While the newspapers continue to spend money on promotions like it’s going out of fashion, I’m happy to reap the rewards.
So this weekend, on Saturday there’s Like Water For Chocolate in The Independent, which I haven’t seen for years, but enjoyed at the time. On Sunday, the Sunday Telegraph has the slightly strange Orlando, which I also haven’t seen for years and years.
But most excitingly, The Times on Saturday has the incomparable Hitchcock film Notorious. This is quite easily one of my favourite films of all time with two of cinema’s greatest actors, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Ben Hecht wrote the script, the film also features Claude Rains, and the cinematography is fabulous. It features the technically incredible “ballroom staircase” shot where the camera pans all the way down from the balcony all the way down to an extreme close up of Ingrid Bergman’s hand as she nervously plays with a key that she stolen from the man she’s been told to seduce by Cary Grant.
Finally, there’s the scene that Hitchcock put in to deliberately evade the censors of the era – the dreaded Hayes code. Kisses could not go on for more than a few seconds, so to stick two metaphorical fingers up at this rule, Hitchcock has Grant and Bergman kissing one another then pulling their lips away repeatedly all the while carrying out a conversation and even answering a phone. They barely leave each other’s arms, and the scene is far more charged and full of eroticism than a long snog would have been.
One way or another, it’s worth getting multiple copies of The Times this Saturday.