characters were banal stereotypes.
The novel falls into the "inverted mystery" category because we know from the get-go that Grandison is a murderer and that his "ward" Mathilda, who's heiress to a large fortune, is in terrible jeopardy the longer she stays around her beloved "Grandy."
If Alfred Hitchcock had been handed the story to film, he'd have thrown out most of the silliness Armstrong wove into her story, starting with the nonsense about Mathilda being lost at sea and believed dead, then miraculously turning up in mid-plot. Worse yet, she suffers from amnesia and can't remember the nice young man she met and married just before going to sea.
When Curtiz got busy filming
"The Unsuspected," he left all that stuff in and tried
to make the best of it. The result was a film the critics generally
disliked with various degrees of intensity--and one that's been
largely forgotten by movie fans since it's not available on home
video and only occasionally turns up on cable television on the
TCM (Turner Classic Movies) channel because it reposes in the
large WB library the Turner network controls.
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1947 movie version of "The Unsuspected." |
My personal feeling is that "The Unsuspected" is a much-neglected gem, despite the dumb plot twists that plague it. It has two great assets: A bravura performance by one of the all-time great film actors, Claude Rains, as "Grandy" and Curtiz' vrey stylish production, which gives it not only a seductive 1940s noir look, but also gives us a lot of scenes in the now-vanished world of big network radio, a special attraction to me and, I'm sure, to all old-time radio buffs.
Rains would have been a perfect radio mystery host, so the scenes where we see him doing his radio broadcasts in the studio are sheer magic. His smooth, cultured voice is soothing and seductive. I can imagine listening to him spin his mystery tales all night, so it's quite easy to picture him as the sort of celebrity host Luther Grandison is supposed to be in post-war America.
Curtiz also gives the film a genuinely creepy look from the start, where we witness the murder of Grandison's secretary by a shadowy figure who strangles her, then hangs her from the chandelier to make it look like suicide.
Grandison has two female "wards." One of them is sexy, naughty Althea, who's played with vigor by the young Audrey Totter. She's married to a lush and is a sharp contrast to the sweet and innocent Mathilda, when she finally shows up. Mathilda is played by the gloriously beautiful young Joan Caulfield, whose primary defender is the "husband" she can't remember, played by Michael North.
"Grandy" has the ego of all great master criminals, so he naturally wants to defy police detective Fred Clark by committing the "perfect crime," then re-enacting it on his radio show without getting caught--the ultimate "in your face" murder that the cops will never realize is the real thing, re-staged.
"The Unsuspected" also has a race-to-the-finish-line ending in which the hero is locked up in a trunk that's about to be dumped into an incinerator at the city dump while the police rush to the rescue.
Armstrong is not much read today because her plots are gimmicky and don't hold enough water for today's "reality"-trained readers. But "The Unsuspected," flawed as it is by its storyline, remains a fascinating film because of the great Claude Rains performance and the stylish Michael Curtiz direction that moves us along so rapidly that we don't fall into any of the gaping holes in the plot.
It deserves resurrection on home video, the sooner the better.
©2004 by Ron Miller.
The photos and advertising reproductions are courtesy of Turner
Classic Movies and Warner Bros.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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