A Film Canon

 

 

Notorious marks the beginning of a new project in Hitchcock's career - forcing the audience to identify with the perpetrator, rather than the victim, of his revelatory object relations; or, more accurately, setting up a triangle between perpetrator, victim and the object capable of reconfiguring the latter's subjectivity, and creating a fluid relation between the three, such that to identify with one is to identify with the other. As a result, the film exhibits some of the most nuanced, adult characterisation in Hitchcock's career, in the shifting relationships between Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), daughter of a convicted Nazi informer, T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant), the C.I.A. agent who arranges for her to act as an American spy, and Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), the object of her efforts, which quickly reach the stage of pretending to reciprocate romantic, and marital, intentions. Given her simultaneous, sincere profession of such intentions to Devlin, this identifies the two men in a manner that ultimately debilitates both, producing an exquisite balance of sympathy that is encapsulated in the final scene, in which the three coalesce into a shifting, uneasy mobile unit for quite different individual motivations, and in such a way as to clarify that the film's preoccupation with staircases, hills and other slanting surfaces has been a mere figure for this exquisiteness. In particular, Devlin's romantic debilitation - combined with his relatively low position in the C.I.A - restrains Grant's self-congratulatory hamminess, producing one of the finest performances of his career, and ensuring that the film can - astonishingly - end on the note of Sebastien's plight, rather than Devlin's - and Alicia's - romantic satisfaction. The result is an intensification of Shadow Of A Doubt's mental telegraphy, in which heightened proximity shortens thought-lines to the distance between touched cheeks, as evinced both in Hitchcock's peculiar use of close-ups, as well as his poetic integration of them into perpetrator-object-victim units; triangulated thought.