But the film never loses sight of the fact that Alicia’s truths are more complicated. The men who seek to determine her fate use her body as a weapon, believing her to be a femme fatale. She is neither projection nor perfectly perfumed fantasy. Noir predominantly offered two kinds of women-the femme fatale, powered by her desire for wealth, autonomy, and sex, who is so focused on herself that she doesn’t heed the men she’s destroying along the way, and the good-natured angel positioned to remind us of societal expectations. By 1946, the year Notorious was released, Hollywood was engulfed in the dark morass of film noir. There were the heartbreaking protagonists of women’s pictures, shopgirls on the make, bespectacled librarians, hungry spinsters. It was the decade that gave the likes of the aggressive Bette Davis, the chameleonic Barbara Stanwyck, and the self-possessed Olivia de Havilland some of their most complex roles. In the forties, Hollywood offered female audiences both escapism and a kind of satisfaction laced with a feminist ethos. But Alicia’s supple vulnerability and mature sexiness are singular. These women can be wanting, cutting, lovely, and even mired in obsessions of their own. She eschews the patrician iciness of Grace Kelly ( Rear Window, 1954 To Catch a Thief, 1955), the painful yearning of Joan Fontaine ( Rebecca, 1940 Suspicion, 1941), and the gleaming eroticism of Kim Novak ( Vertigo, 1958). She brings an untold warmth, a sincerity, and a vulpine physicality that make her character a beguiling outlier not only in Hitchcock’s canon but also within forties cinema and Bergman’s own career.Īlicia is in a class apart from Hitchcock’s other iconic blondes. But even amid these wonders, it is Bergman who is the crowning jewel. The performances by Grant and Rains are dynamic high-water marks in their towering careers. The narrative of this spy drama contains such decadent pessimism that it moves the film into noir territory. Director Alfred Hitchcock and cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff are constantly reminding us where characters are in relation to one another, creating an intricate choreography in which even the most minute gestures-a hand enclosing a key, a gaze, a shaky grin-are charged with eroticism and violent potential. But the mission he ultimately enlists her for, to seduce and garner information from suspected Nazi Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), is complicated by Alicia and Devlin’s own love affair. An opportunity for her to atone for his mistakes, in some small way, comes in the form of Cary Grant as U.S. Alicia is reeling from the conviction of her father as a Nazi conspirator. But her drunken revelry is shot through with so much sorrow and confusion that you can’t help but feel for her.
#Notorious screenwriter ben how to#
She’s a socialite getting drunk in Miami with no sense of direction, the kind of woman with more passion than the world around her knows how to handle. For Ingrid Bergman as the lusciously complex and raw-nerved Alicia Huberman, it’s all these things.Īs the film begins, Alicia is on the razor’s edge of a new chapter in her life, one that isn’t wholly of her own making. In Notorious (1946), love assumes different shapes and presentations-as a wound, a weapon, a promise, a curse.
0 kommentar(er)
