Coffee and Noir: NOTORIOUS
every instance of coffee in noir: 019
You learn a lot about a noir character by their coffee: sugar? cream? more whiskey than caffeine?
I’m cataloging every noir scene where coffee plays a role — rote and ritual, soul-dark or cream and sugar, served from dingy diners to shiny penthouses.
Not just one of my favourite noir but favourite films, Notorious (1946) serves coffee as the centre of its plot; specifically a dastardly Nazi plan to poison a beautiful woman and take over the world.
Said beautiful woman Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) and her lover (Cary Grant) are getting close to uncovering the Nazi’s uranium ore black sand MacGuffin, so Alexander (Claude Rains) and his mother Anna (the marvellously named Leopoldine Konstantin) decide to murder Alicia and make it look like illness, by slowly poisoning her.
Particularly delicious is Hitchcock’s choice of movement over “static shot cut static shot” and the melodramatic shadow use; those I’ll break down the film language on Shot Zero.
Poison Disguised as Love
It’s symbolic that the first sip comes at Alexander’s urging as he pretends to care for Alicia — “it’s getting cold!” — as he urges her to drink what he knows full well is deadly. Alexander isn’t merely a war criminal, he’s angry that his wife is in love with someone else, and he revels in being a part of her comeuppance, even though he has to pretend to care.
We follow camera and cup to her mouth, while Alexander prattles about the thing which goes perfectly with coffee: a good smoke.
Feigning Further
The next instance opens on a near-empty cup; in a different style entirely, signifying the poisoning continuing over time, in different settings.
Alexander again pretends concern for Alicia, even though he’s the cause of her distress, and was almost surely the one to slip the poison in this time, as Anna isn’t around.
Though he’s being ‘handled’ by his mother and several more powerful Nazi agents, the film is clear Alexander is as much a murderer as they, and no pretend niceness excuses that . . . or will save him from his fate at the film’s end.
The Dastardly Deed is Done
Finally, Hitchcock tracks the coffee across the room, then literally foregrounds the ominous cup.
The poisoned cup looms as large in our sight as in Alicia’s thoughts, while she puts together the pieces of what’s been happening to her for days now.
If you think this is dramatic, you’ll love the end scene . . . I think I’ll go make some coffee and watch it now.