Notorious is an espionage film with gothic melodrama and noir elements. It stars Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, and Cary Grant and plays upon the fear of a Nazi revival post World War II. It was released in 1946 but began preproduction during the war in 1944. It follows in line with a series of films Hitchcock made about anti-fascism and Nazi resistance. The preceding films were: The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, and Lifeboat. While Uranium Ore is the MacGuffin and was a premonition by Hitchcock a year before Hiroshima, the film is, in essence, a story about a man who is in love with a woman who must in the line of duty, bed, and marry another man. It is loosely based on Marthe Richard’s life as a French spy and Prostitute (Once Upon a Time... Notorious).
The racetrack scene opens with a charged exchange between Sebastian and his mother. Alicia’s things are set between Sebastian and his mother, already creating a divide between them. Her central position or lack of position also indicates how central of a character she is to the story and the exchange that is about to happen between them. Sebastian’s use of the binoculars is looked upon with more significance after the scene as we learn with a forbearance that he is not watching the horserace but instead shadowing Alicia down in the stands.
The next sequence begins with a fade-in onto Devlin, who is looking for Alicia in the
crowd. We learn later that this is an optical point of view reference that Sebastian may be privy
to. When Devlin finds Alicia, he greets her with a warm handshake; she reciprocates with a
megawatt smile; this is the beginning of their expressive coherence in the performance of their
“false front.” This can be seen as a viewing within a viewing; as Notorious is concerned with the
element of espionage, we are now viewing the scene from an even further protracted
perspective making this film self-reflexive.
The exchange of information begins in a classic narrative two-shot. A mid-shot of both actors framed from the waist up with ample headroom. It offers a reasonably close distance without much perspective into the subtle facial nuances Hitchcock uses to distinguish the breaks in the coherence. From here, the words are the truth, while the acting displays the covert lies they perform undercover as friends.
Devlin approaches Alicia as if meeting a casual friend by accident. Their voices are loud as they greet each other to benefit the unaware audiences around them. After their initial pleasantries are exchanged, their voice lowers drastically, they turn away from the unsuspecting audience and face the racetrack, and they begin speaking from the corners of their mouths to each other. This signifies the switch from verbal lies to verbal truths, with the body language being performative.
Once the conversation moves into a much more emotionally charged scenario, Hitchcock moves to a shot-reverse shot sequence with Alicia's optical point of view of Devlin. Here the dialogue begins to become more untruthful, especially from Devlin, while their faces, especially Alicia’s, becomes more truthful. This switch in mood begins when Alicia alerts Devlin to the news that she has landed Sebastian as a romantic partner. After exchanging information about Dr. Anderson and Emil Hupka’s reaction to the bottle of wine, the camera pulls back as Alicia looks at Devlin. She pauses as a bitter smile reaches her face as she says:
“Nothing very important – just a minor item. But you may want it for the record.”
Devlin asks what it is, and again she hesitates before blurting out.
“You can add Sebastian’s name to my list of playmates.”
Her tone challenges his notion that she is a “tramp,” while her body language reveals her insecurity. Devlin’s face becomes grim. This is the first point in which Devlin breaks his coherence and falls into incoherence.
While still restrained, his momentary lapse in writing the information down is noticeable as his eyes move away from the paper and closer to the camera's lens. Alicia watches Devlin without speaking. Devlin takes this pause before lashing out at Alicia. He straightens and then repartees an emotionally cruel line of dialogue to Alicia, “Pretty fast work,” he says. By framing each character in profile in sharp successions, we are only privy to half their faces. In portraiture, this would connotate a reserved individual who is hiding or is naturally introverted; here, it displays the lack of transparency between their thoughts, words, and emotions and the opaque nature in which they engage with each other and with the duty toward the mission. The cuts create feelings of displacement between us as viewers and the characters on screen.
The shot-reverse shot returns to the static medium two-shot as they return to business and regain composure over their expressive coherence. Their voice raises again to a performative level for anyone who may overhear. Alicia asks Devlin if he is betting on the race. Devlin answers that he isn’t. Devlin dips back into incoherence when he grimly says, “Thanks for the tip.” This reference to Sebastian sets Devlin back, and their coherence does not remain long before another shot-reverse shot takes over, again with the point of view of Devlin from Alicia’s perspective giving us access to her emotions and vulnerability while cutting us off from his. In a striking use of expressive objects, Alicia blocks her eyes with her binoculars. We, as viewers, can see now the horses running on the reflective lenses – another viewer-in-a-viewer self-reflexive moment. She hides her eyes as Devlin interrupts her and calls her out as he sardonically laughs and says:
“I can’t help recalling some of your remarks – about being a new woman, ‘Daisies and buttercups,’ wasn’t it?”
