Monday Movie Review: Notorious

Notorious (1946) 10/10
Alicia Huberman's father has been convicted of treason. Now U.S. government agent T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) has recruited Alicia (Ingrid Berman)to spy on her father's Nazi cohorts in Brazil. While waiting for their assignment, Devlin and Alicia begin to fall in love, but their love is threatened when they learn that Alicia's job is to seduce Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains). Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Notorious may well be Hitchcock's only feminist film.

Okay, first let's say how wonderful it is. Notorious is as perfectly constructed as any film you will ever seen. The composition of its shots, the masterful way tension is built, the subtlety and complexity of emotion, it is all simply perfection. And the acting! I never tire of watching Ingrid Bergman fall in love; she just melts into it, abandoning her very soul to sensation and feeling. Grant takes all his big, fascinating handsomeness and introduces weakness and pettiness and fear. Rains makes us sympathize with a Nazi, and Leopoldine Constantine is extraordinary as one of Hitchcock's trademark evil mothers.

So how is this feminist? The complex and intricate script by Ben Hecht must be credited, as it explores the nature of sexuality, especially as it plays out between a self-described tramp and a man who says he fears women.

When Devlin says this, Alicia seems to understand that this means she is especially fearsome, because she is not just a woman, but a sexual woman. Fearing and also desiring women is the basic recipe for misogyny. One point of interest is that Devlin owns his own misogyny; he has always feared and hated women, it is not Alicia's fault. And yet he hates himself for loving Alicia, and hates her for inspiring those complex and miserable feelings.

Is Notorious about Nazis, or is it about sexuality? Is she working for her government, or for the patriarchy? Alicia, hating the place that men (her father, her government, the reporters; all male) have placed her in, drinks and fucks. Given an opportunity to redeem herself through good works, she embraces it. But is the work truly good, or is it more slut-shaming?

In a pivotal scene, a group of government men sit and discuss Alicia's work. They are distant, removed, stuffy. They are stuffed shirts who can politely discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Alicia, whose work is loathsome and dangerous. And at the same time, they can look down their noses at her for doing loathsome things. Again we must ask, is it her spying on the Nazis that makes her an ambivalent figure, or is this just a metaphor for all female sexuality; necessary but icky, praised for its necessity but still an object of misogynist mockery. Devlin suddenly sees the hypocrisy and objects in the strongest possible terms. He applauds Alicia for who and what she is, and not for the ideal he'd been hoping she'd become. In that moment, he is not measuring her by whether or not she sleeps around, only by her honor and courage.

Devlin has no first name, and so is an everyman; nothing more than an agent of his government, which I read as the patriarchy. At first, he loved Alicia but only if she conformed to his wish to tame and transform her. Finally, he loves her for who she is, a woman with the agency to determine whether or not she will be sexual.

Meanwhile, Alicia is being poisoned. And again, is this a murderous Nazi plot, or the social price of being a sexual woman? Is it really that different from her alcoholism, a self-inflicted poisoning to blind her to the way she is viewed?

You can certainly read it as Alicia hating herself for being sexual, which is not a particularly feminist act, but what Alicia seems to hate the most is being looked at and judged. Our first sight of her in the film is being questioned and photographed by reporters; she wants to get away. And again, she wants to get away from cops, from people who spy on her. Perhaps by becoming a spy she is taking the agency that was taken from her, but it is always when she is being looked at and judged that she drinks, and when her spying is discovered, she is poisoned. The judgmental gaze of others is the essence of poison to her, and when Devlin at last accepts her and understands that it was his own pain he was seeing, not her, she can be healed.

And also? Great movie.

(Cameo cross-post in profile)