The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alfred Hitchcock · a film · 1946 · about 101 minutes · screenplay by Ben Hecht
Mode
Spy thriller made the frame of a love story; romantic melodrama, suspense film and domestic drama of a poisoned wife in one structure
Mythos
Bluebeard: the keys given, the one key stolen, the forbidden room, the slow killing in the husband’s house and the rescue; the descent into a house of the dead and the return up its stair; the son owned by his mother
Phase
A Miami prologue, the love affair and the assignment in Rio, the marriage and the keys, the party and the cellar, the discovery and the poisoning, the rescue on the staircase; each turn made on an object
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 101 minutes, directed and produced by Hitchcock for RKO Radio Pictures; Ben Hecht’s screenplay, Ted Tetzlaff’s photography, Roy Webb’s score
Register
From a drunken party and a long kiss broken by a telephone to a cold poisoning over coffee; flirtation performed for watchers, contempt in an office
Scale
Three people and a mother in one house; an intelligence service and a ring of exiles after the war
Governing Proposition
A traitor’s daughter, known for her drinking and her men, is recruited by an American agent, falls in love with him, and is sent by his service to marry a Nazi in Rio and steal the secret of his cellar. The agent loves her and will not say so; he waits for her to refuse the task he has given her, and she takes it to dare him. The wager of the film is that a spy thriller can carry a love story as its true action, so that the suspense is whether two people will trust each other, proved through things passed from hand to hand: a bottle, a key, a cup.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins at a courtroom door in Miami. A man is convicted of treason, and the reporters turn to his daughter, Alicia Huberman, played by Ingrid Bergman. Their word for her is the film’s title. Before she has spoken she is a traitor’s daughter and a woman with a reputation, and the film will spend its length on what is done with both. That night she gives a party and drinks to forget her father. Among the guests is T. R. Devlin, played by Cary Grant, an American agent.
The drunken drive that follows and the morning after set down the two facts the film will test: her self-destruction and his watching coldness. She sees him from her pillow, upside down, turning as she sits up. She takes the work his service offers, and they fly to Rio. In Rio they fall in love, and the love is the thing the rest of the film will put to the test.
Hitchcock directed and produced the film, and RKO Radio Pictures released it in August 1946. Ben Hecht wrote the screenplay; Ted Tetzlaff photographed it; Roy Webb wrote the score. The project was developed under David O. Selznick and passed to RKO as a package before shooting, with two of the most bankable stars in Hollywood. Claude Rains plays Alexander Sebastian, Leopoldine Konstantin his mother, and Louis Calhern Paul Prescott, Devlin’s chief. It is a film in English, black and white, with some German and Portuguese at its edges.
Movement II
The kiss comes first. On a balcony the two begin it, and they carry it inside, to the telephone and to the door, without letting go, while the talk runs on about a chicken dinner. Intimacy is held in one unbroken space while the ordinary world keeps interrupting it. It is the film’s first summit and its warmest.
Then the agency. Devlin is called in and told what Alicia is for: Alexander Sebastian, a man among the Nazis in exile in Rio, and she is to be sent to him. Devlin does not object. The men around the desk speak of her with contempt in the same breath in which they plan to use her. He has a bottle of champagne with him, and when he leaves he forgets it on the desk. The love affair has become an assignment, and he has let it.
He tells her, and he will not tell her what he feels. He waits for her to refuse; she waits for him to forbid it. Each sets the other a test, and both pass it, and so both fail. She takes the task as a dare thrown back at him. The scenes that follow, the staged meeting on the riding path, the dinner, the race track where Sebastian proposes, are the plot’s machinery: in them the men of the service repeat their low opinion of her, and the back-projected city stands behind the actors like a postcard.
