BFI Hitchcock Season – Notorious (1946)
Of the fourteen films that Hitchcock directed in the forties the critical consensus tends to focus on Shadow Of A Doubt, Hitchcock’s personal favourite of his fifty-three pictures and Notorious, the romantic spy caper which features the alluring pairing of Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in the second of his four and her three collaborations with the master of suspense. This period was also marked with the singular set concentrations of spatial suspense in both Rope and Lifeboat, and the first of his overt flirting with psychoanalysis and symbolism in Spellbound the year before, but I concur with the critical fraternity that Notorious is the high water mark of this decade of experimentation and development, with its nervous romance between the conflicted protagonists foreshadowing the similarly legendary couplings of the following decade, whilst the deployment of an Elektra driven guilt syndrome heralds more overt techniques in terms of character motivation, a developing maturity and complexity which are the building blocks of the subsequent masterpieces. The alchemical ingredients that would see Hitchcock transmogrifying film into a macabre gold during his classical period throughout the Fifties through to the mid Sixties can be divined through Hitchcock’s work in this preceding decade and they are never more clearly synthesised than in Notorious, a fantastic thriller and rollercoaster romance with simmering performances from both Bergman and Grant.
Miami, 1946, a courtroom interior, and a grizzled pack of photographers await the sentencing of the German spy Mr. Huberman for crimes against the state in a perilous time of war. Profiled as a faceless monolith he gets twenty years and his daughter, the aristocratically beautiful Alicia Huberman (a smouldering Ingrid Bergman) walks the shameful parade of the press and flees back to her home. Wracked by guilt Alicia takes to the bottle and solace in the arms of men, in her tiger print blouse a clear figure of unbridled and unleashed femininity, enter stage left the suave government agent T.R Devlin (a clipped Cary Grant) whose mission it is to convince Alicia to infiltrate a South American spy ring linked to her fathers crusade, and soon the couple are jetting down to as a fiery affair blazes between them. Alicia’s mission is to gain entrance to the home of Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains, the original Invisible Man since you ask) whom has always held a torch for her, although his imperious, hectoring mother Madame Sebastian (Leopoldine Konstantin) has her suspicions of this potential cuckold of her sons devoted affections. The fascist spy ring are cryptically pursuing a clandestine plot to develop fissionable materials, and as Alicia is drawn closer into the bosom of the conspiracy she must make the ultimate sacrifice of her body and reputation, and potentially abandon the true love of her life forever….
So let’s summarise as we prowl down the Hitchcock checklist – we have a tortured, psychologically charged romance framed in threat by outside forces, the antagonist Alexander is plagued with the guilt riven hectoring of a controlling mother figure, the film’s plot is cantilevered around espionage and spy-craft, of uncovering buried secrets which is the goal for our damaged heroine who is scarred by her father’s treason and must complete the mission to absolve her inherited sins and achieve resolution through the uncertain affections of her handsome suitor whom in the films most charged sequence literally sweeps her up into his arms and romantically marches her away to liberation and freedom. The plot serves the genre conventions, of suspense and tension being built around the excavation of the genus of the conspiracy, but these themes are heightened and elevated through the romance, with Grant as Hitchcock’s instrument of doubt as it is unsure whether he genuinely cares for Alicia or is merely fulfilling his patriotic duty, a situation compounded when Alicia marries Sebastian and presumably fulfils her conjugal duties, with tensions arising from a man having to send the potential love of his life into the arms of an enemy agent, to be spoiled and desecrated in order to pay for the deceitful treason of her father. Alicia is caught in a psychological trap, she doesn’t know if Devlin simply manipulated her to undertake the mission, and even if his feelings extend beyond his civic service she has now sacrificed herself to the enemy, and it’s from these complexities that we begin to genuinely empathise with the characters through these moral webs and their fissionable interactions, as the on-screen chemistry between Grant and Bergman is simply explosive, andI’mcontractually obliged to link to the celebrated key scene.
