Classic Horrors Club

The movie Suspect (1960) was as much an experiment as the ones its characters perform. Producer/directors John and Roy Boulting wanted to “raise the level” of the supporting feature, or B-movie, shown at the bottom of a double bill. With the budget of a supporting feature, they completed the film in 17 days, hoping to prove that “the acting, writing, photography and direction need not be of the quality usually associated with such films.”

Considering most of the films we discuss for this blog are B-movies, I’m not sure that the experiment succeeded. It’s no better or worse than, say, the last Cushing film we discussed, Cone of Silence. It’s a slow burn, for sure, talky but not boring, that erupts with an exciting climax. It’s not steady enough to be the proverbial snowball gaining speed as it goes, though. Think of the snowball as hitting a bump, flying into the air, then suddenly increasing its velocity as it lands.

While Peter Cushing is his reliably wonderful self, it’s Thorley Walters as Mr. Prince who steals the show. He leads a shadowy government agency keeping tabs on the release of information about eradicating plague because it could become a security risk for the country. With a few eccentric habits and surface level befuddlement, he’s the most fully-realized character, hiding his true power beneath an everyman persona that keeps his suspects off guard.

This plot also provides a more fundamental conflict between science (Cushing’s Professor Sewell) and government (Raymond Huntley’s Sir George Gatling.) Both pontificate about implications of this and that in their specifically British way to which it always takes me time to acclimate. Once I understood what was happening, the plot was not complicated. Then I could shift to squirming about a suspicious tavern customer, Brown (Donald Pleasence.)