Last night our dinner guests left relatively early—they have these things called “children,” and apparently you have to get home to them—so Aldo and I decided to pop one of our favorite Hitchcock movies into the DVD player. It was Notorious—you know, the one about the 1934 Pommard.
Many people, I suppose, may think of this 1946 classic as the one with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant or, more significantly, a beautifully sustained thriller of intrigue and lush sadomasochistic romanticism: Bergman and Grant play a spy and her handler. They become lovers (how could they not?) but nonetheless spend most of the movie lurching between extremes of rapture and disdain even as they try to bring down a house of Nazi scientific schemers presided over by Claude Rains—who in turn loves Bergman with a deluded, puppyish ardor that ultimately is more touching than Grant’s brusque, manly conquest.
But Hitchcock, with his supremely suave cinematic style and fundamental cruel perversity, is a complex director, and his best movies can be appreciated from a number of perspectives. Which is why we think of Notorious as the one about the 1934 Pommard.
The Pommard, in fact, is only the most significant bottle in a movie awash in alcohol. Hitchcock (who was a lover of wine) took meticulous care in plotting out his thrillers, springloading the narrative with details that would trigger suspense while also swiftly establishing the psychology of his characters. Notorious begins with Bergman, the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, behaving very badly, getting stinking drunk on hootch at a party in Miami while flirting with Grant, an uninvited guest.
Aldo and I always feel badly for Bergman in this scene—Hitchcock women who hit the sauce don’t often end well. (Remember the naughty lady with the spectacles in Strangers on a Train?) Recruited by Grant, Bergman flies with him down to Rio, where she cuts back on the liquor and falls for him even before getting all the details of her assignment.
As he goes off to headquarters to learn those very details, she tells him to bring back a nice bottle of wine for dinner. Needless to say, Aldo and I feel our pulses start to quicken at that instant.
What can wine signify but class and genteel, fade-to-black sex? It’s a stepup all around! Mr. Grant does better: He buys a bottle of champagne. In Hitchcock, champagne is what you get for the gorgeous high-society ice sculptures like Grace Kelly. But Grant forgets the bottle at headquarters when he learns, to his shock and disgust, that Bergman’s task is to fling herself back in the moral sewer by seducing Rains.
Ingrid is such a pro at the espionage game, she quickly goes beyond the call of duty. She becomes Mrs. Rains, which means that while she spies on him, she gets to run his large household and open all the closets for inspection—except for the wine cellar. Claude Baby won’t hand that key over. This is, for Aldo and me, a spiking moment of intense curiosity and excitement: We feel like two Mrs. Bluebeards wanting to get behind that bolted door. And Claude Rains wasn’t exactly Andy Devine: you know his stuff will be top-drawer.
We would have ordered the servants immediately to cut down a large tree from a corner of the garden and fashion it into a battering ram. Ingrid, however, must use greater spylike craft.
She throws a fabulous society party at which the best champagne is served—we know the champagne is good because, in Hollywood’s subtle telegraphic style, the words “Top Quality” are stamped on the foil. Bottle after bottle is opened and consumed—how excited Aldo and I are to see a party where the host doesn’t stint on champagne! Should we be having champagne ourselves? No, because the plot is sweeping us along—While the well-heeled guests are guzzling champagne upstairs, Bergman and Grant explore Rains’ wine cellar, where they suspect he and the Nazis have been hiding a secret project: What they find is a row of Pommards from a famous vintage, 1934. And look—the label! In closeup! Aldo and I couldn’t be dizzier if we were Kim Novak going off the belltower in Vertigo. When Grant accidentally knocks a bottle to the floor, it shatters—and we scream as if it were the shower scene in Psycho.
At this point, to be honest, Hitchcock lets us down a little: The glass splinters into shards, but no wine flows. The bottle—and presumably the other bottles in the row—was filled with a mineral ore the Nazis intend to use to make dangerous new bombs. Well, fine, now we know the real stakes behind the story—but where did all the Pommard go? Was it just wasted, dumped down the drain? Did Rains drink it alone in the tub or on one of his prize horses? Did his Nazi comrades have it served at one of their ironically elegant dinner parties at which they plot assassinations? Or did Claude Rains’ mother, a German dragonlady, buy the bottles as empties somewhere?
Hitchcock never answers these salient questions.
Instead, Rains and his mother start dosing Bergman’s coffee with a slow-acting poison. This is, for us, a stunning plot twist—and the point at which we always stop watching. I mean, Grant somehow rescues Bergman, doesn’t he? It’s just that we aren’t an audience who will sit there biting our nails over toxic caffeine. If we wanted high drama from coffee beans, we would have watched Out of Africa.
It seems a pity, really, that Bergman and Cary Grant didn’t get to enjoy the Pommard by themselves.
