Frank Tuttle's Suspense

 Frank Tuttle was a journeyman director who could make good movies when he had good material (see my post on 1942's This Gun for Hire).  For Suspense he had a good bunch of actors, including ice skater Belita and Barry Sullivan as leads and Eugene Pallette (this is his last film; he had started in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation in 1915), Bonita Granville and Albert Dekker in supporting roles.  The script was an original by Philip Yordan and the cinematographer was Karl Struss, who had photographed Murnau's Sunrise in 1927 and later, in 1952, did Chaplin's Limelight.

Unfortunately this film was produced by the notoriously stingy King Brothers for the even more stingy Monogram studio, although they did make it one of their most prestigious pictures. Belita had a number of skating numbers which were beautifully choregraphed by Nick Castle, though they had little to do with the plot,  Barry Sullivan effectively plays a bum who works his way up from a peanut vendor to ice palace owner Dekker's assistant and falls in love with Belita,  who is married to Dekker.  Dekker disappears and comes after Sullivan, who kills Dekker and then is shot by his former lover Granville, who has the goods on him from his time in New York.

This should have made a pretty good film noir but director Tuttle loses focus and directs rather slackly, probably caught between the demands of the producers and those of the studio.  Thanks to Karl Struss the film is appropriately dark and shadowy, though lacking in fatalism; there is also little suspense, except when Belita skates through a circle of knives.