Directed by: James Whale
Starring: Warren William, Gail Patrick, Ralph Morgan, William Lundigan, Constance Moore

STORY

District Attorney Jim Stowell believes in the law.

More precisely, Jim Stowell believes in his version of the law.

He is ambitious, relentless and frighteningly proud of his record as a prosecutor. Every murderer he sends to execution becomes another victory, another demonstration that justice has been served.

And Jim keeps score.

On his desk sits a macabre little abacus decorated with miniature skulls. Each skull represents another person he has helped send to death.

Eleven so far.

Jim intends to keep counting.

But while he has become extraordinarily good at judging the lives of strangers, he has stopped paying attention to the life waiting for him at home.

His wife, Lucy, has become increasingly accustomed to coming second to Jim's cases. He works through dinners. He forgets important occasions. Even remembering Lucy's birthday requires assistance from his wonderfully capable secretary, Sharpy.

Then Jim takes on another murder prosecution.

This time the defendant is Professor Shaw MacAllen, a respected man who discovered his wife with another man and killed her in a jealous rage.

To Jim, the case is simple.

Murder is murder.

MacAllen must pay.

Jim has little patience for explanations about passion, jealousy, emotional collapse or what can happen to an otherwise rational human being when suspicion takes control.

Until suspicion comes home.

Rumors begin circulating that Lucy may be spending too much time with a younger man named Phil.

Jim initially has every reason to dismiss the gossip.

But then he starts looking.

And once he starts looking...

he starts seeing.

A conversation becomes suspicious.

A meeting becomes evidence.

An innocent gesture becomes betrayal.

The prosecutor who has built his career constructing cases against other people begins constructing one against his own wife.

Suddenly MacAllen's crime no longer seems quite so incomprehensible.

Jim knows exactly what jealousy feels like now.

It burns.

It consumes.

And worst of all, it convinces the person experiencing it that suspicion is the same thing as truth.

The parallels between the man Jim is prosecuting and the man Jim is becoming grow increasingly terrifying.

The district attorney who could calmly demand punishment for a jealous husband now finds himself contemplating the very violence he condemned.

And the question at the center of Wives Under Suspicion becomes far more disturbing than simply whether Lucy has been unfaithful.

What happens when the man who judges everyone else is finally forced to judge himself?

James Whale takes a domestic melodrama and steadily tightens it into a psychological crime story about jealousy, hypocrisy and the dangerous certainty of a man who has spent too long believing he is incapable of being wrong.

Because sometimes suspicion doesn't uncover the truth.

Sometimes...

suspicion creates its own truth.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS
YES — THAT JAMES WHALE!

The director of Wives Under Suspicion is none other than James Whale, the filmmaker behind some of Universal's most legendary horror pictures: Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and the magnificent Bride of Frankenstein.

But Whale was far more than a horror director.

Here, there is no monster staggering through a laboratory and no invisible man creating chaos.

The monster is jealousy.

And Whale understands perfectly well how to make it frightening.

JAMES WHALE ACTUALLY DIRECTED THIS STORY TWICE

Here's a wonderful AINTOID:

Wives Under Suspicion was a remake of Universal's 1933 film The Kiss Before the Mirror.

And who directed the earlier movie?

James Whale.

Whale was therefore given the unusual opportunity to return to essentially the same dramatic material only five years later and reinterpret it with a new cast and screenplay. The earlier film was itself adapted from a play by Ladislas Fodor.

A director remaking another director's movie is common.

A director remaking his own movie?

Now THAT belongs in AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS.

AND THERE'S A MORGAN BROTHERS CONNECTION!

It gets better.

The 1933 The Kiss Before the Mirror starred Frank Morgan — the future Wizard in The Wizard of Oz.

Five years later, Wives Under Suspicion featured Frank Morgan's brother, Ralph Morgan, as Professor Shaw MacAllen, the accused murderer whose actions become the disturbing mirror for Jim Stowell's own jealousy.

So James Whale remade his own film...

and a Morgan brother turned up in each version.

THAT is an AINTOID.

WARREN WILLIAM — THE PRE-CODE ROGUE GETS SERIOUS

Classic-film lovers know Warren William as one of the great personalities of Pre-Code Hollywood.

