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| Director Alfred Hitchcock |
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| Hitchcock with Ingrid Bergman and costume designer Edith Head |
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| Hitchcock and Bergman on the set |
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| in London |
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| Hitchcock and Bergman with Cary Grant |
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| celebrating Cary Grant's 42nd birthday |
NOTORIOUS A USA
(102 mi) 1946 d: Alfred Hitchcock
The death of his
mother, the apparently maternal relationship he had with his wife Alma, and the
crush he’d developed on Ingrid Bergman “all released a flood of conflicting
feelings that made Notorious not only possible but necessary... [it was] the
artistic rendition of an inner life that might have exploded if denied
expression.” —The Dark Side of
Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, by Donald Spoto (594 pages), 1983
Arguably Ingrid Bergman’s greatest performance, developing a
personal rapport with director Alfred Hitchcock, where the playfulness of the
opening and the midriff-exposing zebra-print outfit she wears is a stark
contrast from the grim territory of where this film goes. Among the most extraordinary actresses of
all-time, where her private life to leave her success in Hollywood to work with
Roberto Rossellini in Italy for Stromboli
(1950), Europa
'51 (1952), and Journey
to Italy (1954), making five films in all, entering into a scandalous
affair with the married director, eventually getting married and having three
children with him, was as dramatic as anything happening onscreen, as not only
was she beautiful and intelligent, but more than anything, she had a
conscience, wanting to make films that reflected that. Her work was more important than the money, something
rare in artists working today, wanting to be part of the Italian neorealism
movement, making films that pondered issues of complex psychology, as seeing
Rossellini’s OPEN CITY (1946) was an experience that changed her life, suddenly
open to the spread of realism in world cinema.
You don’t think of Hitchcock as a political director, yet this film
falls into that territory, a remarkably modern story, diving into wartime
espionage, romance, and suspense, using a lurid premise where government agent
Cary Grant persuades Bergman into infiltrating a WWII Nazi spy ring, a film
where a monstrous demand is made on the heroine in order to achieve a political
objective. In order to satisfy J. Edgar
Hoover’s objections of disparaging depictions of FBI personnel, the FBI agents
were changed to the more generic term of government agents. If neo-realism consistently engenders the
structure of anxiety into the structure of the plot, then Hitchcock could
accentuate the suspense factor. According
to François Truffaut, who published a 1962 book of interviews with Hitchcock
about all his films, NOTORIOUS represents “the very quintessence of Hitchcock.” Reuniting the team of Ingrid Bergman and Oscar-nominated
screenwriter Ben Hecht from Hitchcock’s psychoanalytic drama SPELLBOUND (1945),
while also bringing over Claude Rains from Ingrid
Bergman Tribute: Casablanca (1942), with producer David
O. Selznick selling his studio to RKO, while allowing Hitchcock to produce the
film himself. According to Selznick’s biographer,
David Thomson, he was barred from visiting the set or seeing the rushes, where the
legendary producer’s absence may explain why this film is as good as it is, as
he wasn’t there to interfere and ruin it. Hitchcock, in particular, was happy to be out
from under his seven-year contract, which he described as being “held in
slavery,” becoming the first American movie the filmmaker could really call his
own, featuring psychologically complex and solidly developed characters. What Hitchcock persistently examines in his
best films are the ways an audience can be manipulated in and out of morally
ambiguous situations, with the audience feeling threatened, suffering along
with the protagonists, as the story plays with the audience’s sympathies,
exhibiting exceptional domestic psychology, a resourceful use of silence, and a
strong sense of place, while the overall pessimism veers into film noir
territory, as our capacity for inhumanity is the engine that drives this
picture. The complexity and technical mastery
of the filmmaking represented a turning point of Hitchcock’s career, marking
his stylistic maturity, a time in his legendary career when he finally came
into his own. The story may have drawn
inspiration from the short story The Song
of the Dragon by John Taintor Foote which had appeared as a
two-part serial in the Saturday Evening
Post in November 1921, The Song of the
Dragon : Foote, John Taintor, 1881-1950, where a theatrical producer is
approached by federal agents during the war who want his assistance in
recruiting a young actress he once had a relationship with to seduce the leader
of a gang of enemy saboteurs in order to get hold of valuable information.
