…
…
…
...
SPOILER ALERT!
There have been several movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock in which a man has a mother, which is usually a bad sign. Most notable among them is the movie Psycho (1960), of course. Preceding that movie was Strangers on a Train (1951), in which Robert Walker, who is a psychopath, is unduly attached to his mother while hating his father. In Frenzy (1972), as soon as we find out that Barry Foster loves his mother, we are right to suspect him of being the necktie strangler. In The Birds (1963), Rod Taylor has a strange relationship with his mother. For four years, he has spent every weekend with her, during which time he has had no girlfriend because he didn’t want to upset her.
In all these cases, the man is a bachelor. If a man is married or has previously been married, then there is nothing to worry about. In The Wrong Man (1956), Henry Fonda has a mother, but he is married to Vera Miles, so that makes it all right. In North by Northwest (1959), Cary Grant has been married and divorced twice, so we know he is normal, and his mother is just amusing.
I thought that the Hitchcock movies mentioned above were all the ones in which a bachelor has a mother. But the other night, I decided to watch Notorious (1946). I had completely forgotten about the mother angle in this movie, probably because I find the movie so disturbing in other respects that I overlooked it.
A few film critics have compared Notorious to Gilda, also made in 1946. In that movie, the title character, played by Rita Hayworth, is married to an older man, Ballin Mundson (George Macready), a Nazi living in South America. Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) and Gilda used to be lovers, but that love on his part has turned into hate. To vent his hatred on her, he sees to it that she remains trapped in her marriage to Ballin. And then, at the end of the movie, after Ballin is killed, Johnny and Gilda are now together and will live happily ever after. At least, that is what we are expected to believe, which is asking a lot.
A similar love/hate triangle exists in Notorious. Cary Grant plays Devlin, an American secret agent whose job it is to enlist Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) to infiltrate some Nazis in South America shortly after the end of World War II. The fact that she is the daughter of a Nazi spy, who has just been convicted of treason, will presumably make it possible for her to gain their confidence. The intelligence agency Devlin works for has had her bungalow wired for three months, and from the arguments they have heard her having with her father, they know that she is patriotic.
However, Alicia is also known to be a woman of loose morals, who enjoys drinking and screwing, hence the title of this movie. Being hardboiled, she sneers at love. When Devlin asks her why she likes a particular song, she says, “Because it’s a lot of hooey. There's nothing like a love song to give you a good laugh.”
Because of her promiscuity, one of the men Devlin works with had misgivings for a while, saying, “She had me worried for some time, a woman of that sort…. I don’t think any of us have any illusions about her character….” On the other hand, it turns out that a woman of that sort is just what they need.
Devlin falls in love with Alicia before finding out exactly what her assignment is. That assignment turns to be the seduction of Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), who is one of the Nazis, and who used to be very much enamored of her. When Alicia does not adamantly refuse to prostitute herself in that manner, Devlin hates her for being willing to go along with it, and he starts being mean to her. I said I found this movie disturbing, and this is the reason, the way Devlin is so mean to Alicia throughout most of the movie. It is for the same reason that I find it difficult to watch Gilda, given the way Johnny is mean to Gilda.
Of course, we have to wonder, what did Devlin think Alicia would be asked to do if not use sex to get information about what the Nazis are up to? After all, is he not supposed to be the honeypot that will lure her into this scheme? In other words, the normal procedure, one would think, would be to invite Alicia into an office at the intelligence agency to see if they can get her to help them by appealing to her patriotism. We might imagine Devlin’s superior, Paul Prescott (Louis Calhern), explaining the situation to her. Besides, she doesn’t seem to have a job, so maybe she needs a paycheck.
Instead, Prescott gets Devlin, presumably the sexiest secret agent they have, to wangle his way into one of her parties, where he can seduce her into doing his bidding. And then, just because he ends up falling in love with her while enticing her with his charm, he ends up hating her for not living up to his high moral standards.
It turns out that Devlin did not know that Sebastian already had a thing for Alicia a long time ago, but that merely raises the question, why didn’t Prescott let Devlin know that when he was assigned to the case? There is no good answer to that question regarding the movie’s internal logic. Instead, the answer is one of external logic. The movie needs to make excuses for Devlin by keeping him in the dark, otherwise he would have no reason for being upset when Alicia goes along with a plan that he knew about all along.
Anyway, she succeeds in making Sebastian fall in love with her, and soon they are married. At the end of that movie, when it is clear that Sebastian’s Nazi friends will kill him for being foolish enough to marry a secret agent, Devlin and Alicia will be able to live happily ever after, especially since, as in the movie Gilda, there will be no need for a messy divorce. But as with Gilda, we feel put upon when asked to accept such an ending. Whether we are talking about Johnny in Gilda or Devlin in Notorious, these men have shown Gilda and Alicia respectively how cruel they can be. Such cruelty would be bound to manifest itself again in the future, for people do not change that much. These women would be foolish to marry them.
