Cary Grant: “Superbly Unbalancing” in Notorious

Here is what Richard Schickel, the man I keep quoting, has to say about Grant’s acting in that masterpiece. It’s quite a good analysis, I think, of what Grant did with his own persona in the film.

As Devlin the counterspy Grant is cool, brusque, competent — with an almost sadistic edge of cruelty about him. At the start it is clear that his assignment is distasteful to him — recruiting and running an amateur, and a woman at that. And what a woman she is. Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia is not only the personally loyal, if politically disapproving, daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, she is also a nymphomaniac and an incipient alcoholic, unstable to the point of explosiveness. And emotionally needy, pathetically so. “Why won’t you believe in me, Devlin — just a little bit,” she begs at one point. And our shock at seeing Bergman violate her previously pristine image, degrading herself in her need is, like Grant’s charmless manipulativeness, one of the things that makes this movie so superbly unbalancing. She is, in [Pauline] Kael’s terms the pursuer, he the pursued, but in the movie’s own terms that is less significant than the neurotic force-field it wants to set up between them.

In effect, Devlin is forced to become her lover in order to calm her down enough to do her job, which is to insinuate herself into the home and circle (in Rio de Janeiro) of Alexander Sebastian, who is played by Claude Rains, in one of that impeccable actor’s most delicious roles, as the only master spy in the history of the genre who is hag-ridden by his mother (yet another piece of pathology to reckon with)…

What Devlin does not count on is that he will fall genuinely in love with Alicia. Or that Sebastian will ask her to marry him. And that there is no way out of the match if she is to complete her mission.

What neither she nor the audience has counted on is Devlin’s neurosis, which now comes to the fore.

He thinks she accepts the situation too easily; her attitude fits all too well with what he knows of her earlier promiscuity; and with all the fears and suspicions of women in general which she had almost made him forget.

He turns petulant as a jilted schoolboy, reaching levels of mean-spiritedness that from any leaading man would startle an audience, but which from Cary Grant are almost devastating. Hitchcock and Hecht (the writer) have now stripped him bare of his protective image as they previously did Bergman.

The resolution of Notorious requires not just the restoration of moral order, but the rebalancing of psychological equilibrium as well. And what dark intensity this brings to the normally routine process of sorting out a spy drama’s strands. One feels that if one of the Brontes had attempted an espionage story it would have turned out something like this.

With Notorious we come closer to the heart of Grant’s darkness — as close as he would allow us to come. There were two decades left to his career, but only once — and then again for Hitchcock — would he risk anything like this exposure. Something assuredly was lost by the reticence. And yet one can scarecely blame him. Self-revelation is a terrible trial for anyone; it is especially so for an acotr, whose instrument is his person; most of all for an actor like Grant, who so carefully and deliberately created a screen character that was as much a fantasy to him as it was to his audience, in which he could comfortably hide himself, or whatever of himself — that is to say, the Archie Leach who had been — that still existed.

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