For its period Hitchcock was pushing at the boundaries of acceptable eroticism with his passionate trysts, for its time it’s almost embarrassing to watch for me, it’s just to intimate to observe, with Grant nuzzling away at Bergman’s neck as they both mutter their sweet platitudes to each other, the passionate chemistry between them as tangible as the uranium pulsing McGuffin that propels the espionage, with the breaching of forbidden doors in the Sebastian mansion where many secrets are kept, its Hitchcock’s first attempt at a genuine and heartfelt love story which is rarely played for laughs as the trademark pranks and jest are mostly regulated to the cutting room floor. Alicia is the true hero of the story in eclipse of Grant, a point which takes us back to the alleged treatment of women in the Hitchcock universe, as she enters the lion’s den and takes the risks, she is the resourceful heroine who retains the mask of subterfuge under the straining circumstances, although admittedly she does needs to be finally saved by the male hero in the final sequence but c’mon, this was 1946. The climax of Notorious is magnificently orchestrated for its era as you can see below, once again in Hitchcock’s universe the normal contract of behaviour and systems of decency must be observed in an almost Buñuelian inflected fashion as the poisoned Alicia is spirited away by the impervious Devlin, as through a cruel twist of the screenwriters quill if Sebastian intervenes then his fellow plotters will have to homicidally eject him from their cabal when they discover that he has married an American agent, a fact he has kept secret from everyone except his mother, with whom he has plotted the slow murder of his duplicitous wife through the judicious application of arsenic. Thus Sebastian is impotently left by Devlin to return to his home and the murderous, neutering wrath of his mother, symbolically castrated as Devlin and Alicia hurtle away into the emancipating South American night. A core film of the Forties and a psychologically explosive precursor of things to come, Notorious is essential Hitchcock;
North By Northwest (1959)
C’mon now, you didn’t really think I was going to go and see this over the weekend did you? Not a shock I’m sure to anyone who visits the Guardian film pages to see this fifty year old Hitchcock release given the Minty treatment, they’ve been giving it quite a few column inches over the past week or so. I have to confess (ha, do you see – ‘I Confess‘) that this is actually the first Hitchcock film I’ve seen at the cinema which is criminal. Many years ago I did turn up at the Curzon Soho on a Sunday lunchtime, eager to pop my Hitchcock cherry with a double bill of ‘Vertigo‘ and ‘The Birds‘ and I’d only gone and got the bloody dates wrong. Never mind, it was worth the wait as ‘Northwest’ is one of my favourite films by the master of suspense and it was quite a treat in the ideal environs of the well air-conditioned NFT1. I did have a quick look at this beforehand which was underwhelming to say the least, at a tenner a go I should really have killed time before the screening with another wander around Tate Modern down the road.. C’est la vie…
The legendary Saul Bass at work there of course, Fincher paid tribute of sorts with the titles to ‘Panic Room‘. ‘Northwest‘ might be a film about a suit, a sartorial wonder that our hero Cary Grant, the true personification of the word debonair, propels through a simmering world of hidden danger, macabre murder and deviant deception. Laconic Ad-man Roger Thornhill is mistakenly identified as the secret agent George Kaplan during a telegram mix-up in a New York restaurant, after being kidnapped by foreign agents the bewildered Thornhill is enveloped in a cat and mouse game with the nefarious Vandamm (James Mason, never better) and his henchman Leonard (Martin Landau) who frame Thornhill for the murder of a dignitary at the United Nations building. Seeking to clear his name Thornhill falls in with the archetypal Hitchcock icy blonde, the crystalline Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) and a burgeoning romance develops as the government agents and foreign devils struggle to smuggle the all important McGuffin microfiche out of the country….
