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 even 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 wonton one. 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 then, 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.”
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 the sadomasochistic life
proffered up. 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.
devlin: 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, were
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
official’s, 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 Traffaut,
“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. Champagne will will again
betray her at Sebastian’s grand party later in the film.
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 Sebastians’ case, is utterly intertwined with the jealousy he feels for 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, more than
her own charms, that so appeal to him that he 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 note that
this is close to the story of Alicia’s experience in the Sebastian household.
Without even consulting his domineering
mother, Alex Sebastian determines to marry Alicia, mostly out of jealousy,
without his mother’s consent; she does not even 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
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.” 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” (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 Peter Rabbit follows, laced with a poison that will
kill the “wanton lady” if Madame Anna Sebastian has her way. Although the plot
requires Devlin to unexpectedly (particularly given his determination to the
leave the country) and somewhat ridiculously to come to her rescue, in the more
sublimated fantasy of Hitchcock’s masterwork he rescues 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
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