Dial ‘M’ for Mother
A Freudian Hitchcock
By Paul Gordon, professor of comparative literature
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
From the introduction:
“In Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), a film in which the camera, as William Rothman has aptly noted, ‘expresses the full-bodied passion that vibrates in his greatest later films,’ there is a particularly stunning sequence in which time seems to stop as the camera slowly moves from a medium shot of Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) ‘looking slightly frightened’ to a long shot of Mme Sebastian (Mme Leopoldine Constantin), the mother of Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) who walks ominously and directly towards the viewer and into the camera. …
“Such momentous staircase scenes are frequent in Hitchcock, but so, I would argue, is the figure of the Mother, who is often there to greet anyone entering the Hitchcockean oeuvre: ‘When, in Notorious, Ingrid Bergman investigates the house of spies, its uncanniness is confirmed, and personified, by the Hitchcockian figure of ‘Mother.’’ George Toles even goes so far as to postulate a ‘law of the mother’ in Hitchcock in which the other female characters ‘must first capture, in a metaphor borrowed from Notorious, all of the mother’s keys.’”
By Paul Gordon, professor of comparative literature
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
From the introduction:
“In Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), a film in which the camera, as William Rothman has aptly noted, ‘expresses the full-bodied passion that vibrates in his greatest later films,’ there is a particularly stunning sequence in which time seems to stop as the camera slowly moves from a medium shot of Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) ‘looking slightly frightened’ to a long shot of Mme Sebastian (Mme Leopoldine Constantin), the mother of Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) who walks ominously and directly towards the viewer and into the camera. …
“Such momentous staircase scenes are frequent in Hitchcock, but so, I would argue, is the figure of the Mother, who is often there to greet anyone entering the Hitchcockean oeuvre: ‘When, in Notorious, Ingrid Bergman investigates the house of spies, its uncanniness is confirmed, and personified, by the Hitchcockian figure of ‘Mother.’’ George Toles even goes so far as to postulate a ‘law of the mother’ in Hitchcock in which the other female characters ‘must first capture, in a metaphor borrowed from Notorious, all of the mother’s keys.’”