Men Who Knew Too Much by Griffin Susan M.; Nadel Alan; & Alan Nadel

Author:Griffin, Susan M.; Nadel, Alan; & Alan Nadel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 9.1 Alex extends his hands to Alicia.

Her hands are the means through which she acts out her dual role as loving spouse and secret agent; like Maggie’s, they are the means through which she dissimulates, again like Maggie not so much the touch but via one variant of it, the embrace. But the emphasis on the hand doesn’t end here. The next sequence begins with one of Hitchcock’s most dazzling and justifiably famous shots—a crane shot beginning on the top of the staircase and sweeping down into the crowd of partygoers being greeted by Alicia, ending with a spectacular close-up of her closed hand, holding the key. In this sequence in particular, Alicia’s hands intervene in the world—and in so doing, as with Maggie, it is her skill and subtlety, her mastery of “touch” in every sense of the word, that comes to the fore. For like Maggie, Alicia knows how to use touch in all its manifestations—physical, psychological, as a means of manipulation—making Devlin’s, by contrast, appear to be crude and therefore of limited value in the extraction of the secret from Alex and his group. But—whether explicitly or implicitly—Devlin seems to follow her lead in the very next sequence, to adopt both her haptic strategy (touch in the physical sense) and subtlety (touch in the metaphorical sense). To be sure, his own directness comes to the fore—while looking in the wine cellar at a manifest at the back of the row of champagne bottles, he brushes against them, causing one to fall; this of course reveals the uranium sands concealed therein, which he scoops up and puts in an envelope—thereby solving the mystery but also, in the end, inculpating Alicia. A potentially more troubling inculpation impends, however, as the butler Max and Sebastian arrive to look for more champagne. Devlin grabs Alicia, tells her that he is going to kiss her, then puts his arm behind her back and does so framed by the lit doorway, precisely imitating both the tactics and the body language of her embrace with Sebastian16—and for that matter, the tactics of Maggie, who publicly stages the embrace with Charlotte “for them,” for the eyes of her father and husband.

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