Alfred Hitchcock | Notorious / 1946

opening closets

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Hecht (screenplay), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Notorious / 1946

 

On the surface, Alfred Hitchcock’s beautiful film Notorious is a straight-forward romance between T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) and Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), with the added intrigues of a spy-movie and underlying mystery. Hitchcock’s 1946 film is so well made, and so embedded in the romantic tropes of the day, that even the Hays Office’s ban on kisses longer than three seconds, was cleverly broken by allowing the actors to “nuzzle,” “kiss,” and “talk” their way through two and one-half moments, creating in most heterosexual viewers (and homosexual ones) one the most erotic love scenes in American film-making. In this work the “thriller” aspects of the plot are almost perfectly enmeshed with the problematic love-affair between Devlin and Huberman, two beautiful actors who seem to be naturals together, and, if film-lore was correct, were indeed comfortable—in part because of Grant’s acceptance of and help in making Bergman feel relaxed in her role—in one another’s company. Surely, one might argue, this is one of Hitchcock’s most openly heterosexual films, with the beautiful Bergman being loved not only by Devlin but by the well-educated and cultured, if utterly detestable, Nazi, Alexander Sebastian (the almost unctuous Claude Rains).

     But, of course, and, as Grant might quip (as he does in this movie and in The Philadelphia Story) “naturally,” Hitchcock’s films always have several layers, as does Grant’s witty acting. If, by film’s end, the two major figures drive off into the sunset to live out their lives as a loving couple, they certainly have to find their way through a great deal of confused and twisted issues of sexuality to get there.

     First of all, and perhaps most importantly, the beautiful Alicia is a marked woman, even a possibly wonton one—certainly a being, as they used to say, with a lot of luggage. She is, after all, the daughter of a traitor, an American-Nazi sympathizer who is in the very first scene found guilty of espionage and sentenced to twenty years of prison. Even at the trial, he defends his position, threatening American society (“You can put me away, but you can’t put away what’s going happen to you, and to his whole country next time. Next time we are going….,” certainly a terrorist-like threat), and, soon after, commits suicide. Perhaps in reaction to her parentage, Alicia is a woman who drinks heavily, and has, so we are told, sought out the beds of numerous strangers. Indeed, it is her very history that has brought Devlin to one of her rather insipid, drunken parties, where he hopes to recruit her as a spy—for what purpose he has not yet established. Even she is disgusted by the emptiness of her “celebration,” dismissing her guests into the dark before she attempts to take a late-night drive with her uninvited visitor. The drive, in which she is almost arrested for drunken driving, ends even more disastrously as Devlin is “forced”—a very strange concept given his somewhat affable violence—to slug her, knocking her out. So ends their first “date.”

 

    The next morning she is hung over, as Devlin hovers over her, literally spinning in her vision, as he offers her a glass of liquid that chillingly reminds one of the milk containing a light-bulb he served up Joan Fontaine in Hitchcock’s Suspicion of five years earlier. Certainly, it is not an auspicious beginning of a “romance.”

      Despite the invitation to join her friends upon their yacht, however, Alicia—obviously attracted to the man who has already abused her—rejects their plea to join them, which requires nothing but her own readiness, without even a suitcase (“We have everything aboard!”)—in preference of Devlin’s invitation for a vague future in Rio de Janeiro. It will not be the first time that we perceive that this daughter of a Nazi readily assents to a more difficult path, a life that might even be said to be slightly sadomasochistic. She has, indeed been filled with self-hating: hearing of her father’s death, she responds:

 

                           When he told me a few years ago what he was, everything

                           went to pot. I didn’t care what happened to me. Now I re-

                           member how nice he once was, how nice we both were. It’s

                           a very curious feeling, a feeling as if something had happened

                           to me, not to him. You see I don’t have to hate him anymore—

                           or myself.

 

Even as in the new environment, she recovers some of her sense of self-worth and health, abandoning her alcoholic ways, she is tortured by Devlin’s taunts:

 

                          alicia: Well, did you hear that? [she has just refused a second

                               drink.] I’m practically on the wagon, that’s quite a change.

