New Picture

Above Suspicion (M.G.M.) is something new in Joan Crawford pictures. Instead of setting a special table for her saucer-eyed talents, it all but relegates Miss Crawford to playing stooge to pouty Fred MacMurray. Still worse, Joan's usually endless array of hats is reduced to a bare subsistence level.

MacMurray & Crawford are an American and his bride in prewar Germany, but not on anything so innocent as a honeymoon. In quest of a secret which Great Britain needs to know they get involved in disguises, a Liszt-accompanied murder, battles with the Gestapo. They also run afoul of such suspicious figures as Basil Rathbone and Conrad Veidt. Strangely enough, it all adds up to a better-than-average summertime melodrama.

But for Miss Crawford it is not much of an event to mark her departure from M.G.M., where she has been a big name ever since the gin-drenched days of Our Dancing Daughters (1928). Her new boss: Warner's. Reported inducement: "an executive job."

For Conrad Veidt Above Suspicion is also a milestone: his last picture for anybody. He died last spring (TIME, April 12), age 50, of a heart attack, on a Hollywood golf course. Often regarded as Eric von Stroheim's most formidable rival as a fondler of monocles, German-born Veidt first came to fame in Robert Wiene's bizarre fantasy, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Other weirdies, like The Hands of Mr. Orlac, followed. Women fainted, men screamed, children chortled when they were shown. By 1926, when Veidt went to Hollywood, audiences had got hold of themselves pretty well, but his adroit villainy was always good for a hiss.

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