The Unsuspected (Michael Curtiz Productions, Warner Bros., 1947)

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

I wanted to watch last night’s Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” showing of a 1947 film called The Unsuspected, produced as well as directed by Michael Curtiz and the first movie he made under an in-house independent deal with his long-time employers, Warner Bros., by which he’d put up half the money, Warners would put up the other half, and they’d split the profits (if any) equally but Curtiz would have full artistic control. Curtiz had been a director in his native Hungary when he got a contract offer from Warner Bros. in 1928 on the strength of a Biblical romance he’d made in Hungary called The Moon of Israel. They were about to film Noah’s Ark and wanted a director with Biblical “cred,” and though Noah’s Ark was a flop Curtiz stayed on at Warners and churned out gangster movies, thrillers, Westerns, swashbucklers, tearjerkers and just about everything else studio heads Jack Warner and Hal Wallis threw at him – including at least one acknowledged masterpiece, Casablanca.

For his first semi-independent production Curtiz decided on a dark crime story in the genre later known as film noir and in particular wanted to rip off 20th Century-Fox’s hit Laura (1944). So he bought a novel by Charlotte Armstrong called The Unsuspected that either already contained elements of Vera Caspary’s source novel for Laura or had those added to the story by screenwriters Bess Meredyth (Mrs. Michael Curtiz) and Ranald MacDougall. The script almost seems to be following a checklist of Laura templates: a vain and self-important celebrity who regularly broadcasts on radio and turns out to be the murderer; a woman who’s thought dead and suddenly turns up alive; a portrait of her that hangs over a fireplace and features prominently in the action; and a killer who creates a phony alibi for himself by recording his radio broadcast on a transcvription disc and claiming he couldn’t have committed the murder because he was doing his show at the time. (This gimmick was also used in the “B”movie The Falcon in San Francisco, made between Laura and The Unsuspected in 1945, with Elisha Cook, Jr. as the killer D.J.) It was also interesting how many elements of The Unsuspected got recycled in the two Columbo episodes I’d seen the night before, including the killer (a celebrity) faking a murder of a woman to look like suicide and the use of recording equipment; the central character, Victor Grandison (Claude Rains), has his living room bugged so he can record his guests’ conversations on his disc recorder any time he wants to.

Curtiz planned his film for an all-star cast, including Orson Welles as the killer true-crime radio host; Laura star Dana Andrews as the “nice” male lead; and Joan Fontaine as the female lead – but Andrews and Fontaine were both out of his league salary-wise and Welles didn’t want to do the movie unless he could also direct it. So Curtiz got Claude Rains – obvious casting for a radio host since in his first important film, The Invisible Man, he’d created a spectacular characterization with his voice alone, (Rains made a total of 10 films with Curtiz, most famously as the opportunistic police chief in Casablanca,) For his female lead – Matilda Frazier, Grandison’s niece – he got Joan Caulfield, who until then had mostly played anodyne ingenues in musicals and for his male lead he got Ted North, who’d just made a film at RKO, The Devil Thumbs a Ride. Curtiz changed his first name to Michael so he could bill him with an “Introducing … ” credit, though ironically The Unsuspected turned out to be his last film. Fortunately Curtiz was able to fill out his cast list with excellent supporting actors like Constance Bennett (as Grandison’s long-suffering producer, Jane Moynihan), Hurd Hatfield (as lounge-lizard Oliver Keane, the equivalent of the Vincent Price character in Laura) and Audrey Totter (as Althea Keane, who seduced Oliver away from Matilda and married him).

The film opens with a mysterious character named Roslyn being strangled in Grandison’s living room and then hanged from his chandelier to make it look like she killed herself. The police, headed by Lt. Richard Donovan (character actor Fred Clark in his first film – later he’d usually play villains but in this one he’s a good guy, albeit one so totally tied to Grandison at first I thought he was a private detective on Grandison’s payroll and only later did I realize he was a cop; also I suspect his character name was a screenwriters’ in-joke because the real Richard Donovan had headed the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, in World War II). Steve Howard (Michael North) turns up and claims to have married Melinda just before she went on a vacation cruise to Lisbon (one remembers the significance of Lisbon in Curtiz’s Casablanca!) and the boat sank on its return trip. She was reported missing and believed dead, but she was rescued by a Brazilian fishing boa and its crew off the shore of Rio de Janeiro and flown back to the U.S. Matilda has no recollection of having married Steve even though he takes her to the justice of the peace who supposedly married them, and when they go on dinner dates the waiters address her as “Mrs. Howard.” Midway through the movie Steven admits to Matilda that they’re not really married – he faked it as a way of getting into Grandison’s inner circle to investigate the death of Roslyn, a relative of his – but by then she’s started to fall in love with him for real.

Grandison, for reasons the writers don’t do too much to explain, decides to eliminate Oliver and Althea, shooting Althea and then planting the gun on Oliver and sending him out in a car whose brake lines he has severed so the car will crash and kill him. When the police find Oliver’s body they do a ballistics test and determine the gun found on Oliver killed Althea, so they assume what Grandison wanted them to assume: Oliver shot Althea and then died in an accident. Later Grandison decides he needs to eliminate Steve and Matilda, too, so she has Matilda write a suicide note (she thinks she’s just taking dictation for one of his broadcasts), then feeds her drugged champagne and clubs Steven over the head. Then, in an unusually macabre murder scene anticipating the early James Bond movies from the 1960’s, Grandison has a crook friend of his load Steve’s unconscious but still living body into a crate and drive it in a pickup to the local dump – only Matilda comes to in time to warn the cops, who trace the truck, follow it to the dump, and arrive just in time to stop the heavy-equipment operator from dropping the trunk containing Steve’s body into the flames. It ends with Grandison being arrested in the middle of rehearsing his radio show – we can tell it’s a rehearsal because the chairs for the studio audience are empty, and I wish they’d anticipated Dick Wolf’s gimmick of arresting the perp in the middle of a public broadcast.

The Unsuspected is actually quite a good movie; though its plot makes virtually no sense it’s a triumph of film noir style over substance. Curtiz borrowed cinematographer Woody Bredell from Universal because he’d liked Bredell’s work on Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), and for his “special effects photographer” he had Robert Burks, who would later become a full-fledged cinematographer in his own right and shoot all but one of Alfred Hitchcock’s films between Strangers on a Train (1951) and Marnie (1964). The result is a visual feast for film noir devotees even though the plot makes little sense and the borrowings from Laura are all too obvious – though there are nice in-jokes in the script, notably when Oliver Keane jokes on Matilda’s return that she hasn’t aged any but her painting has: a reference to Hurd Hatfield’s star-making role in MGM’s The Picture of Dorian Gray two years before!