Details

Release year: 1941

Storyline

A shy young heiress marries a charming gentleman, and soon begins to suspect he is planning to murder her.

Top credits

Directors

Alfred Hitchcock

Writers

Cast

Cary Grant — Johnnie Aysgarth
Joan Fontaine — Lina McLaidlaw
Cedric Hardwicke — General McLaidlaw
Nigel Bruce — Beaky

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Awards

1 win & 2 nominations

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Did you know

• Sir Alfred Hitchcock always claimed that he wanted his film to end with Lina being murdered by her husband, as in the novel. However, his biographer Patrick McGilligan, writing more than a quarter of a century after Hitchcock's death, reveals that there is some evidence that Hitchcock considered, quite early in preparing the film, changing the ending so that John Aysgarth seems to prove his innocence, as in the final movie. Furthermore, the historian and critic Michael Wood has intriguingly suggested that the ending of the film is presented in such a way that we don't actually know that Johnnie is telling the truth to Lina, and that he may simply be planning to murder her at a later date.

• In interviews, Sir Alfred Hitchcock said that an RKO executive ordered that all scenes in which Cary Grant appeared menacing be excised from the movie. When the cutting was completed, the movie ran only fifty-five minutes. The scenes were later restored, Hitchcock said, because he shot each piece of film so that there was only one way to edit them together properly. This is a technique called 'in-camera editing', a trick Hitchcock had already employed a year before during filming of Rebecca (1940), to prevent producer David O. Selznick from interfering with the final cut of the movie.

• Joan Fontaine's performance in this movie is the only Oscar-winning performance that Sir Alfred Hitchcock directed. She was the last surviving credited cast member when she died in 2013.