Notorious marked the beginning of the fruitful collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Edith Head. By now, you must know that Hitchcock paid the same attention to the clothes his characters wore as to any other detail in his movies. He would put the clothing directives in the script itself (even before the shooting began, he would have a clear vision of how the film would look like), so that when Edith asked him what kind of clothes he wanted, he said “I really don’t care, whatever the script says”.
About the costumes in Notorious, she said: “Hitchcock is a director who dominates every single scene of his pictures, even to fashion. The job was tricky. The clothes couldn’t be smart in the ordinary sense. They had to avoid the fussy and the extreme. They had to be right for her (Bergman). Some women need accessories galore – jewels, furs, feathers, silly hats – to look glamorous – all the things she hates. She looks marvelous in plain things – a smock, or a blouse and shirt, or a schoolgirl’s tailored dressing gown. Her clothes must have simplicity, skillful design and practically no ornamentation. This is elegance in the subtlest sense.” Alicia had to be elegant and attractive enough to attract the attention of both T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) and Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), but still be believable as a spy. As François Truffaut says in his book, Hitchcock, the film has an exceptionally pure story line, part of which, the sentimental angle is the simplest in the world: two men in love with the same woman.
Cary offers her a scarf to cover her bare midriff, so that she doesn’t catch a cold, as he gallantly puts it.
In the second scene in the film, Ingrid is hosting a cocktail party and her outfit is a great example of the way clothing had a great impact in Hitchcock’s films. Bergman was filmed partially against the dark silhouette of the back of Cary Grant’s head, and the viewer’s eye is continually drawn to her, who is dressed in an ensemble with a zebra print top embellished with sequins and a bare midriff. The idea was to establish Alicia Huberman as a party girl and her outfit easily did that. But filming Cary Grant’s back had another reasoning, as well. Hitchcock chose this angle to create a dark silhouette and a mysterious mood, accentuated by Cary’s uncommonly thick neck, one of the flaws he would learn to overcome in time (for example, by wearing shirts with tall collars and broadening the shoulders of his suits with padding), but which, here, Hitch shrewdly uses to serve his purpose.
Later on, Alicia had to wear more demure clothing; as an infiltrator, Hitchcock cautioned, she needed to blend in, not stand out.
A gesture that would become one of Cary Grant’s trademarks, putting his hands into his pants pockets. As Richard Torregrossa points out in his book, Cary Grant: A Celebration of Style, it would be perfected with the arrival of double-vented jackets and it is an obvious detail in North by Northwest. He’s wearing single-vented jackets in Notorious, as shown below. Another thing to observe was Cary’s ability to mix prints (photo above), an art he had learned from Jack Buchanan, one of his style models.
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won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival “for a new movie language and the beauty of its images.” I loved the film the first time I saw it, a few years ago, and I loved it even more now. Visually speaking (cinematography by Aldo Scavarda), it’s a hauntingly beautiful film. Not one frame is purposeless, each tells a part of the story. And as a whole, I find the film groundbreaking, stark and pure, advancing the language of cinema. With no clear ending and an on-going theme of reflection, this is one of the kinds of movies that has the most lasting impression on me.
, a light playfulness that could not have been achieved cinematically without the house robe. She also says that Adriana Berselli told her that Monica Vitti was the one who chose the more playful one of two items, because she was dying to do a comical piece in the film. This just shows, once again, the actress’s real talent for comedy.
