CITTA VIOLENTA

A simultaneously stark and indulgent thriller that has US intelligence agents staking out Nazi exiles in Brazil, uranium ore hidden in wine bottles, and one tragic man's tyrannical mother (enough material for two or three more films than this!) but is, in the end, about none of these things. It's a strained, and strange, portrait of love. Or, you could say, love struck by silence, spite, its acidic extremes; caught lust or its consummation, and potential apotheosis.

It takes a long way around. Everything important remains unsaid until the very last, almost terminal, moment. Emotions break and pass in mute, but are anything other than invisible. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman use their faces and bodies like shields, but their eyes are essays. Grant plays Devlin, a handsome OSS-style officer repressed to the point of petrifaction, who falls for Alicia Huberman (Bergman), the wild and estranged daughter of a Nazi spy. Devlin can hardly believe this slip, this deluge; he winces with anger, devotion, and disappointment, and Alicia knows it: “you’re sore because you’ve fallen for a little drunk you tailed in Miami, and you don‘t like it.” Too much!

Alicia, at least, can express feeling when she is allowed to; though Devlin bludgeons her out of it. And so, she drinks, like she used to: recklessly, hard. And the drink does what it should do: it dismantles reality, smothers emotion. Drink disembodies the drinker: this is fine, oblivion being sought. On a Rio sidewalk, across a cafe table, Devlin says: “you've been sober for eight days...eight days practically whitewashed.” “I'm very happy, Dev,” Alicia replies. “Why won't you let me be happy?” She offers intimacy relentlessly, but it's cut short, blunted. Tenderness and the longing for it all weighed in words and little openings. "It's no fun, Dev," she says, emotion laid on a chopping block. "Don't you think it's a little late for that?" Snap back: vocal chords frosty with indignation and self-loathing. Bergman herself was no drinker, whore or party girl; she makes an awkward and glacial debauchee, but it somehow strikes true, and maybe you're willing her to excess, as well as redemption. She was no cook, either, which must have made Alicia's romantic chicken dinner - that “caught fire once,” but is left to go cold – something of an on-set joke. “Marriage must be wonderful with this sort of thing going on every day.” That clipped accent, irresistible.

Notorious is an elaborate construct: a tangle of truth and deception, a feint and conceit, a wilderness of mirrors. (James Jesus Angleton couldn't unpick this love affair!) Sparks of sincerity and desperate empathy flint off lies and facades. Happiness is visible in tiny, repeated moments: in outbursts, and reflexes. But it’s rare. Appearance must be maintained, for reasons of patriotism, and self-dignity. A war is winding down. In its ruins, love is an icy blast, and a counter-blast.

Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)