For the next few days Team Experience will be sharing favourite screen kisses. Here's Seán...
Seán here in Berlin, saying hallo! to you with the adequate amount of Prussian warmth. I'll be filling you in with all my hot takes on only a handful of the myriad of films premiering at the Festspiele. But first a quick wink to one of my favourite on-screen kisses (the whole lot of them).
Alfred Hitchcock was a master of genre and form, leaving behind a body of work admired by scholars and movie lovers alike. Aside from being a good, old, problematic trickster on set, he also knew how to do it within the confines of the screen. The Production Code which outlined what was decent and indecent on film had a long list of cuttable offenses. Even toilets were verboten. But what if the inclusion of one was essential to the story, as it was when Marion Crane disposes of a letter in Psycho? Hitchcock knew how to skirt the rules and Notorious (1946) is one of the best examples of this...
Using the retrictions of the day, Hitchock and his stars created what might actually be one of the most sustained and erotic kisses of screen history.
Lasting no more than 3 seconds, a kiss certainly couldn't be open mouthed either. If a scene violated a rule it had to be cut. But as Hitchcock proved in Psycho, by including essential dialogue or plot points in the same scene with the offense meant that cutting it could ruin the picture. In Notorious, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman smooch, nuzzle, nibble, peck and press lips against each other, breaking continuously and getting all wrapped up in each other again. Hitchcock may also have created one of the most realistic on-screen kisses as these two so clearly have the hots for each other. Sometimes it's the little things that have the biggest impact.