That Painting in Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941)

  In Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) when the police question Lina McLaidlaw about her husband’s friend’s suspicious death in Paris, the younger cop twice stands riveted by a painting on the wall. Given Hitchcock’s fervid attention to detail, the logical question is: What’s the point of that painting?

It’s a 1931 Picasso — Cubist — image of a tabletop with a pitcher and fruit on a stand. It’s the modernity that puzzles the cop, who may find there another mystery to be solved. Like Lina’s father, the cops are figures of traditional style and values disturbed by the apparently looser and less grounded modernity, in art as in life. 

That painting is the only modern work in an array of traditional images. Conventional landscapes slip by in the other interior backgrounds. Its main antithesis is the stern large painting of Lina’s  military father that looms over her engagement to Johnny, shadows the couple when it’s his disappointing bequest to them and reappears behind her when she learns of Johnny’s apparent involvement in their friend Beaky’s (convenient) death.  

More modern than that record in oil are the newspaper images and scenes of Johnny’s high society life. The mousey spinster Lina is against her will drawn to his exuberant public life among the horsey set, first in a society photo then when we watch him shot again. The fast set recorded by the galloping press is an affront to the traditional oils.

That Cubist still-life is an even more modern break from tradition. It’s an image of shattered forms and norms, reflecting a looser, faster, more dangerous life — like Johnny’s two threatening car-rides, his scandalous love and business lives and his prodigal wastes of money. 

There’s a curious human equivalent to the  modern painting at the crime novelist’s dinner party. A woman with a tight-bunned Germanic face wears a man’s formal suit and a black bow-tie. We learn nothing more about her than that image. But in her gender ambiguity she tacitly challenges the societal norms as the Cubist painting does traditional art. 

In that scene Johnny apparently is excited by the possibility of a detection-free poison, that at least feeds Lina’s paranoia if not his financial daydream. The non-binary woman personifies that freedom from norms. 

In fact, that Cubist painting feels especially intrusive and disturbing given the film’s markedly British tone, setting and feel. It’s the most un-British element in the film. The opening credits appear against a drawing of a standard British countryside. Lina’s parents, friends and society smack of the British, with her novelist friend Isabel clearly an Agatha Christie surrogate.

    This radical Britishness seems apt because Hitchcock made Suspicion one year — and two features — after his departure to America for Rebecca. It has the feel of a homecoming, a retreat from the brash America — where Cubism and other forms of artistic and cultural relativism were in full flower. That radically modern painting seems a quiet personal touch from an outsider — perhaps another form of his cameo appearance. 

Hitch actually appears mailing a letter from a village post office. As he was ensconced in America by then, the film was a kind of letter home — steeped in the home vernacular — from the outside world of America and the new European art.