Shooting began just a month after the war ended, blending a
compelling spy mission with a romantic love story, set in postwar Miami Beach, when
the threat of Nazis was still present in viewer’s minds, opening with a court
finding John Huberman guilty of treason as a Nazi sympathizer, sentenced to 20
years in prison, with his daughter Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), a German
naturalized citizen, seen coolly walking out of the courtroom afterwards
avoiding the press. Cutting to a house
party, Alicia Huberman is drinking heavily with friends and is quite the
hostess, passing drinks around, speaking glib dialogue, revealing a cynical side
of the actress we’ve simply never seen, standing out from all the other
Hitchcock actresses, kind of a spoiled socialite with a scandalous reputation, exhibiting
a loose-living, wild and carefree nature, where she’s simply the life of an
otherwise dreary party, where it’s clear right from the outset that she is the
emotional center, the magnet that draws our attention. But as guests start to leave (some passed out
on the couch) what she describes as “a perfectly hideous party,” one lone
figure remains, seen only in shadow as a silhouetted stranger with his back to
the camera, with Hitchcock adding an aura of mystery to this unseen character, who
is constantly observing, yet Alicia calls him a party crasher and says she likes
him, attracted, no doubt, by his handsome face and debonair manner, eventually identified
as Devlin (played with minimalist perfection by Cary Grant) after everyone else
has gone. The two are nothing less than
brilliant together, every nuance, every facial gesture, and every witty phrase,
where their relationship has a real spark, like a reiteration of Grant and
Katharine Hepburn in the Howard Hawks screwball comedy BRINGING UP BABY (1938),
yet somehow both were overlooked for Academy Award nominations. With her warmth and vulnerability on full
display, she invites him to take a drive, despite the fact she’s obviously
tipsy, where her drunken joyride driving, speeding while dangerously swirling around
the road, “I want to make it 80 and wipe that grin off your face. I don’t like gentlemen who grin at me,” is an
attempt to get a reaction out of him, like fear, but it’s more of an alert that
something is deeply troubling inside.
When a police officer stops her, Devlin calmly offers some credentials
that quickly resolves the situation, which infuriates her, believing he’s a
cop, as she has no love lost for the police, suggesting the way they treated
her father remains a sore spot, Notorious (1946) Movie Clip
- Car Driving scene YouTube (3:06). Punching
her in the face and knocking her out to get himself behind the wheel is a scene
that simply doesn’t sit well today. Yet
when she awakens in the morning in full hangover mode, he’s still there, though
upside down and out of focus in a first-person shot. Tired, unkempt, and with her hair down, for
these few moments she’s perhaps more relatable to viewers than any other role,
disgusted with herself, and with him, yet she’s completely believable - - not
some glamorous movie star. Yet behind
the mask, she’s an intelligent, sensible, and powerful young woman, but the
discovery of her father’s secrets causes her to have trust issues, losing all
self-respect, developing a self-destructive side and a reputation for
promiscuity, while she has to overcome her tainted past as a “notorious” woman
and find her place in the patriarchal society of the 1940’s. Devlin appears to offer her that opportunity,
as she’s enlisted to spy on a ring of Nazi exiles in postwar Rio de Janeiro in
Brazil, with Hitchcock sustaining their relationship with great sensitivity and
insight. While it’s a dangerous mission,
more than a little out of her league, the connection to her infamous father
leads them to believe the Nazis would trust her. While essentially posing as a love story,
NOTORIOUS is as frightening an exploration of sexual and emotional abuse, as
well as political manipulation, as you can find in an American film. Part of its fascination is the complex shift
in power dynamics, continually changing the narrational point of view, moving
from dominance and helplessness by use of subjective camera shots, making the
tension personal, then transferring it to the audience, as the heroine must
suffer before she can redeem herself through self-sacrifice. Hitchcock is not for everyone, as many feminists
consider his persistent depictions of victimized women to be indicative of
blatant misogyny, yet there is also a subversive, oftentimes even progressive,
approach to gender evident throughout Hitchcock’s work, especially here, where the
melodrama is a dangerous place, a dark, loveless, and brutal world where the
viewer is an emotional accomplice to the unfolding crimes.