Movement III
Alicia marries Sebastian and enters his house: a great hall, a staircase, doorways in depth, and a mother who rules it. As the wife she is given the keys, all but one. The cellar is locked, and the key to it is on her husband’s ring. The film’s oldest pattern now shows itself: the wife with the keys of the house, the one door she is forbidden, the husband who will know. Before the party she takes the key from his ring, and holds it in her hand.
The crane shot is the film’s most famous movement. From the top of the great hall the camera descends, over the heads of the guests, to Alicia’s closed hand and the key inside it. The height of the shot is the height of the risk: the whole house and its society, and then the one thing that can ruin her. Devlin is among the guests. The champagne is running low, and if it runs out Sebastian will go down to the cellar for more.
In the cellar the two search among the wine bottles. A bottle falls, and what it holds is not wine but ore. Sebastian comes down, and Devlin kisses Alicia where he will see it, a kiss staged for a jealous husband’s eyes: the second kiss of the film, and the opposite of the first. Afterwards Sebastian learns from what was left behind that his wife has opened the forbidden room.
Movement IV
Sebastian tells his mother that he is married to “an American agent”. The mother takes command. Konstantin plays her with a still menace from her chair, and Rains plays the son as a man whose love was the one sincere offer anyone in the film made, and who has been betrayed in it. To expose his wife would expose him to the men around him, who must not know. So mother and son begin to kill her slowly, in his own house.
The poisoning is done with coffee. The cup is set in the foreground, made enormous, while the mother sits quiet behind it. Alicia sickens; her sight blurs, and the faces of the two watching her swim out of focus. The film gives her point of view where it carries what she now knows, and what she knows is that her husband’s house has become her grave. Drink, which began the film as the thing she wounded herself with, ends it as the thing she is killed with.
Devlin, meanwhile, keeps his distance. His coldness is not reserve but judgment, a past held against her, and it is held until it is almost too late. On a second viewing his silence looks more and more like punishment, Sebastian’s love looks more real, and Alicia’s yes to the mission looks more like a dare. The film was taken up by the French critics of the 1950s as central to Hitchcock, and Truffaut’s interview book returns to it at length.
Movement V
Devlin comes to the house. He climbs the stair to her room, finds her poisoned, and pays at last the debt he owes her. He lifts her and carries her down the stair. The Nazis are watching from the hall below, and Sebastian, who must keep his secret from them, walks with the two: the husband beside the wife he has been poisoning and the man who is taking her away, down his own staircase, saying nothing.
At the foot of the stair is the door and, beyond it, the car. Devlin takes Alicia out to it, and the car door shuts Sebastian out. The film denies its villain death and gives him something worse: he is left outside, with the men waiting in the house behind him. It is one of the hardest endings of its decade, and it is staged as a loss, because the man left behind was the one who loved her best.
The film perfected a manner. The spy romance in which a woman is sent to the enemy’s bed passes into Hitchcock’s own North by Northwest (1959); the crane to the key is among the most quoted shots in cinema; Brian De Palma has paid it homage; and it holds a place in the argument that made Hitchcock an author. A man who sends the woman he loves into a role is the plot Vertigo would make explicit and deepen twelve years later. Eighty years on, the film survives whole, in one version, a chamber thriller held tightly in one house.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds the spine required. The courtroom makes Alicia a traitor’s daughter before she speaks, and the reporters’ word for her is the title. The party and the drunken drive set her self-destruction and Devlin’s watching coldness, the two facts the film tests. The agency scene, the champagne left on the desk, turns love into an assignment; the marriage gives the plot its key and the theme its traded body; the party needs the champagne to run low; the poisoning is the price of discovery, the staircase the payment. What holds the axis is the middle: the agency men in Rio repeat their contempt more than once, and the race track covers ground the dinner had covered.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds within the triangle. A woman’s reputation is both the reason she is used and the reason she is despised for the use, and the men who send her to a Nazi’s bed speak of her with contempt. The man who loves her will not say so, holds her past against her, and waits for her to refuse the task he gave her: love becomes a test each lover sets the other, and both fail by passing it. The villain’s love is the one sincere offer in the film. What holds the axis is the other half: the state that does the using is sketched in a few office scenes, and the uranium is a pretext by design.