The Unsuspected

The real star of Michael Curtiz’s The Unsuspected is the dazzling lighting and cinematography. Luxuriously shadow-dense and imaginatively shot at every turn, the film deserves greater recognition as a visual paragon of the noir style. Claude Rains stars as Victor Grandison, host of a true crime radio show who’s had two women in his life recently perish: his wealthy ward Matilda Frazier (Joan Caulfield) drowned in a boating accident, and his secretary Roslyn just hanged herself in his home office. When Matilda’s discovered to be alive and returned home, a maze of new tensions and suspicions emerges, leading to (another?) murder in the household. Audrey Totter plays Grandison’s scheming niece Althea, whose alcoholic husband Oliver (Hurd Hatfield) had almost married Matilda, and Constance Bennett plays radio producer Jane Moynihan, who seems to know far more about the recent deaths than she’s telling. Despite a fairly complicated plot that might bend a little too far at times, Curtiz directs with semi-Gothic gusto, assembling fun plot devices like secret recordings, short-term memory loss, a struggle around a trash incinerator, and a fantastic out-of-control car flying down hillside highways and right off a cliff. Note the famous scene at the Peekskill hotel where the neon sign outside the window flashes only the last four letters. K-I-L-L