Alicia’s use of the binoculars recalls D.W. Griffith’s True Heart Susie when Lillian Gish, overcome with the news of her beau’s engagement to another woman, hides her face behind her fan. We lose access here to Alicia’s expressive naturalness, which permeates through her cohesive performance. An extreme close-up of Alicia lowering the binoculars enough to regain access to her eyes shows them cascading downward to the ground and away from the lens.
Ironically, their most honest confrontations come amid their performances of neutrality toward each other. When Alicia remarks that if Devlin could have stopped her but instead “threw” her at him, Devin addresses that it was a sort of “love test” in which he questioned Alicia’s character and that her agreement for or against the mission would then inform him of her true personality. Alicia remarks that it was an unbalanced test from the beginning because Devlin had already presumed her guilty, “You never believed in me – what’s the difference—” he responds that it was lucky that he didn’t. “Lucky for both of us – isn’t it? It wouldn’t have been pretty – if I’d believed in you.” Then sarcastically, “If I’d figured, ‘she can never go through with it – because she’s been made over by love.’”
These extreme close-ups of Alicia are distinct from the shots of Devlin, which remain relatively neutral in a wider close-up. Another profile ECU quickly follows her frontality to the camera when she says she hates Devlin with a tear glistening under her lashes. This moment of confession denotes a moment when her dialog and face are telling the truth. She is radiant, and it is easy to understand why this was the film that captures her beauty more than any other she would ever act in. The most important line of dialogue is another self-reflexive moment of performance within performance when Devlin turns away from the racetrack to face Alicia head-on. Seeing Alicia’s tears, Devlin smiles sardonically and says: “Dry your eyes, baby; it’s out of character.” The shots return to a medium shot, yet in this case, Devlin and Alicia are now turned away from each other as Sebastian enters stage left and inserts himself between them, echoing the initial shot of Sebastian and his mother. He is now the object which displaces them (Alicia and Devlin) from each other.
The dialog from Sebastian lets the audience know that he had been watching Alicia and Devlin, an act of surprise. However, foreshadowed at the beginning of the scene. In his interview with Truffaut, Hitchcock distinguishes between suspense and surprise by letting the audience know more than the characters do themselves. While the fact remains that Sebastian’s surveillance was not known, it could have been felt or intuited. The suspense, however, is that we know the information spoken between Devlin and Alicia that Sebastian is not privy to, nor was he able to see with such clarity the polarizing close-ups that dispelled cohesive performance.
With the knowledge of Sebastian’s viewing, we again turn to a close-up of Alicia, who quickly regains her composure but must use her hat, symbolically covered in a veil, to hide her face. Rains had extensive theater training. He believed that the less you do, the more effective it was. In his acting, he utilized this method of “taking the right thing away.” He can be viewed here as he fixedly makes a threatening ultimatum to Alicia, further driving the narrative forward and complicating the plot.
Hitchcock's editing shows the relationship to the acting, especially with its use of the close-up or “Big Head,” as Hitchcock was known for writing it. Notorious is a film with 119 close-ups with 72 extreme close-ups (Truffaut et al.). The close-up gives Hitchcock freedom from the telegraphic Delsartian method. It allows viewers into the character’s psychological mindset through minutely choreographed faces and eyes. In this way, the dramatic tension can be communicated through slight movements giving credence to Hitchcock’s famous expression of wanting actors to “do nothing extremely well.” What is implicated here is that humankind often tries not to telegraph their exacting emotional or mental states but instead tries to maintain an expressive cohesion between their objectives and their actions toward their accomplishing them (Truffaut et al.).
Notorious is a film that shows implications for what it means for characters to assume roles, i.e., political roles, as in the case of a spy thriller. In Naremore’s Acting in the Cinema, we learn about constructing a “person” out of nothing. The film is considered a classic in Hitchcock’s repertoire. In his interview with Hitchcock, Truffaut refers to the film as having the maximum effect from a simplicity of elements (Truffaut et al.). The story's simplicity is there, as well as the restraint within the performances. It owes thanks to its casting of Rains, Bergman, and Grant, with immense help from the supporting Madame Konstantin. Yet, the film gives a lasting impression. It is poignant with its times’ cultural fears without becoming overtly political or nationalistic and lets it remain a timeless classic of 20th-century filmmaking.
Works Cited
Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Univ of California Press, 1988.
Once Upon a Time... Notorious. Directed by David Thompson, 2009.
Truffaut, Francois, et al. Hitchcock. Simon and Schuster, 1985.
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