Monkeyface, I've been broke all my life

I went to Dr. Fiveash's funeral service yesterday. It was held at the Greek Orthodox church at the bottom of the street I grew up on. I hadn't realized he was actually baptized in the tradition, although I had known that one set of his grandparents were Greek immigrants; he'd told the story once about how they were married from two feuding families in Crete and then sent to America so that the next generation couldn't even think about getting involved in the feud. I remember him saying, and hope I am remembering correctly, that their fortunes were saved by the paint-peeling local liquor they knew how to make during Prohibition. It was a musical service, mostly ritual: the cantor sang in Greek, the priest echoed him in English translation. He spoke a little about Dr. Fiveash's life, although the eulogies are being saved mostly for the memorial service. It was not offensive. Everyone in attendance walked by the coffin on their way out, saying farewell. And then there was potluck in the church basement, which I hadn't been expecting. I met one of my former social studies teachers, who talked to me about living in Somerville and backpacking across Europe to Kathmandu, a friend-of-dearest-friend who is now in science education, the father of the kid who'd sat next to me in Latin and mythology, who recognized me from the two lines I'd spoken in a short movie his son filmed one summer. (The one I remember was an exasperated "Oh, Grendel." I was playing Lamia.) I think it was a good funeral, as these things go. It was sad. Everyone who said something, thank you.

After dinner, I went to see Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) at the HFA. It's one of his lesser pictures, but I have always liked it. Most of the literature surrounding the film involves Hitchcock's dissatisfaction with it, especially the ending which he always complained the studio had hijacked after the story became a glamorous A-list property with Cary Grant and an expensively borrowed Joan Fontaine rather than just another neat little B-picture for RKO. If that's true, it's the rare case where I'm perfectly glad the director was thwarted, because the thing I love most about Suspicion as it exists is the ambiguity of its title: the tension beween the places where Fontaine's Lina is quite right to be suspicious of the irresistible, irresponsible man she married on a mix of chemistry and defiant whim and the places where everything they don't know about each other suggests, to the sheltered, bookish Lina, possibilities perhaps even more damning than either of them deserves. Johnnie Aysgarth is a charming wastrel, a sponger, a gambler, a penniless playboy whose opening flirtations on the train include him borrowing enough change off Lina to make up the difference between his third-class ticket and her first-class compartment where he'd much rather stay. It's their relationship in microcosm and he makes no bones about it. "I'm honest with you because I think it's the best way to get results." What does it mean, then, when he stops being honest with her? What results is he looking for now? What better way has he found? The casting plays beautifully with this uncertainty: on the one hand, it's Cary Grant. He might be a womanizer, he might be a crook, but he wouldn't be a murderer, too, would he? On the other, it's Hitchcock. Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo (1958), remember? Without any outside information to tip off whether we're watching a calculating Bluebeard or a floundering ne'er-do-well, we're left as anxious as Lina, wanting desperately to believe she didn't make a mistake with Johnnie, not wanting to be so lured by the dream of a happy ending that we miss some crucial, fatal detail. The ending does have its hiccups for me, but they don't have to do with which side of the question the script comes down on. And I am reminded every time I watch this movie that I've seen Joan Fontaine in almost nothing: The Women (1939), Rebecca (1940). Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) has such a good pulpy title, I'm really sorry I missed it this summer at the HFA.

I am going tonight with derspatchel to see Twelfth Night at Theatre@First. While I'm thinking about Shakespeare, somebody cast Tom Hiddleston in Much Ado About Nothing, all right?