There is, however, one big difference between these two movies. In Gilda, Ballin does not have a mother, whereas in Notorious, Sebastian does have a mother, played by Leopoldine Konstantin. Suppose that Sebastian, like Ballin, had not had a mother. In one sense, the movie could have proceeded in pretty much the same way. Sebastian’s mother is not essential to the plot, but she is essential to the characterizations.
Claude Rains was about 57 years old when he made this movie. His character of Sebastian is that of a man who, on account of his mother, has been bachelor all his life. His mother says she doesn’t like Alicia because she suspects that Alicia just wants to marry him for his money, but he knows the real reason. “All these carping questions are merely the expression of your own jealousy,” he says to her, “just as you've always been jealous of any woman I’ve ever shown any interest in.” In other words, Sebastian is not merely a bachelor with a mother, which in a Hitchcock movie is bad enough, but she is the reason he is a bachelor as well, which makes it worse. In fact, the only reason he got to know Alicia long enough to fall in love with her when he met her in Washington was that his mother was not with him at the time.
Claude Rains was 5 feet, 6 inches tall. Ingrid Bergman was 5 feet, 9 inches tall. Now, in real life, some men marry women who are taller than they are without there being any psychological implications. But this is a movie, and Hitchcock deliberately chose these actors for their parts. Because our mothers were taller than we were when we were children, the pairing of Alicia and Sebastian, with her being 3 inches taller than he is, naturally has a mother-son connotation. Not only does Sebastian have a mother in this movie, but his wife Alicia is like a second mother to him as well.
Although a bachelor with a mother in a Hitchcock movie indicates something bad, what that bad thing is varies from one movie to another. Freud may have conditioned us to think of an Oedipus complex, but only in Psycho is there any hint of that, and that hint occurs only in the novel on which the movie was based, and even then, the novel only refers to rumors of incest and necrophilia. In none of the other movies are there any indications of an Oedipus complex. Far from having a sexual desire for his mother in Strangers on a Train, for example, Robert Walker’s character is thought by many critics to be a homosexual.
The character flaw of Sebastian in Notorious, other than the fact that he is a Nazi, is that he is weak, which is made clear by the way he is dominated by his mother. While we are children, we depend on our mothers for protection. This is something we naturally grow out of, but Sebastian has not. When he realizes that Alicia is a secret agent who has learned that there are wine bottles filled with uranium in his wine cellar, he goes to his mother’s bedroom and wakes her up, telling her he needs her help, berating himself, saying, “I must have been insane, mad, behaved like an idiot to believe in her with her clinging kisses.”
“Stop wallowing in your foul memories,” comes his mother’s curt response, as she lights up a cigarette and prepares to take charge of the situation. She decides they will poison Alicia, killing her before the other Nazis find out. Of course, Devlin rescues her from their clutches in the nick of time.
In 1956, William H. Whyte, Jr. published The Organization Man, in which there is a chapter on personality tests. His advice for any man wanting to rise in a corporation to upper management is to cheat when taking such a test. To that end, he provides a list of mantras to instill in one’s own mind before taking a personality test, which will hopefully allow one to answer the questions in a way that will be conducive to one’s advancement to upper management. For example, one such mantra is, “I like things pretty much the way they are.” Another is, “I don’t care for books or music much.”
First on his list of mantras, however, is this: “I love my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more.” The idea behind this is that a man who loves his father more than his mother is a healthy male, one capable of taking the reins of power in a corporation. Of course, he must still love his mother to some degree, but to love your mother more than your father would be a bad sign, indicating that one is insecure and still feels the need for maternal protection.
Ultimately, just as in Gilda, there may have been a need to diminish the masculinity of the rival male in the triangle. A lot of critics believe Ballin is a homosexual, making it easy for us to believe that Gilda’s sex with him was not all that good, not like the kind she will have with Johnny. In a similar way, giving Sebastian a mother and making him shorter than Alicia was necessary to facilitate a happy ending for her and Devlin, if you are willing to call it that. In so doing, Hitchcock made it easier for Devlin to accept the sexual relationship between Alicia and Sebastian.
Now, on the one hand, it probably bothered Devlin that a mama’s boy like Sebastian was the one who got to have sex with Alicia while Devlin himself, who was tall, handsome, and manly, was deprived of that privilege. It just wasn’t fair! But on the other hand, if Sebastian had not had a mother, and if, in addition, he had been played by an actor that was taller than Ingrid Bergman, Devlin might have worried that Alicia really enjoyed the sex she was having with Sebastian. The image in his mind of that Sebastian bringing Alicia to orgasmic ecstasy would have been too much for a man like Devlin to forgive.