Smooth, sophisticated and frequently deliciously unscrupulous, William made a specialty of playing charming operators, businessmen, lawyers and rogues who could talk their way into—or out of—almost anything.

Here he gets something darker.

Jim Stowell begins as a man supremely confident in his ability to determine guilt and punishment.

Watching that certainty collapse when emotion enters his own life gives William one of the film's most interesting challenges.

The prosecutor becomes psychologically trapped inside his own prosecution.

THAT SKULL ABACUS TELLS YOU EVERYTHING

You really don't need a speech explaining Jim Stowell.

Just look at his desk.

After an execution, Jim uses an abacus whose markers are miniature skulls to keep count of the death sentences he has obtained. AFI's synopsis records that he has already counted eleven and calculates that he has twenty-four more to go.

It is grotesque.

It is darkly funny.

And it tells us immediately how thoroughly prosecution has become a scoreboard for this man.

James Whale could make an object do a tremendous amount of storytelling.

WHALE BROUGHT IT IN EARLY — AND UNDER BUDGET

Here's something every independent filmmaker can appreciate.

According to AFI, modern sources report that Wives Under Suspicion began production with a $250,000 budget.

Whale completed it four days ahead of schedule and $30,000 under budget.

AIN SALUTES YOU, MR. WHALE.

Because nearly ninety years later, independent filmmakers everywhere are reading that sentence and thinking:

FOUR DAYS EARLY AND UNDER BUDGET?!

Give the man another picture!

GAIL PATRICK WAS PERFECTLY CAST AS THE WOMAN BEING WATCHED

Gail Patrick had one of those extraordinary classic-Hollywood faces that could suggest elegance, intelligence and mystery almost simultaneously.

Audiences may recognize her from films including My Man Godfrey and Stage Door.

As Lucy, that sophistication works beautifully because Jim begins interpreting what he sees rather than what he actually knows.

Lucy doesn't have to transform into a femme fatale.

Jim's imagination does the work for her.

And that puts the audience in the uncomfortable position of watching suspicion alter a man's perception of the woman he supposedly loves.

BEFORE FILM NOIR HAD A NAME...

Wives Under Suspicion arrived in 1938, several years before the cycle we now call classic American film noir fully emerged.

Yet look at what Whale is playing with:

Murder.

Sexual jealousy.

Psychological obsession.

Moral ambiguity.

A powerful man losing control.

A marriage poisoned by suspicion.

A protagonist moving frighteningly close to committing the very crime he believes he understands.

It isn't difficult to see the shadows of the noir world coming.

And with cinematographer George Robinson behind the camera, the film carries another connection to Universal's rich tradition of atmospheric black-and-white filmmaking. AFI credits Robinson as director of photography.

THE TITLE WAS ALMOST MUCH SIMPLER

The film carried the working title Suspicion before becoming Wives Under Suspicion.

Three years later, of course, Alfred Hitchcock would release a rather famous film called Suspicion.

Probably just as well Universal changed this one.

THE AIN REASON

Wives Under Suspicion belongs on Absolutely Indie Network because this is precisely the kind of movie that can disappear behind the enormous reputations surrounding it.

Say James Whale, and people immediately think:

Frankenstein.

The Invisible Man.

Bride of Frankenstein.

But a Treasure Chest of Entertainment shouldn't merely show audiences the titles they already know.

It should open another drawer.

And suddenly there is James Whale directing Warren William and Gail Patrick in a psychological crime drama about a prosecutor who discovers that judging murder from the courtroom is considerably easier than understanding the emotions that can produce it.

That is a discovery.

And underneath its murder plot, Wives Under Suspicion asks a surprisingly enduring question about certainty.

Jim Stowell believes he knows people.

He believes he knows criminals.

He believes he knows justice.

He believes he knows his wife.

Then jealousy enters the room...

and suddenly he doesn't know anything.

The man who has spent his career demanding that other people answer for their actions must finally confront the possibility that he is capable of exactly what he condemns.

That is more than crime melodrama.

That is human nature under interrogation.

And for AIN, there's one final irresistible touch:

James Whale made the movie ahead of schedule and under budget.

A master filmmaker. Warren William. Gail Patrick. Murder. Jealousy. Suspicion. A wonderfully macabre skull abacus.

Open the Treasure Chest.

This one belongs inside.