The Invisible Adjunct has been thinking about the repulsiveness of Mr. Collins in _Pride and Prejudice_, and about how people in different situations and different eras differently assess Charlotte Lucas's decision to marry Mr. Collins--and so acquire a comfortable living now, Longbourne Manor itself upon the death of Mr. Bennett, but at the price of taking the odious and obsequious Mr. Collins as a life-companion and as a lover. This is not viewed as a Fate Worse Than Death by Charlotte Lucas or be Elizabeth Bennett, but many of us find it perilously close to such.
It is in this context that Ann Marie and I rewatched the Hecht/Hitchcock's "Notorious," which spun out many of the same issues in heightened and concentrated form. The female lead--Alicia, played by Ingrid Bergman--loves the male lead--Devlin, played by Cary Grant--and he loves her. But Devlin cannot believe that a Woman With a Past is capable of True Love. And so Alicia is enlisted in an American intelligence operation: she is to seduce, marry, and spy upon Alix Sebastian--played by Claude Rains--a Nazi Weaponeer of Mass Destruction who stores his enriched uranium in his wine cellar in wine bottles of the 1934 vintage.
Ben Hecht and Alfred Hitchcock clearly have consigned Ingrid Bergman to a Fate Worse Than Death, and indeed almost to death itself. (But she is rescued by Cary Grant in the last moments of the last reel, and so Hecht and Hitchcock relent and have mercy--the Sexually Transgressive Woman does not die but just becomes very sick.)
And there must be also something to be said about the archetypical role in this of Claude Rains. In how many Classic Hollywood Studio movies is sexual contact with Claude Rains's character a hideous, hideous fate? In "Casablanca" the first clue we have that Rick--Humphrey Bogart--is a hero rather than a villain is when he uses his rigged roulette wheel to rescue the Very Young Bulgarian Girl from the lupine clutches of Claude Rains's character Captain Renault.
Could Claude Rains play Mr. Collins in an adaptation of _Pride and Prejudice_? Or is that just too wrong on too many levels for anyone to contemplate?
Posted by DeLong at March 23, 2004 09:47 PM | TrackBack