Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Under Suspicion Blu-ray Movie Review

Brighton, Rocked by Noir

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 15, 2011

Before becoming a bankable movie star in films like Taken and Unknown, Liam Neeson was still an exceptional actor who made interesting but often little-known films like 1991's Under Suspicion (not to be confused with the 2000 film of the same title starring Morgan Freeman and Gene Hackman). A tautly scripted British thriller released by Columbia Pictures in just a few American theaters, the film is part of the Sony catalogue being issued on Blu-ray through Image Entertainment.

Writer-director Simon Moore, who had already created the original miniseries Traffik for British TV, built his story from elements of classic film noir: a shady private eye with flexible ethics; a local cop who'd like nothing better than to nail him for a crime, and another who's his pal and protector; an alluring lady with a mysterious past and questionable motives; a large fortune that's subject to a conveniently timed new will; a couple of brutal murders; and several suspicious characters hovering around the edges. But Moore took these creatures out of their natural habitats in the American asphalt jungle and transplanted them to the British seaside resort of Brighton, circa 1959. Then he used effective location photography and provocative period recreation to keep reminding the viewer that this was no Yankee tale of corruption, but a hearty British cocktail of crime and iniquity. "You may have the guns", Moore seems to be saying (because it's essential to certain plot developments that British cops of the era were unarmed). "But we've been betraying each other for centuries!"

In a prologue, we're introduced to Tony Aaron (Neeson) and his partner, Frank Vance (Kenneth Cranham, best known to American audiences as the evil Dr. Channard in Hellraiser II). It's 1957, and they're cops staking out the home of a local gangster, Powers (Alan Talbot). The only problem is that Tony can't keep his pants zipped, and despite Frank's protests, he's having a fling with the gangster's wife, Hazel (Maggie O'Neill). Sure enough, Powers catches them one night, and the resulting altercation leaves another cop dead. Tony resigns from the force, and everyone other than Frank hates him, especially the dead officer's partner, Waterston (Malcolm Storry).

Two years later, Tony is scraping by as a private investigator, working an end of the business that's not only unethical, but positively illegal. To get around the era's strict divorce laws, discontent husbands would pay someone like Tony to photograph them in the act of a staged "adultery". Low-rent clientele might be satisfied with using a prostitute, but Tony has achieved the dubious distinction of attracting a high-end clientele: barristers and other accomplished patrons who are willing to pay more for a better class of fake mistress. To such men, Tony provides Hazel, who is now his wife. He tells each client that Hazel is an actress who's never done this kind of thing before (though, of course, she's a practiced expert). Then Tony sends the client off to an arranged assignation at the Radley Hotel, while he dodges various people to whom he owes money (and that's a lot of people), waiting in the hotel bar until it's time to appear at the door, snap the picture and create the case for divorce court.

Just after Christmas, though, one of Tony's clients is murdered: a wealthy Italian painter named Stasio (Michael Almaz), who has a resentful wife, Selina (Alphonsia Emmanuel), and a much younger American mistress, Angeline (Laura San Giacomo). Waterston is positively overjoyed to have Tony connected to something illegal, and he hopes it will turn into something more than just cooking up a fraudulent divorce case. It's all Tony's former partner Frank can do to keep the vindictive cop on a leash.

Both the dead painter's wife and his mistress have solid alibis, but Frank keeps digging away, especially after it's revealed that Stasio changed his will just before he died so that Angeline inherits everything. But the deeper Frank digs, the more he uncovers evidence pointing to Tony as the killer. Even the painter's solicitor, who hired Tony, ends up incriminating him, in an unexpected development. Meanwhile, Tony keeps trying to punch holes in Angeline's story, which brings him and Angeline together in the large house she now owns and inhabits alone -- and Tony is no better at keeping his pants on today than he was two years earlier.

Anyone familiar with the film will recognize that the sketch provided above is substantially abbreviated. Whatever its flaws, Under Suspicion is tightly plotted, and describing it without spoilers for the first-time viewer requires omitting most of the story. The film's strongest points are its sense of time and place and the performances by Neeson and Cranham, who effectively establish the friendship between Frank and Tony that is essential to the machinations of the plot. The weakest point is the character of Angeline, who should be the film's femme fatale (and certainly has the wardrobe for it), but never quite manages to cast the spell of danger that a femme fatale requires. This isn't the fault of Laura San Giacomo, who can certainly play torrid and manipulative, as anyone who ever saw Sex, Lies and Videotape will attest. Rather, it appears that writer-director Moore conceived of the character as distant, icy and inscrutable, although it's hard to understand why. When Tony and Hazel went for each other in the prologue, they generated real heat. When Tony and Angeline go for each other in the latter half of the film, it feels like an afterthought, even though it's just at that point that the film could use a blast of heat and a sense that Tony is playing with fire. The last thing a film noir needs is anyone playing it safe.

Under Suspicion Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Sony and Image have done their usual commendable job in transferring Under Suspicion to Blu-ray. The 1080p, AVC-encoded transfer provides a smooth, film-like image that aptly conveys the foggy, seaside Brighton locale, the seedy interior and neighborhood of Tony's office, the lavish mansion where Angeline resides and the various bars, offices, police stations, courtrooms and prison facilities where the investigation leads. Blacks are black with the most minor crushing (probably source-based), colors are well-saturated, and images are finely detailed with a visible but not intrusive field of natural-looking grain. Fleshtones tend toward the ruddy, but that's appropriate for a coastal town in the middle of winter. There was no indication of high-frequency filtering, transfer-induced ringing or compression artifacts.

Under Suspicion Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The original stereo soundtrack is supplied as PCM 2.0, and it's serviceable without being showy. Dialogue is clear, assuming you have no problem with the accents, which aren't especially strong, and there are subtitles if you need them. The atmospheric score is by Christopher Gunning, who has composed extensively for British TV and whose most recent major film credit is La Vie en Rose (La môme). One has to wonder, though, if the film would have been more successful with a darker, more foreboding score. Body Heat was artfully scripted and impeccably acted, but it wouldn't have been as effective without John Barry's horns prophesying doom from their opening notes.

Under Suspicion Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

None.

Under Suspicion Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

For fans of Under Suspicion, this disc is an easy recommendation, because the technical quality is up to the usual standards of Sony/Image releases. For those unfamiliar, a rental is advisable, because the film may or may not be your cup of tea (Earl Grey or English Breakfast). Then again, Image releases tend to go on special, and if you're a fan of Liam Neeson, he's great in this film, though in a very different role than the big-budget films he's made recently. Recommended.