Alfred Hitchcock is often considered an innovator of filmmaking, and quite rightly so I might add. His films carry a certain daring confidence that few early pieces of cinema possessed and his 1946 film Notorious is no exception.
Notorious follows a woman by the name of Alicia Huberman (played pitch-perfectly by a Hitchcock mainstay Ingrid Bergman) who is enlisted by a US government agent named Devlin (the suave Cary Grant, also a Hitchcock favorite) to spy on a group of suspected Nazis post WWII. The story is simple enough, as is the case with many Hitchcock films, but the excitement lies not in the story itself, but in the multiple twists and turns that Hitchcock expertly presents.
When I was younger, and had little experience in the realm of Hitchcockian cinema, I always assumed that he was some sort of master of horror. My VHS of The Mummy (the Brendan Fraser remake) was one of the few video tapes I owned as a kid, so I would watch it over and over, and on it was a preview for a Hitchcock video collection. If I remember correctly, they did indeed call him the "Master of Horror" in this preview, splicing together numerous shots from all of his films, which included blood-curdling screams, people falling from tall buildings, skeleton corpses, and of course, black devil birds raining death from above. So you'll forgive me when I say that as a child, I wanted nothing to do with Hitchcock or his psychotic imagination.
Of course, in hindsight, while Hitchcock is a master of horror (movies like Psycho and The Birds should help prove my case), I'd say equally so he's the master of the thriller and, as a child, I misunderstood everything about the man. Notorious follows more closely to other Hitchcock classics like North by Northwest and Vertigo, films that would come to shape the way modern thrillers are made, and have little to do with psychotic murderers nursing terrifying mommy issues.
Where Notorious truly excels is in it's charismatic lead performances. Bergman is enchanting. Here is an actress who was well ahead of her time. She found ways to give depth to characters who quite frankly had little right having much depth at all, and her performance here is of no exception. Though Grant gets top billing, Bergman is very much the star. Not to take anything away from Grant, who is so majestically cool onscreen, that I began to think how much of a shame it was that James Bond didn't surface until 1960. He would've been a shoo-in.
Though the film starts off a bit slowly (this can be attributed to the fact that the audience isn't really sure what's going on right away), it generates speed quickly, and once Hitchcock establishes the plot as well as all the main players, the film rarely lets up. Interestingly, and in traditional Hitchcock fashion, the director plays mind games with the audience, creating a possible love triangle between the two leads, and the supposed antagonist, a well-off Nazi by the name of Alexander Sebastian, played with a nice dose of reserved villainousness by the talented Claude Rains, who by all accounts, seems to be consistently brilliant in everything he does. Hitchcock revels in showing us only the bare essentials, leaving us to speculate, discuss the possibilities, and piece together the rest. Is Alicia really in love with both Devlin and Sebastian, or is she just playing her part of spy to absolute perfection? We may never know.
While watching, I noticed that Notorious bore resemblance to two films. Most notably, it holds quite a bit in common with the classic film-noir Casablanca, with both films revolving around world war spy games, love triangles involving good looking people, and beautifully exotic locations. This is probably a result of audience love for Casablanca and their thirst to see more films along those lines. More importantly, however, a certain element of Notorious reminds me of a later Hitchcock film, the previously mentioned Psycho, and dare I say that Hitchcock may have used his experience on the set of Notorious to construct what many consider to be his best film in Psycho. Specifically, the relationship between Sebastian and his mother is rather frightening. She lives with him in his large mansion, always keeping a watchful eye on her son, never afraid to voice her often vengeful and corrupting views to Sebastian. There's an underlying weariness in Sebastian when he's around his mother, who is a constant hulking presence in the home, but ultimately he sides with her harsh, disturbing ways, stifling any good that may have been present in him. And isn't this, after all, the main dynamic of Norman Bates and his mother in Psycho? Watch the film and decide for yourself.
Normally, I don't condone remakes. Though I'm usually excited to see them, they very often let me down, throwing restraint to the wind, becoming heavy-handed, often missing the point of the original entirely. However, I would loudly get behind a remake of this film, if done by the right people of course. I could easily see it's gorgeous locales, sophisticated characters, and interweaving plot as a fine Scorsese piece, shot with the same grace in which he shot this year's Shutter Island (with DiCaprio in the Cary Grant role, of course). Or perhaps the brothers Coen could take the film and give it an interesting injection of outlandish cynicism. Alas, I'm sure such a thing will never surface.
All in all, a strong entry in the Hitchcock catalogue and a diamond in the rough that you mustn't miss.
FINAL SCORE: 4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment