I have a love for older films, and Ingrid Bergman has always fascinated me. Born in Sweden, she was already a working actress there when she was brought to Hollywood, and she was anything but a typical movie star. She refused to pluck her eyebrows, wear plunging necklines, sport high heels (she was 5 foot 9), polish her nails, or submit to a Max Factor Hollywood makeover. Yet she was naturally beautiful, and no other actress was quite so mesmerizing or believable when it came to playing love scenes – there was a naturalness to Bergman such that every emotion she played radiated through her and leaped out of the screen. (Another Bergman favorite of mine is Gaslight). This is one of my favorite classic movies: An Alfred Hitchcock production in hazy black and white. In typical 40s fashion, the title says more about Bergman’s character than anything she does in the film.
SYNOPSIS: Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, purportedly a “notorious” German-born party girl whose father has just been convicted in Miami of Nazi collusion. This role was against type for Bergman, who usually played naïve, dutiful, virtuous gals, or at least gals whose passions were honest. Miss Huberman sleeps around, it is implied, and Bergman plays a careless, troubled drunk in the flick’s early scenes delightfully, her dialog fraught with inebriated, eye-closing pauses, wearing an outfit where she shows just a sliver of bare midriff – shocking, for Bergman. (Cary Grant’s character –who has crashed her party -- emphasizes the bareness by tying a handkerchief around her waist to keep her from “getting cold” before they go out for a drive in her car.
Alicia has been recorded refusing to go along with her father’s schemes, so she is targeted by a government agency for use in a spy scheme to rout out more Nazis in Brazil. Grant is the smooth talking agent Devlin who recruits her and accompanies her to Rio de Janeiro, where Alicia claims to have changed her slutty ways. Despite his misgivings Devlin ends up falling for her (there’s a scene on the plane when they are flying into Rio and she leans across his lap to look out the window; Grant’s heated look at her is priceless). The two American spies tour a few Cariocan hot spots, including Sugarloaf, and when Alicia accuses him of not believing she can change, Devlin shuts her up with a kiss. In a scene inside their seaside Rio apartment, Bergman is lit up with love and affection, and she and Grant engage in a long series of intimate kisses and intermittent dialog that was daring for the times, when no one kiss could last longer than 20 seconds. (“This is a funny kind of love affair,” she says. “Oh, why is that?” “Maybe because you don’t love me,” she sighs.)
But no sooner have they come out of their first clinch when the agency lays down the law: Miss Huberman is to use her sexual skills to ensnare a former suitor, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains in his best Napoleon In A Pompadour attitude), who is suspected of being part of a Nazi ring. Both Dev and Alicia are stricken by the news, but company man Dev lets her make up her own mind about the assignment. Hurt that Devlin doesn’t object to the scheme or stop her, Alicia bitterly plunges ahead.
Sebastian falls for Alicia all over again, and despite his mother’s cautions, marries her. Now wedded to this wealthy Nazi kingpin, Alicia tries to ferret out what information she can about his associates and activities, passing news to Devlin via a series of brief rendezvous about town. Devlin is bitter but professional, helping the new bride arrange a large party at the Sebastian mansion so he can infiltrate and try to discover what secret is being held in the wine cellar. It turns out that a special kind of uranium ore mined from nearby mountains is being smuggled to Europe in wine bottles. We never find out exactly what’s so important about this ore or how it’s being used, only that it’s important to the Nazi cause; the audience instead is caught up in Alicia’s daring scheme to get the only cellar key from her husband then pass it to Dev at the party. Hitchcock uses a long overhead tracking shot from the top of the sweeping staircase down to Bergman standing in the grand entrance hall as she greets guests then telescopes the focus even further to her hand in which we see her nervously clutching the key. (Grant reportedly kept the UNICA key after filming and presented it to Bergman years later as a gift.)
To divert Sebastian from going into the cellar for more champagne – and thus noticing that he doesn’t have the key -- Devlin presses a kiss on Alicia, which she can’t even pretend to struggle against. Caught, she tells her husband that Devlin is drunk and forced his attentions on her. Despite the subterfuge, Sebastian realizes that his cellar key is gone. His suspicions mount further when he awakens the next morning to find the key mysteriously returned to his key ring. Sebastian is undone by Alicia’s betrayal and confesses to his mother (“I am married to an American agent”). It is Madame Sebastian who comes up with the ingenious and diabolical plan to slowly poison Alicia and cut off her outside contact once she becomes incapacitated. Thus their vicious Nazi associates will not suspect them of any missteps (in an earlier scene a former colleague, Emil Houpka, publicly freaked over wine bottles used at a dinner party and was summarily disappeared by the Nazi leader).
When Alicia shows up to their next meeting looking beat down, Devlin assumes she’s been lushing it up again and she lets him think so ( alcohol “lightens my … chores,” she tells Dev). But when she misses even more meetings, Devlin goes to the house and learns that “Mrs. Sebastian is ill and confined to her bed.” While the butler goes to fetch Mr. Sebastian, Devlin slips upstairs into Alicia’s room for one of the most romantic scenes ever. “Alicia, tell me, what’s wrong with you?” “Oh Dev, they’re poisoning me...” Alicia says she thought she’d never see him again, and he says he had to see her, he’s in love with her. “Say it again,” she says, “it keeps me awake.” The scene is in tight closeup, you see Bergman doing her love thing, languishing on Grant’s shoulder, her relief palpable, a sick woman reveling in the knowledge that she is loved and ultimately redeemed.
Devlin gets her out of the bed and onto the stairs to get her out of the house. Though Sebastian and his mother attempt to stop them as they descend the long staircase, they are thwarted by the fact that the other Nazis are in the house for a meeting and the Sebastians don’t want to create a scene or reveal that they have been infiltrated by American spies. Devlin saves the day, getting Alicia into the getaway car and locking Sebastian out. Now Sebastian is being summoned by the Nazis, who know something is amiss. THE END.
COSTUME NOTES:
Bergman is at the height of her gorgeous simplicity, her hair loose for the most part, yet while her costumes aren’t much to look at, her accessories are stunning.
•Alicia’s engagement ring from Sebastian is a giant square ice chip of a diamond that seems to weigh down her hand, representing the devil’s bargain she has made.
•For the big party scene, she wears a simple black long-sleeved gown with a deep V neck and back. The V represents her role in this intrigue as both vamp and victim. Her hair is swept into an elaborate bun at her nape crossed with a braid pinned with a diamond brooch. She also wears a glittering diamond necklace, earrings, and a diamond-studded chain belt, items that dazzle the eye. The black gown accentuates her role as a femme fatale, a Mata Hari, though she is inexperienced as a spy.
•In the drawing room scene when she first realizes that the Sebastians are poisoning her coffee, she wears a simple silk blouse and below-the-knee tweed skirt. Over the collar she wears a heavy, too-formal necklace of encrusted jewels – hard to tell what gems they are in black and white – cabochon cuts linked together with teardrop stones cascading in the front, with matching teardrop earrings. The jewelry is, as they say, to die for. The necklace appears to be made of tears, a noose of woe representing the trap she has stuck her pretty neck into. Poisoned and vulnerable, perhaps she will die for what she is attempting.
OTHER NOTES
•Notorious is a fraught word. Face it, Bergman was playing what we would call today a ‘ho. A woman who chooses to cast away virtue – an unrepentant non-virgin in other words – is trash, and deserves whatever she gets. In the 1940s, OK, this was supposedly before the enlightenment. But it goes on today. What happened to women’s lib, gender equality, all of that? One of the axioms or suppositions of the plot, in Devlin’s mind as well as the audience’s, is: Once a ‘ho, always a ‘ho. While love is a transformative value in popular culture, love and transformation come to fallen women conditionally and only after they survive near fatal odds.
•No people of color in this film despite the Brazilian location (though Rio is mostly repped by herky-jerky, stock film backdrops). America was caught up in its war stories, with Nazis providing the perfect villains as they do in Bergman’s best-known film Casablanca. Rio is almost unnecessary to the plotline, though during the big party scene Alicia tells Alex that she will ask the musicians to play Brazilian music after playing so many European waltzes. It is against the backdrop of Brazilian music that Dev and Alicia do their wine cellar snooping and then have their kiss, native music inspiring our leads to get elemental, get physical. The one Brazilian woman in the film is depicted as a boor.
•The flick was a bit daring in having a woman use her sexual wiles on a man she doesn’t love, ultimately winning the affection of the man she does. At the same time, Alicia is no supersleuth, she’s a woman caught in a bad circumstance who has lost faith in herself and is willing to do anything because she doesn’t care. It’s meeting Devlin that changes her, though the timing couldn’t be worse.
