Suspense (King Brothers Productions/Monogram, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9:15 my husband Charles and I watched the “Noir Alley” showcase on Turner Classic Movies and saw a really quirky movie that’s long been a special favorite of mine: Suspense, a 1946 production from Monogram that showed the studio getting ready to move into the big time. They’d hit it big in 1945 when producers Maurice and Frank King (their original last name was Kozinski) did a biopic of John Dillinger after the Production Code Administration had finally lifted their flat and absolute ban on movies about the infamous outlaw whose striking resemblance to Humphrey Bogart probably “made” Bogart’s career since he became a star on both stage and film playing the Dillinger-esque Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. With Bogart tied up at major studios and too old for the part by then, they grabbed Lawrence Tierney for the lead and Anne Jeffreys as his moll, spent $65,000 on the production and had a huge hit. So Monogram president Steve Broidy green-lighted the King brothers to make a $1.1-million extravaganza featuring Monogram’s ice-skating star, Belita (actually a British woman named Maria Belita Jepson-Turner who competed for Britain in the 1936 Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany -- though she lost the gold medal to Sonja Henie of Norway, winning her third consecutive Olympic figure-skating gold and setting up the situation -- as well as generating a lot of stock footage for -- Henie’s film debut, One in a Million). Monogram signed Belita to compete with Henie at 20th Century-Fox and Vera Hruba Ralston at Republic, ice-skating queens who had parlayed their fame on ice into movie stardom doing elaborate production numbers on skates in films with paper-thin plots. Belita’s first two Monogram movies, Silver Skates and Lady, Let’s Dance, were very much in the mold of Henie’s films, but for her third Monogram film she, the King Brothers and screenwriter Philip Yordan decided to strike out and feature her in a film noir.

When I first saw this film in the early 1980’s I was astonished that, unlike Henie and Ralston, Belita could actually act; in Suspense (originally called Glamour Girl until the Kings and their superiors at Monogram realized that would seem like just another skating musical instead of a major departure) she plays Roberta Elva, a hard-bitten skate performer who’s married her impresario, Frank Leonard (Albert Dekker). She’s become the star of his “Ice Palace” revue but she’s not particularly happy off-rink; she suggests world-weariness by delivering her lines in a low tremolo much like the one Barbara Stanwyck used in Double Indemnity and she drifts into a sort-of affair with fleeing gangster Joe Morgan (Barry Sullivan, second-billed). Joe has come to L.A. because both New York and Chicago have become too “hot” for him (for reasons screenwriter Yordan carefully keeps ambiguous). He looks up Max (George E. Stone), an old friend from New York who’s running a shooting gallery at a carnival midway across from Frank Leonard’s Ice Palace. Indeed, director Frank Tuttle opens Suspense with a shot that still packs a wallop: a young blonde woman wields a pistol and threatens to shoot someone, and then the camera pulls back to show she’s at Max’s shooting gallery and all she’s about to shoot is a metal duck target. The girl is Ronnie (a surprisingly effective adult Bonita Granville), an old flame of Joe’s from his days in Chicago, and Yordan proves himself a disciple of Chekhov in “planting” her this early even before Joe has landed a job selling peanuts at Leonard’s theatre and has started to lust after Roberta.

I’m sure I had a tape of this on VHS and had probably shown it for Charles before, but he hadn’t remembered seeing it and, while he liked the film overall, he had problems with it. It’s billed as a film noir but he argued it was really a pretty standard romantic triangle -- though it becomes more noir-ish as it progresses -- and it’s also a late entry in that odd sub-genre of romantic melodramas from the 1930’s like Other Men’s Women and Dante’s Inferno in which a proletarian rises to riches and social prominence only to lose it all and end up back where the writers, with a surprising degree of class prejudice, tell us he “belongs.” Joe Morgan gets a job selling peanuts at the ice arena, only to win an instant promotion when he watches Frank rehearse Roberta’s latest stunt -- skating through a paper-covered hoop with the paper tearing as she bursts through -- and suggests a variant that will make the stunt more dangerous and thrilling. Instead of just a hoop, he suggests it be ringed with swords that could cut her to pieces if she aimed her leap wrong. Though for Belita’s sake the actual knives were made of rubber, it still looks scary as hell on screen and serves as the climax of a series of skating dances including an Afro-Cuban number (with Miguelito Valdes, Desi Arnaz’s principal rival in the Latin singer/bandleader department in the mid-1940’s: both of them recorded “Babalu,” and though he wasn’t as scary in the opening cries Valdes phrased the rest of the song more sensitively) and a solo skate ballet called “Introspection” Belita insisted on being in the film or she would walk off it.

Yordan’s script is full of brittle wisecracks as well as classic film noir situations, though it suffers (as Charles pointed out) from the characters’ lack of moral ambiguity: under her hard-bitten, ferociously independent exterior Belita is a good girl at heart; Barry Sullivan plays Joe Morgan on one note of thuggishness throughout (ironically the King brothers had discovered two finer noir actors who could have played the part better, Alan Ladd and Robert Mitchum, but by 1946 both of them had decamped to major studios and were out of Monogram’s price range); and only Albert Dekker as Leonard has any moral ambiguity, descending from exploitative but still halfway decent guy to revenge figure after he picks up on Joe’s growing attachment to Belita. The film’s turning point comes when Leonard suggests to his skating star that they return to the cabin in the mountains which he owns and where they had their honeymoon. Only Joe Morgan crashes their party and Frank responds by getting one of the three hunting rifles he has on his wall and stalking Joe with it, but the shot goes wild, causes an avalanche of snow and apparently burying Frank with it. Only as Joe and Roberta continue their partnership and reopen the ice shows, poltergeist-like things start happening around the theatre that suggest Frank is still alive -- including the sudden appearance of Frank’s pipe, which he had custom-made and is therefore unique. Frank ultimately turns up alive and determined for revenge, but Joe kills Frank and stuffs his body into a roll-top desk which he has taken out and burned (apparently sometime or other he’d seen The Front Page), replacing it with a new one and getting Roberta’s suspicions up.

She ultimately cuts off her relationship, such as it ever was, with Joe (we’ve seen him grab her and plant kisses on her, to which she reacted neither by yielding or trying to fight him off -- apparently she’s accepted dealing with men’s amorous attractions as the price she has to pay for having a career), and he gets himself shot to death by Ronnie (ya remember Ronnie?), the girl from Chicago who kills him for rejecting her in favor of Roberta. Though it has its unevennesses and could have been even better than it is, Suspense is a quite exciting noir thriller, with Belita’s big skate dances more smoothly integrated into the film than you’d expect and the typical noir atmosphere of gloom and doom hanging over it. Where Charles thought it went wrong was in the casting of Barry Sullivan, a good actor but one who plays the character as too much of an unrelieved thug to work as a noir protagonist -- having just re-read my post on the 1948 film Sorry, Wrong Number and noted that I’d said John Garfield would have been a better choice for the male lead than Burt Lancaster, I found myself wishing it would have been Garfield instead of Sullivan here: Garfield could play a thug and make you at least understand him, while Sullivan comes off as an out-and-out boor and one wonders why Roberta is willing even to consider having sex with him.