It’s Hitchcock at the peak of his powers, coming off the previous years critically mauled ‘Vertigo‘ he purposely embarked on a more commercial thriller project which was then followed up with the grandfather of all those nasty little slashers ‘Psycho‘ the following year – not a bad run eh? All the usual suspects are here, cameraman Robert Burks, editor George Tomasini, composer Bernard Herrmann and screenwriter Ernest Lehman all contribute to forge one of Hitch’s most celebrated and loved golden age movies. Philip French recently alluded to a curious new theory doing the rounds about these three films forming a loose trilogy where one of the central protagonists is a ghost, a cipher, an invisible presence who may or may not exist – Madeleine in ‘Vertigo’, Kaplan in ‘Northwest’, Norma Bates in ‘Psycho’ but a cursory goggle hasn’t thrown up much, I’m sure there would be all sorts of allusions to psychoanalytic theory and the absence of an Oedipal or Elektra figure, the missing figure being the surrogate id or agent of the superego, all that sort of stuff which I enjoy reading if I’m in the right mood. Critics love to allude to the whirlpool of psychosis that structure our societies and how many of Hitchcock’s films puncture that veneer of normality to let the agents of chaos and murder run free, not dissimilar to much of Lynch’s work now that I think of it. It’s a testament to Hitchcock’s skills that he was able to embed such subtexts into the DNA of many of his films that academics are still coaxing out connections, links and refractions between his work some fifty, sixty years later. For me the star of the show was some of the examples of ‘pure’ cinema which I explore a little below, the gripping Herrmann score and the coolly chilling performance of James Mason, an actor who frequently nudges his way into my favourite actors of all time list, just take a look at ‘Odd Man Out‘, Nicholas Ray’s satirical ‘Bigger Than Life‘, ‘The Wicked Lady‘ and of course ‘Lolita‘ which neatly leads me to link to some recently excavated Kubrick material here.
Lets just take a quick look at this classic scene shall we? First of all, there is no score until the attack begins in earnest toward the end of the sequence, the first trick in Hitch’s arsenal to unsettle and unnerve the viewer. The opening establishing shot projects the dimensions of the action, the lack of cover for Thornhill to furtively scramble toward, an elevation of the importance of space from time in the sequence which is reinforced by each of the shots in the scene lasting roughly the same duration and the editing only accelerating in line with the action toward the scene’s finale. The ominous arrival of the older bus pedestrian raises suspense expectations – is this Kaplan? Is he armed? – which are dismissed through dialogue revelations then reaffirmed when he casually remarks ‘Funny, there’s no crops to be dusted there…..’
Truffaut called Hitch out on the scene and asked in a very respectful manner if the sequence wasn’t wholly gratuitous and abs
urd as it doesn’t in any sense move the plot forward, it doesn’t move the story along (actually it does as it demonstrates the apparent malevolence of Eve as she sent Thornhill to this place to meet the elusive Kaplan but that’s another story) to which Hitchcock customarily replied ‘I practice absurdity quite religiously’. He wanted to take the viewers down a different path, to give them another in the series of shots of adrenaline that peppered the film and climax with the celebrated Mount Rushmore (spoilers) finale. Moreover in usual maestro fashion Hitchcock had the idea to invert the idea of his hero being pursued by the usual trench-coated assassins, our hero in fear of his life, isolated in a pool of light on a shadow drenched city street, an ominous sleek limousine quietly prowling into shot in the distance, the usual cliché manner of presentation to build suspense and tension. Instead he decided to take our avatar into the bright sunlight, into blank open countryside where no hidden menace could lurk, a much more challenging puzzle for him to solve cinematically with theoretically a more profound effect on the audience – I’m also left wondering if it was the first example of a hero running away in mid-shot with an explosion erupting behind him. I like and appreciate the sequence like any film-fan but my favourite arrangement in the movie is the auction room scene, the construction is exquisite.
Curiously I’ve been thinking about Hitchcock recently in a slightly more tangential way due to one my film pod-casts broadcasting an article where they selected a list of the all time best cinema books that any cineaste should have read and own. This list had made an astoundingly glaring omission by not including this (incredible audio here), not only the seminal work on Hitchcock (although the Spoto is also good) but a project that set the template for the comprehensive interview format book with filmmakers which focused on the conceptions, ideas and ideologies behind the movies and how those themes were wielded with the artistic film-art choices (composition, camera movement, editing, the whole mise-en-scene elements, the employment of certain film stocks) rather than just some of the on-set anecdotal production stuff which of course can also be hugely entertaining. So for the record here is a selection of the best film books I’ve read, from the business and global financial elements through to overviews of specific eras and movements, proceeding on to specific directors and actors, closing on the homogeneous craft of film, there is certainly a wealth of material out there.
Minty's Menagerie 
Recent Comments