Hitchcock and the Tramp

Recently, I finally got to see Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film noir classic Notorious. And it was delightfully refreshing - especially in light of the inordinate amount of press going to the Twilight series these days, and its message that True Love (TM) must be chaste, obsessive, and monogamous, and that True Love (TM) mostly comes to good girls who wait.

Back in 1946, Alfred Hitchcock made his movie about the great romance of, in the parlance of the times, a "loose woman." As Notorious opens, our heroine Alicia Huberman, played by Ingrid Bergman, is freely enjoying the drinking and casual-sex parts of life. Into her life walks Mr. Devlin, played by Cary Grant, who talks her into a job with the U.S. government spying on Nazi war criminals. Alicia and Devlin quickly fall into a love affair, even as bad-girl Alicia smirks, "Every time you look at me I can see it running over the spokes: ...Once a tramp, always a tramp," and later, "You're sore because you've fallen for a drunk." Censorship rules at the time prohibited nudity or kissing more than three seconds on film; Hitchcock followed only the letter of those laws with the intimately sexy sequence starting at 3:30 below.



Not giving away much, as it becomes reasonably predictable, Alicia also starts having sex with the Nazi that Devlin has hired her to spy on. Which she discloses to her lover right after giving him other espionage-related intelligence: "Just a minor item but you may want it for the record. You can add Sebastian's name to my list of playmates." His initial reaction is predictably hurt and hurtful: "It wouldn't have been pretty if I had believed in you." But for all the accusations that Alicia is a loose woman, a tramp, an alcoholic, or a whore, her sexual charms very effectively earn the Nazis' trust, which is what makes her a competent spy. She knows exactly who she is, and why she does what she does; and what she does involves putting herself in great physical danger for the cause of fighting fascism. Without her "loose" sexual confidence, she wouldn't be as capable of a heroine.

This is not a film about polyamory, because obviously there is no honesty in reporting one's lover's activities to his enemy's government. But it is a film that exposes the falsehood that romantic love - with all the glory of Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant - must necessitate sexual exclusivity. The "tramp" risking her life for patriotism blends the binary between "bad girl" and "good girl." And in the end, love proves more important (and more interesting) than sexual jealousy.

Especially with all the New Moon billboards I have to pass on a daily basis, I am grateful to Alfred Hitchcock for a thriller glorifying the romance and the accomplishments of a slut.