-
7. MacGuffins, Deceptions, Domestic Recriminations
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
- Additional Information
MacGuffins, Deceptions, Domestic Recriminations miKe levee, rains’s aGenT, called his client one day. Alfred Hitchcock had expressed interest in Rains’s services. Could he have a meeting? Hitchcock was casting a film called Notorious, a tale of postwar intrigue and espionage revolving around an expatriate Nazi cell in Rio de Janeiro , starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. Bergman would play Alicia Huberman, a woman with a checkered background who is conscripted by American intelligence to seduce and marry a mother-dominated Nazi, Alexander Sebastian, who is suspected of trafficking in uranium. A performer of special elegance and cosmopolitan charm was required. Rains was intrigued. “Tell me,” said Hitchcock. “How will you play this fellow? With a German accent?” “Oh, no. You’ve got real Germans. This man has been to Heidelberg, the Sorbonne, and I was thinking about Oxford.” “And Brixton?” Hitchcock asked bluntly. Rains was slightly startled. “How did you know?” “I found out everything about you. I wanted to know.” Hitchcock’s first choice for the role had been Clifton Webb, whose arch screen persona would likely have underscored the subtextual implications of homosexuality in the mother-dominated character. But the story called for Sebastian to be genuinely, achingly in love with the Bergman character, and Webb would arguably have been not quite believable in the part. Rains would play it with great subtlety and convincing pathos. Hitchcock then changed the subject. “What about this business of being a midget?” C l a u D e R a i n S 0 “What do you mean, a midget?” There were no midgets mentioned in the script. “Your wife, Miss Bergman, is very tall. There are occasions when we can build a ramp, but have you ever worn elevated shoes?” Rains, recounting the story years later, said that at this, “My pride took a bit of a setback. I protested, but he insisted in a gentle way and I bought them.” He added, “I finally got used to them, and I’ve used them many times since.” Most accounts of the making of Notorious mention Rains’s use of lifts in his shoes and ramps to bring him up to Bergman’s stature (Humphrey Bogart famously wore platform footwear for several scenes opposite the actress in Casablanca). On the first day of shooting, Rains was talking to Bergman. Hitchcock crept up and jerked up the cuff of Rains’s trousers, displaying the shoes. “The shame of Rains,” he intoned. A close viewing of the film reveals very little obvious chicanery with Rains’s height. Hitchcock in fact uses the disparity in height to visually underscore the shifting power dynamics between characters. There are several long shots of Rains and Bergman walking together at what appears to be their natural height (Rains was about 5'6" and Bergman about 5'9"); these are scenes in which Bergman’s character seems to be gaining confidence and control. But in other key scenes, such as Sebastian and Alicia’s first meeting in a restaurant, as well as the bedroom scene in which Sebastian almost discovers his wife’s crucial theft of a key, Hitchcock brings his performers to a level plane. At one scene in a restaurant, Rains seems to be sitting on the equivalent of a telephone book, the better to look Bergman directly in the eye. Notorious is a sterling example of Hitchcock’s use of the “MacGuffin ,” his pet word for an inanimate object or other arbitrary device that drives the story. In this case, it was a bottle in Sebastian’s wine cellar filled with granulated uranium. This was not a particularly good way to transport a radioactive substance, but it was an excellent way to stage a suspenseful sequence in which Rains painfully realizes he has been set up by Bergman and American intelligence. Rains made no recorded comment about working again with Cary Grant, who had made such a poor impression on him during the filming [54.86.180.90] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:51 GMT) MacGuffins, Deceptions, Domestic Recriminations of The Last Outpost; for Notorious, Rains was content simply to walk away with the show. As one Canadian reviewer noted, “It is difficult not to find Rains’ baggy-eyed, shrewd-face villainy more interesting, and therefore more sympathetic, than the virtue of Cary Grant.” Notorious earned Rains his fourth, and last, Academy Award nomination . He lost again, but never made a comment to anyone about his obvious disappointment. Meanwhile, he and Hitchcock...