Auriol Lee as Isobel Sedbusk, writer and Aysgarth's friend Reginald Sheffield as Reggie Wetherby, Lina's dancing partner Leo G. Carroll as Captain George Melbeck, Johnnie's employer and cousin Uncredited Billy Bevan as Ticket Taker in train Leonard Carey as Burton - McLaidlaws' Butler Clyde Cook as Photographer Alec Craig as Hogarth Club Desk Clerk Vernon Downing as Benson, Inspector's assistant Gavin Gordon as Dr. Bertram Sedbusk, Isobel's brother Lumsden Hare as Inspector Hodgson Aubrey Mather as Executor of General Laidlaw's Will Constance Worth as Mrs. Fitzpatrick Alfred Hitchcock's cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. In Suspicion, he can be seen very briefly approximately 47 minutes into the film posting a letter at the village postbox. The West-Ingster screenplay In November 1939, Nathanael West was hired as a screenwriter by RKO Radio Pictures, where he collaborated with Boris Ingster on a film adaptation of the novel. The two men wrote the screenplay in seven weeks, with West focusing on characterization and dialogue as Ingster worked on the narrative structure. When RKO assigned Before the Fact to Hitchcock, he already had his own, substantially different, screenplay, credited to Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, and Alma Reville. (Harrison was Hitchcock's personal assistant, and Reville was Hitchcock's wife.) West and Ingster's screenplay was abandoned and never produced. The text of this screenplay can be found in the Library of America's edition of West's collected works. Production Development Suspicion illustrates how a novel's plot can be so much altered in the transition to film as to reverse the author's original intention. As William L. De Andrea states in his Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994) that Suspicionwas supposed to be the study of a murder as seen through the eyes of the eventual victim. However, because Cary Grant was to be the killer and Joan Fontaine the person killed, the studio — RKO — decreed a different ending, which Hitchcock supplied and then spent the rest of his life complaining about. Hitchcock was quoted as saying that he was forced to alter the ending of the movie. He wanted an ending similar to the climax of the novel, but the studio, more concerned with Cary Grant's "heroic" image, insisted that it be changed. In his biography of Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto disputes Hitchcock's claim to have been overruled on the film's ending. Spoto claims that the first RKO treatment and memos