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The heights are real, and they are four. The kiss, carried from the balcony to the telephone to the door without breaking the embrace. The crane at the party, from the top of the great hall down through the guests to the key in Alicia’s closed hand, its height the height of risk. The cup in the foreground of the poisoning, with Alicia’s sight blurring and the mother quiet. And the descent of the staircase, ending on a door that shuts on Sebastian. The cellar builds dread from a dwindling stock of champagne. What holds the axis is what lies between: the Rio exposition is flat, and much of the suspense is suspense of mechanism rather than of feeling.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The pattern is Bluebeard, and it lies in the plot. A wife is given the keys of her husband’s house but not the one; she steals that key and opens the forbidden room; he learns of it from what she left behind, begins to kill her slowly in his own house, and a rescuer carries her out. Beneath it runs a descent into a house of the dead, ruled by a mother from her bed, and a return up its stair; and Sebastian is the son his mother still owns. The particulars stay particular: a wine label, a key ring, a cup of coffee. What holds the axis is that the archetype is carried by the thriller’s apparatus and is never surfaced as more than its plot.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is the espionage thriller, Hitchcock’s own above all (The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur), and the romantic melodrama of the Selznick studio. The turns are real: the spy plot reduced to a pretext and the love story made the action; a cold, even cruel hero, played by the star most identified with charm; the most sympathetic man in the film as its villain, his ruin staged as a loss; the heroine’s past as premise. But the axis scores turn and stake together, and the stake was small: a star package with two of the most bankable leads in Hollywood, a proven genre in its master’s hands, a commercial success. It is a wager placed on a proven path, made inside the classical studio form.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Where the form works, it is the knowledge. The suspense makes the viewer complicit: to want the mission to succeed is to want Alicia in Sebastian’s bed, and the film knows it. Point of view is hers where it carries knowledge: Devlin seen upside down from her pillow, turning as she sits up; the cup and the faces blurring as the poison takes her. The close-up of the object is the instrument of trust, the key, the bottle and the cup the places where faith and betrayal become visible. The staircase gives the moral order a vertical. What holds the axis is the share that is container: the agency scenes and the back-projected exteriors, told in a scene grammar any thriller would use.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Eighty years of return are evidence. The French critics of the 1950s took the film as central to Hitchcock, and Truffaut’s interview book gives it extended attention. It yields formally, in the crane, the kiss and the staircase, studied without end, and morally, in a triangle that hardens with each viewing: Devlin’s silence looks more like punishment, Sebastian’s love more real, Alicia’s yes to the mission more like a dare. It has been read as a study of masochism in love, as the first form of the plot Vertigo would make explicit, and as a portrait of the postwar state’s use of women. What holds the axis is convergence: the readings agree, and much of the return is a return to the director’s corpus.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Released in 1946; the field is the cinema of the 1940s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the thriller shown to be a vehicle for an erotic and moral study, and camera movement and the close-up of an object made to carry suspense and meaning at once, in a classical form so complete it became a standard for the director’s later work. It perfected a manner rather than reorganising what film could do; Citizen Kane, five years earlier at the same studio, is the decade’s reorganisation. How much of the reach is the film’s own, and how much borrowed back from its maker’s later fame, is weighed against it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the spy romance of a woman sent to the enemy’s bed, carried into North by Northwest (1959); the crane to the key, one of the most quoted shots in cinema; Brian De Palma’s homages; its place in the auteur argument. That reach lies largely within the director’s line and the genre.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty years. The film as released survives whole: one version, with no loss of substance, and restorations that only repair. Presence has been continuous, in repertory, on television, in every home format and in teaching, and poor prints in wide circulation are a charge on the fabric of circulation, not on the work. The surface fixed to its moment is largely its subject: Nazis in Rio, the uranium and the agency are 1946, and they age as history, the dawn of the atomic age, not as fashion. Charged: the back projection in the Rio exteriors and at the race track reads as studio period, and its presence beyond cinema is narrower than the director’s most famous films. