Teaching a course on The Novel this summer, and this is the view from my Montréal classroom.

I woke up this snowy April morning in Montréal and joined a virtual ceremony and became a Canadian citizen. True north strong and free.

Totally stable behaviour.

Québec press wrapping its head around the idea that it might not be as dependent on the U.S. as it feared (and as a certain American neighbor wants it to fear). That 21% of the pie is big--but it's a slice that can be made up (or nearly made up) in other ways.

Bruno (Robert Walker) is at a tennis match. Everyone else in the crowd is doing that thing that crowds do at tennis matches--watching the ball and the player's reaction to that ball.

Instead, Bruno watches Guy (Farley Granger).

Yet--just when you are expecting to be served the tropes you thought you ordered with this genre on the menu--Hitchcock serves you something utterly shocking.

The last two minutes of _Suspicion_ are utterly disorienting. What just happened? What have I been watching for the past two hours?

Again, not exactly a riveting insight, but keeping his audience off balance when it came to genre expectations was Hitchcock's bread and butter.

He knew the satisfactions of genre: the entire film can be seen as an homage to the comforts of the English murder novel.

"My villain? My hero, you mean," says Isobel Sedbusk, the murder mystery novelist who befriends Joan Fontaine's innocent Lina, "I always think of my murderers as my heroes."

It's probably a little pat to say it, but it strikes me that Hitchcock winked at his audience with that quote.

I took in Hitchcock's _Suspicion_ (1941) tonight. I've seen it before, or at least parts of it, but it must have been decades. Not exactly a super insight to say: it's brilliant. Grant and Fontaine are both at the top of their game; Hitchcock creates suspense out of a (literal) glass of milk.

Making that drifter/saviour character a woman--one who actually beats up a man with a gun and saves a helpless man (in contradiction to the gothic trope)--was interesting, and I wish the film had a better sense of the opportunity that the idea and Lupino were offering them.

Lupino is hot, full stop. But she also brings a brooding intelligence to every scene that makes make more of the thin writing than it deserved. Director Raoul Walsh, who had worked with her before, clearly knew that--when it doubt, let the camera linger on Lupino's haunted eyes.

The script is weak. Supporting performances are good. Andrea King's opening scenes as sister Sally fending off advances of the same two bit hood while raising a son and trying to cope with war vet husband in hospital with ptsd could have been an interesting, if very different film, itself.

Lupino's character Petey Brown--a world weary New York nightclub singer--blows into L.A. to help her sisters and brother out of a number of jams, wear the hell out of a series of truly fantastic dresses, fend off the advances of a low rent gangster, and fall in love with a haunted piano player.

The script was weak, and while the supporting performances were amusing enough, they were not given much to do. Andrea King had some interesting scenes at the beginning as a mother trying to fend off advances of a gangster while her husband is in a military hospital with ptsd.

Also worth nothing: Lupino's dresses in the film are gorgeous, characters in their own right.

This week I continued my tour through 40's noir with 1947's "The Man I Love;" another film with Ida Lupino, and she makes the film.

Ann Sheridan's opening scene-- fending off the advances of hungry truck drivers at all night cafe with clever put downs and cut-eyed glances that sliced them open before slamming them into their rightful places -- was also worth the price of popcorn.

Lupino --femme fatale classique-- losing it in the final courtroom scene was everything every conclusion to every Perry Mason episode (still 17 years away) wished it was.

Last week: "They Drive By Night" (1940). Film noir about truck drivers and murder by garage door opener. As I'm a bit dim, it took me about half the watch time to realize Humphrey Bogart was -not- the lead. Interesting labour politics drew me in; ptsd due to electric doors made me glad I stayed.