Is Holmes a pimp?
Well, that caught your attention...
The following is taken from Richard Valley's liner/production notes on the MPI DVD release:
In Alfred Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS (1946), Ingrid Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, a dissolute beauty recruited by American agents to get the goods on a gang of postwar Nazis operating in South America. Alicia is expected to accomplish her mission by seducing and eventually marrying Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), the group's leader - in other words, she must sleep with the enemy. In THE VOICE OF TERROR, we're introduced to Kitty, described by Holmes as the late Gavin's "sweetheart," and by another character as Gavin's wife. Most likely, Holmes is right, and Kitty is the dead man's lover - and quite probably a prostitute. If she's not a fallen woman when we first meet her, she certainly becomes one, in a sequence anticipating NOTORIOUS by four years. Following her meeting with Holmes, Kitty "accidentally" encounters a Nazi agent named R. F. Mead [sic - Meade] as she tries to elude the police. It's all a ruse; the better to play Mead for information that will lead Holmes to the Voice of Terror, but the Nazi doesn't know that. He hides the girl in his house and before long Kitty is living in sin with the man who - it turns out - murdered her previous lover.
This is remarkably sophisticated material for a B programmer, adult and ambiguous in its delineation of the Kitty/Mead relationship. (Kitty has vowed to kill the man who killed Gavin, but in one scene she appears genuinely concerned for Mead's welfare. For his part, Mead treats her well.) That it works so well is due in no small measure to the actors playing Kitty and R.F. Mead - Evelyn Ankers and Thomas Gomez.
Whilst I think Valley exaggerates the importance of the Kitty-Meade storyline (comprising as it does only two short, albeit intense scenes, plus I disagree that Kitty shows any real sympathy for Meade), he's cetainly correct that the film implies that Kitty consents to becoming Meade's lover to gain his confidence. Given that Holmes is behind the ruse, it seems we must conclude that Holmes planned for this eventuality.
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