Notorious

The postwar situation as stated by a traitor's attorney is far from settled, "we'll leave that for the appeal." The distressed heiress (Ingrid Bergman) medicates herself with drink and sex, the still center of her shindig is a government agent introduced in a Magritte view, the unmistakable back of Cary Grant's pomaded head. (Hair gets in her eyes during a joyless joyride, the hangover gaze finds the tall dark stranger practically upside-down.) From Miami to Rio, infiltrating the residue of the Third Reich is a mission for the closet patriot "good at making friends with gentlemen." The targeted industrialist (Claude Rains) supplies the third side of quite the bitter triangle, the vulnerable Nazi the heroine is to seduce while her contact feigns indifference. "I see. Some kind of love test." Alfred Hitchcock at his most subtly barbed, an essay on romantic bondage in espionage guise, as polished as Lubitsch and a hundred times bleaker. The celebrated kiss scene is a nuzzling close-up that moves from balcony to telephone to door, the cold water that follows has Grant's ithyphallic champagne bottle forgotten on his superior's desk. (Edwards duly ejaculates the punchline in The Pink Panther.) Bottles return as a ticking clock at the husband's soiree, culminating with uranium ore concealed in the wine cellar locked like Bluebeard's castle. "The honeymoon's not over, huh?" Up by the chandelier and down to the clenched palm, the camera zeroing in on the key-shaped talisman of deception and truth, afterward the cuckold is a shamefaced little boy facing Mother (Leopoldine Konstantin, between Mrs. Danvers and Mrs. Bates). The blur of intoxication and poisoning is where Hitchcock refines the grammar of cinema, and where Mata Hari becomes Sleeping Beauty. Emotions and codes, cf. Sternberg's Dishonored, "dry your eyes, baby. It's out of character." It all builds to Bergman's smile following a ballet of deliverance and doom down a lavish staircase, a magnificent descent magnificently reversed at the end of Vertigo. Cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff. With Louis Calhern, Reinhold Schünzel, Moroni Olsen, Ivan Triesault, Alexis Minotis, and Fay Baker. In black and white.