                          deddddevlin: It’s a phase.

                          alicia: You don’t think a woman can change?

                          devlin: Sure, change is fun, for awhile.

 

      One might almost think Devlin (Grant), a bi-sexual in real life, was talking of himself. Indeed, soon after, when she accepts the role as a kind of Mata-Hari to seduce Alex Sebastian, he uses her very love to verbally abuse her again: “I can’t help recalling some of your remarks about being a new woman. Daisies and buttercups, wasn’t it?”

      But even during their brief “love” affair, it is clear that, despite her deep love for him, he is removed, uncommitted to the love-making in which he participates. Hitchcock has, in fact, caught their relationship quite clearly in its sputtering interruptions: the kiss, the nuzzle, the questions which always intrude: Devlin is as unsure of his love of this “marked woman” as Sebastian is impetuously convinced of his. As Alicia herself proclaims:

 

                           alicia: This is a very strange love affair.

                           devlin: Why?

                           alicia: Maybe the fact that you don’t love me.

 

Even in the midst of what might seem as a romantic tour of the beautiful Brazilian city, Devlin admits, in yet another of his on-film admissions, of his gay preferences: “I’ve always been a-scared of women.” We hardly need Ben Hecht’s open comments to make us realize this fact; but, as I have written before, the obvious in both Grant’s and Hitchcock’s films is often openly hidden.

      The plot turns even more sinister when his CIA associates reveal what they really want from Alicia Huberman, that she meet and romance the suspected Alex Sebastian. And, despite his somewhat subdued protests, comparing Alicia to the officials’ notably at-home, protected wives, he is party to what basically must be described as selling Alicia into sexual slavery. As Hitchcock himself has said in an interview with Truffaut, “Cary Grant’s job—and it’s rather an ironic situation—is to push Ingrid Bergman into Claude Rains’ bed.”

       Although the film indicates this action as arising from his sense of duty, we also clearly perceive it arises from his own disorientation with his attraction to a woman, which Hitchcock and Hecht further reveal in his purchase of a bottle of champagne for what was to have been their first domestic encounter—she cooking chicken (a chicken she admits that has caught fire; she is completely inexperienced with the domestic world, while she gushes about the joys they might one day experience together: “Marriage must be wonderful with sort of thing going on every day!”)—he leaves the champagne, symbol of romance, at the office.

      If Devlin is a reluctant lover, even more strange as a suitor is Sebastian, a man controlled by his dominating mother, who is perhaps the most powerful figure in this film. Just as in Casablanca, Rains performs Sebastian as a man, basically heterosexual, yet confused about that identity. Although completely caught up in the romantic world of his German upbringing with the young Alicia, she also represents—just as she does to the American “patriots”—a figure who represents a kind of trophy, symbolizing position and power, which, in Sebastian’s case, is utterly intertwined with the jealousy he feels about her. A great deal of his courting of Alicia has to do with the “attractive man” with whom he has first seen her: Devlin. And it is clearly Devlin, as much as her own charms, who appeals to him so much that it mentions it several times. Upon querying Alicia about her riding with Devlin when he has first encountered her, she puts everything into perspective: she was so upset and lonely after her father’s imprisonment, she observes, that she would have “gone riding with Peter Rabbit.”

      It’s a small statement, yet it expresses the utter complexity of all of their relationships in this densely-rich film. In the original Peter Rabbit book of 1902, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter, dressed in human garb, disobeying his mother’s orders, sneaks into Mr. McGregor’s garden to eat as many vegetables as he can. McGregor spots him and is on the chase. Peter escapes, but loses his jacket and shoes, which McGregor uses to dress a scarecrow. Wearily returning to home, Peter becomes ill and is put to bed with a dose of chamomile tea. If one ever wondered about the brilliance of both Hecht and Hitchcock as writers, I need only observe that this is close to the story of Alicia’s experience in the Sebastian household.

      Without even consulting his domineering mother or receiving her “necessary consent,” Alex Sebastian determines to marry Alicia, mostly out of jealousy. His mother, accordingly, does not attend the marriage and belittles the relationship throughout, particularly at the horse track, where Alex keeps his lover in the eyes of binoculars, while he pleads with his mother to be pleasant; her response: “Wouldn’t it be a little too much if we both grinned at her like idiots?”

     Even at the couple’s first meeting at a restaurant, when she recognizes her American head agent Prescott (Louis Calhern), Alex speaks of his handsomeness. And when she later reports this to Prescott, he quips as she is about to attend a dinner party at Sebastian’s house, “Sorry I’m not going with you!”

 

    The world Alicia has entered is sharply misogynistic in a way that the outer shell of the plot does not want to reveal. If on the outer layer, Alicia is beautiful figure loved by two men, underneath this tale she is simply a “type,” perfect for the job, “not a lady.”

      Is it any wonder that upon her early return from the “romantic” honeymoon, Alicia spends her first days attempting to open every closet in the Sebastian mansion—despite the fact that Madame Sebastian, the overbearing mother, holds most of the “keys.” In these events, moreover, writer Hecht repeats two of his symbolic statements: Alicia does not like long, pleasurable sea voyages, and she is a woman who, metaphorically speaking, comes with a great deal of baggage.

     There is nothing in these small closets to uncover, but this strong woman must know that the sexuality of her world is somehow locked up. After the dinner party, where once more liquor has been the subject of demonstration and protestation—an important sub-theme in this movie of stuporous individuals—Alicia is encouraged to open the Sebastian house up to a huge celebration, a very dangerous thing in a world of dark secrets.

     The grand party ends in the basements of the mansion, with Devlin and her seeking out the “key”—the literal version of which she has stolen from her husband’s key-chain—to the Nazi activities. Once more, it is the “lack” of Champagne—the romantic symbol at the center of this tale—that destroys their cover. Deep in the confines of the wine cellar, Devlin accidentally breaks open a bottle of vintage wine to find not the source of lover’s pleasure, but black sand, the darkest remnants of what might be described as a romantic representation, and in this case, even more disturbingly, the leftovers of uranium, possible atomic destruction.

      Without proper time to cover and hide the discovery—something Devlin/Grant has never been able to do throughout this revelatory myth—he must again “pretend” a love which clearly does not exist, intensely kissing Alicia only to try to convince Sebastian than it is a frustrated last attempt at an impossible love:

 

                    “I knew her before you, loved her before you, only I’m not as

                    lucky as you…” 

 

But we know the truth. Devlin has in that very action of symbolic romance sent Alicia to certain death.

      By early in the morning, Sebastian has discovered her deceit, and returned to the beside of his mother for consolation and protection:

 

                    “Mother, mother, I need your help….I am married to an American agent.”

 

     The chamomile tea of the Peter Rabbit fable follows, laced with a poison that will kill the “wanton lady” if Madame Anna Sebastian has her way. In her attempts to get Alicia out of the way, Madame Sebastian even suggests that Alicia and she take a long sea voyage together, a form of “pleasure,” which we already know, Alicia abhors.   

    Although the plot requires Devlin to unexpectedly (particularly given his determination to the leave the country) and somewhat ridiculously come to her rescue, in the more sublimated fantasy of Hitchcock’s masterwork he saves her only in order to have “the poisons” removed from her system; she is still a venomous being not worthy of his attentions. Despite his cinematic assurances, “You’ll never get rid of me again,” we realize that in his claims of being “a fat-headed guy, full of pain,” the pain may not have been simply his jealousy of her relationship with Sebastian, but the pain of his own sexual orientation.

      As Alex Sebastian is called in to face his Nazi compatriots for his sins, asked to admit to his self-created lies for which he will surely face death, the “happy” couple of Alicia and Devlin drive off into the dark shadows of this cinematic romance with only the audience’s applause. Although I love this film, I cannot bring my hands together, but joyfully offer up the bifurcations of my head.

 

Los Angeles, May 28, 2013; revised March 15, 2015

Reprinted, in a different version, from World Cinema Review (June 2013).