Wives Under Suspicion (Universal, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I picked up the next two items in the James Whale filmography, which we’ve been working through in chronological order: Wives Under Suspicion and The Man in the Iron Mask. Wives Under Suspicion was James Whale’s final film under the contract he had signed with Universal in 1933 when he was at the height of his critical and commercial success and the father-and-son team of Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr. still controlled the studio. Whale’s standing at the studio collapsed when his massive production of the musical Show Boat in 1936 was the final straw that broke the back of the Laemmles’ Universal; as Whale overran his budget and schedule, the Laemmles had to go hat-in-hand to hedge-fund owner J. Cheever Cowdin for the money to finish it and keep the studio afloat. The deal allowed Cowdin and his hedge fund to take over Universal in a forced sale if the Laemmles couldn’t pay back the loan on time, which they didn’t – though, ironically, when it was finally released under the new regime Cowdin installed Show Boat was a blockbuster hit.

Whale’s next film, an adaptation of Erich Marka Remarque’s The Road Back – his post-war sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front – again ran over budget and schedule and was further sabotaged by Universal’s new production chief, Charles Rogers, who caved in to pressure from the Nazi German government to take out most of the film’s anti-militaristic content (though what’s left is a flawed but still powerful drama that’s particularly good at dramatizing the returning veterans’ struggle with what now would be called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD). Whale was also Gay, and as open about it as you could be in 1937, which hadn’t bothered the Laemmles (Whale biographer James Curtis claims that one reason he often used British actors was not only that he felt more at home with them culturally, being British himself, but also that they didn’t care that he was Gay – their attitude was, “A lot of theatre people are Gay. Who cares?” – while U.S. actors were more likely to be homophobic and express disgust at working for a Gay director.

Wives Under Suspicion was a remake of Whale’s 1933 courtroom melodrama The Kiss Before the Mirror (adding Whale to the list of directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra and William Wyler, who remade their own movies), in which a defense attorney in early-1930’s Vienna (played by Frank Morgan, who’s best known today for the title role in The Wizard of Oz, whose performance in quite a different role will dumbfound Wizard fans) defends an old friend (Paul Lukas) who shot his wife and killed her when he realized she was having an affair. The original title came because he realized she was cheating on him when he saw her primping before her elaborate set of bedroom mirrors, and when he kissed her she reared back in revulsion and accused him of spoiling her makeup. This let him know that she was making herself up for another man, not him. The attorney then finds out that his own wife is stepping out on him similarly, and he hatches a plot to kill her after he wins his case and therefore establishes legal justification for such an action.

Wives Under Suspicion was scripted by Myles Connolly from the original Austrian play by Ladislas Fodor, and Connolly made one intriguing change in the premise: in his version the attorney (Warren William) is a prosecutor, a district attorney who has an abacus-like rack of 35 miniature skulls in his office that represent the master criminals of his city (Connolly reset the story in the United States but didn’t specify what American city it takes place in) whom he’s prosecuting one by one. The latest scalp in his collection is Joseph Patterson (Matty Fain), who gets convicted and executed in the opening scenes – which have an intriguing and ironic parallel to Frankenstein: a series of elaborate electrical gadgets in which a human body is plugged, this time not to bring it to life but to kill it. This time the murderer Jim Stowell (Warren William) is prosecuting is Shaw MacAllen (Ralph Morgan, brother of Frank Morgan, star of the original The Kiss Before the Mirror), a hapless guy from a well-to-do family who became a political science professor and got disowned by his family for marrying a lower-class woman who turned out to be a “manizer” as well. Shaw finally caught his wife when he kissed her as she primped before the mirror and she reared back with revulsion, though this time around Ralph Morgan merely narrates this in a confession William has recorded – Whale didn’t get to show this action on screen in a flashback as he had in 1933.

William locks the record in a safe in his home and says he won’t reveal it at trial unless the defense pleads insanity, which they do – a goof because if court procedure were the same in 1938 as it is now, the prosecution would be legally obligated to share all the evidence they had with the defense, and if the D.A. tried to pull the stunt William plans in the film, the recorded confession would almost certainly be ruled inadmissible and the D.A. would risk having the judge declare a mistrial. The premise of the film is that Stowell has been ignoring his wife Lucy (Gail Patrick), forgetting her birthday (though his long-suffering secretary “Sharpy,” played by a woman named Cecil Cunningham in what’s clearly the voice-of-reason role in this film, remembers it and sends Lucy a pair of earrings in Jim’s name) and constantly breaking dinner dates with her to work on ine case after another. Given how much strongly the Production Code was being enforced in 1938 than it was in 1933, Connolly had to fudge some important plot points, including making Lucy completely innocent of any intention to have an affair. The man she’s suspected of having the affair with is Phil (William Lundigan), but Lucy is only seeing him because he’s dating her best friend Elizabeth (Constance Moore) and she’s trying to get Elizabeth to marry him despite her uncertainty, mostly about his job prospects because he’s a graduate student in college and Elizabeth is worried about his job prospects after he finishes. (To add to the irony, Connolly made Phil one of Professor MacManus’s students.)

Eventually Jim stalks Lucy and Phil and aims a gun at her when the two are together, though he doesn’t shoot. Instead he destroys MacManus’s recorded confession and agrees to plead the charge down from murder to manslaughter, and he and Lucy eventually end up taking their long-delayed vacation even though a big case is breaking as they leave. From the opening credits to William’s presence in the cast list and a big but dramatically irrelevant scene in which Patterson’s cousin returns from Mexico to gun Jim Stowell down, Wives Under Suspicion looks like a Warner Bros. production in exile – indeed, it’s closer to the usual Warners style than the film Whale actually made there, The Great Garrick – and there’s virtually nothing of Whale’s style in the movie. There are some interesting camera compositions (the cinematographer is George Robinson, who shot some of the best Universal horror movies in the post-Laemmle “New Universal” era as well as some of the studio’s best films noir) that suggest that had Whale been able to keep his career going (as it turned out, it petered out after just two more features, the last of which Whale wasn’t allowed to finish), he might have become a very interesting noir director. Whale’s visual flair, his knowledge of the expressionistic “German style” of cinematography and set design, and his love of moral ambiguity and fascination with characters who are literally not what they seem (as a Gay working-class Englishman who had reinvented himself as a faux aristocrat, Whale was clearly drawn to stories about imposture) should have enabled him to make a comeback in the film noir era.