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the evidence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, and at the three summits the making bears the meaning. Hitchcock’s découpage is exact: each insert of an object is placed so that the viewer knows what the characters fear before they speak. Tetzlaff lights Bergman’s face as the film’s moral surface and gives the Sebastian house its depth of stairs and doorways, and the crane is a feat of planning. Hecht’s dialogue says less than it means. Grant’s withheld warmth, Bergman’s brittle gaiety giving way to fear, Rains’s wounded dignity and Konstantin’s still menace are each among the best work of their careers. The costs run through the middle: Webb’s score is conventional and swells where the images are full, the process work in the car, on the riding path and at the race track is visible, and the agency men are flat.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Alicia’s drunken party in Miami, a woman drinking to forget her father, and the poisoned coffee in the Sebastian house. One law governs both: drink as the medium of trust and betrayal, and love as a test conducted under watching eyes. Alicia drinks to wound herself; Devlin forgets his champagne at the agency; the champagne at the party runs low and sends Sebastian to the cellar; the wine bottles hold the ore; the coffee holds the poison. Every scene is watched, by Devlin, the agency, the mother, the guests below the stair, and even the flirtations are performed for observers. What strains it: the agency office plays by the plot’s law more than the film’s, and the Rio postcards stand outside it.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Several orders are held, and integrated in one house: love and sexual reputation; consciousness, in Alicia above all and in Sebastian’s wound; the family, in a traitor father and a mother who owns her son; marriage, a contract under law used as a weapon; the state, in a service that trades a woman’s body; politics and history, in Nazis in exile after the war. What holds the axis lowest is how much of that is thin. History is a pretext by design and the uranium explicitly a device; labour is servants and a butler; nature is a Rio skyline in back projection; the sacred is absent. The state itself is a few offices. It is a chamber thriller’s scope, held tightly, and the figure records the ceiling of a house.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Made at 8.1 and The Inner Law at 8.0. A film whole in one version and continuously present for eighty years, its 1946 surface ageing as history rather than fashion; a making exact at its summits, in the placed insert of the object, the crane to the key and four performances among the best of their careers; and one law of drink, trust and watching eyes from a drunken party in Miami to a poisoned cup in Rio.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: love, consciousness, the family, marriage and the state are held in one house, but history is a pretext, labour is servants, nature a back-projected skyline, the state a few offices, and the sacred is absent. Above it, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 7.4, real turns made on a proven path with a small stake, and a perfected manner whose reach lies largely within its maker’s line; then The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 7.6, a Bluebeard pattern never surfaced beyond the plot, and readings that converge on the director’s corpus.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.9, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 7.7, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, The Swerve at 7.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.4 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.4, and Pressure on Tradition, 7.4, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Notorious as released by RKO Radio Pictures in the United States in August 1946, black and white, Academy ratio, mono sound, about 101 minutes, from the courtroom door in Miami to the car door on the steps in Rio: directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, written by Ben Hecht, photographed by Ted Tetzlaff, with music by Roy Webb; with Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Leopoldine Konstantin and Louis Calhern. One version is in circulation, and no choice of cut arises; restorations bear on survival only. No print, script or transcript was consulted. The project was developed under David O. Selznick and passed to RKO before shooting; the terms of that sale and any uncredited contributions to the script are not given. Dialogue is quoted only where the words are certain, and one short line is given; the agency men’s words about Alicia are described, not quoted. Claims that could not be verified, among them the length of the kiss and the reason given for its being broken into short kisses, the exact count of sequences, a judgment of the film attributed to Truffaut, the year of its entry in the National Film Registry, its copyright status, and later spy films said to rework it, are not given.