SUSPICION: gutsy Grant deserved a golden gong

Joan Fontaine won an Oscar for her performance in SUSPICION but it's Cary Grant who deserved it.

I'm not saying Fontaine was undeserving but Grant is just magnificent in this Alfred Hitchcock thriller, playing Johnnie, a charming but incredibly suspicious gentleman who seduces and marries the young and impressionable Lina, played by Fontaine.
Hitchcock reveals Johnnie's true character piece by piece, like peeling the layers from an onion, and the more Lina discovers the more she feels like crying.
There's clearly something not quite right about him on their first meeting in a railway carriage. He's prissy, effete and childish yet Lina, who's supposedly smart and intelligent (and reading a book on child psychology) is intrigued by him and secretly overjoyed when he contrives an opportunity to call on her a few days later.
Despite a growing number of warning signs she lets him sweep her off her feet and in no time at all they're married, which is when she starts discovering that almost nothing she'd assumed about him is true.
What so impressed me about Grant is that he's playing aggressively against type. Sure he'd played smooth talking charmers before - that was his screen persona - but never with the disturbing undercurrent of evil on show here. 1930s and 40s Hollywood was built on the premise that its stars always portrayed a type and never strayed from it, so this was a gutsy thing for Grant to do and I understand RKO were very uncomfortable about it. Often when stars stepped away from their type (Gable in 'Parnell', Bogart in 'The Return of Dr X' or 'Virginia City') it was a disaster because the public didn't want to see them playing a different kind of character, but Grant is effective because he takes his screen persona and subverts it, suggesting there's something very rotten beneath that smooth veneer.
It's genuinely disturbing to watch a character we think we know so well gradually reveal the darkness behind the handsome mask, and Fontaine does a great job in expressing the creeping fear that comes with this realisation.
By 1941 Hitchcock was already a master at ratcheting up the tension turn by turn, and interspersing it with moments of frivolity (provided here by a wonderfully nincompoopish Nigel Bruce) which just add to the stress levels rather than alleviating them. SUSPICION builds beautifully to what should be a spectacular climax but isn't because of RKO's jitters over messing with Grant's image. The blame for the ludicrous denouement lies squarely with the studio, not Grant or Hitchcock.
The result is an enormous let down and a load of unanswered questions, but this climactic disappoint can't detract from Grant's masterful performance. He's so good I actually didn't mind the cop-out conclusion (too much).