Alicia is the enigma, the missing piece of the entire film
whose code must be cracked to make sense of it all, yet after the imprisonment
of her father, who immediately commits suicide in his cell, she’s completely
alone in the world, with no one to really talk to about her deeper
problems. The contrast between her
father’s values and her own couldn’t be more starkly different, as she’s a
believer in the American ideals, feeling guilty about her father’s crimes and
tries to make up for them by punishing herself, yet Devlin believes she will
make a convincing undercover agent. While
the mission he ultimately enlists her for is to worm her way into the household
of a nest of Nazi spies in order to find out who they are and what they are up
to, it gets more complicated when they have a torrid love affair before she is
assigned, but as soon as his superiors, led by spy chief Prescott (Louis
Calhern), get involved in organizing the specific details and the plan is about
to go into effect, Devlin takes a back seat, as love could compromise the
mission and actually endanger her life, though he’s the agent she will continue
to report to, with his character exhibiting ominous undertones, which have
deepened even more since his role in Suspicion
(1941). By allowing his superiors to
make all the significant decisions, Devlin is heartsick and out of sorts, as
they have no real interest in Alicia, who is stereotypically viewed as an
immoral woman who drinks heavily with a sexually promiscuous past, showing all
the signs of a Fallen
woman, a perfect example of what happens when a woman’s sexual history
frames the totality of her identity, yet she’s not what any of them think. Hitchcock reveals a marked skepticism about
the ethics of government agents, viewed as a group of opportunistic and
unscrupulous officials, a move that is both surprising and daring considering
the fact the film was made at the end of the Second World War, a time when
patriotism was in high gear. Devlin and
Alicia are both feeling lost for different reasons, while also extremely
attracted to each other. Knowing the
importance of the mission, Devlin hates the idea of sending her in there, and
has a hard time living with himself, continuing to conceal his feelings, the
embodiment of the emotionally repressed man, as he’s consumed by an
overwhelming sense of guilt and self-loathing, playing aloof and treating her
badly to cover up his own personal conflicts, while Alicia’s life abruptly
changes, vowing to stop drinking, where her job is to ingratiate herself with a
Nazi associate of her father’s in South America, a man who was once, and may
still be, in love with her. Her
assignment involves resuming a romance with a German agent in Rio, Alexander
Sebastian (Claude Rains, who was nominated for an Oscar), a reserved and
cautious man who is extremely human and personally sympathetic, yet
ideologically evil, living in a chilly, luxurious mansion with a grand
staircase along with his smothering mother (Austrian actress Madame Leopoldine
Konstantin, one of prewar Germany’s greatest actresses, who is simply
unforgettable in her only American movie appearance), holding regular meetings
with his evil cabal, where her job is to infiltrate this circle of scientists,
diplomats, and spies who congregate at his mansion, curiously introduced to
them by a series of hand kisses, each one seen leering at her, smitten by her
beauty. Yet when one of their group
briefly questions what they’re doing, he is quickly eliminated as being a weak
link. This is how they operate. Once Alicia enters their lair, greeted by an
almost spectral presence of Madame Konstantin, the film turns into a
claustrophobic chamber drama, where the suffocating interiors have an
overwhelming influence, much like the giant Gothic mansion in Hitchcock’s Rebecca
(1940). Essentially this amounts to a
love triangle, with both men belonging to powerful political organizations, where
the intense drama forces viewers to constantly change their feelings about the
three leads, while it’s also a sumptuous romance between Bergman and Grant, sharing
what was at that time the screen’s longest close-up kiss,
Notorious (1946) -- (Movie Clip) Strange Love Affair YouTube, broken up
into a series of erotically charged short kisses and teasing small talk, a
cleverly innovative way to avoid the Hays Code censors forbidding “lustful”
kisses that last more than three seconds.
As an undercover operative, Alicia meets her handler Devlin at a Rio
race track, providing the details of who she is watching, reminding him of the
ultimate sacrifice she is making by sleeping with the enemy, which hits Devlin
like a ton of bricks, as it only makes him angry at himself and her for
agreeing to such an ethically-challenged idea and actually going through with
it, until they are interrupted by a jealously suspicious Sebastian, Notorious
(1946) -- (Movie Clip) My List Of Playmates - Turner ... YouTube (3:51). Among the more complicated relationships in
movie history, both are extremely conflicted by the roles they play, deferring
the personal for the professional, yet it keeps them both alert and on edge. Disappointed by Devlin’s indifference, she
ends up marrying Sebastian, believing she has no other choice.
When Alicia suspects they’re keeping something secret in a
locked wine cellar, with Sebastian holding the only key, they devise a plan to
hold a fabulous dinner party, where Devlin can get himself on the invite list
and she can find a way to get him the key, with Hitchcock turning up the
cinematic tricks with one of the more clever shots in movie history, where the
skill and precision that Hitchcock employs is exemplary, with a crane shot swooping
down the stairs to the main floor as the camera zooms in on the key she’s
holding in her hand, a scene that ends with Hitchcock’s cameo appearance
quickly taking a glass of champagne from the table, Notorious - Key exchange
scene YouTube (2:26). The suspense
is only ratcheted up as they make their way down to the wine cellar where Devlin
accidentally breaks a bottle, discovering black sand in several of the bottles,
which is later discovered to be uranium ore, a key ingredient used in the making
of nuclear weapons. It’s important to
remember this was actually filmed a year before Hiroshima, a time when people
had no idea about the significance of uranium.
Sebastian discovers their absence from the party and finds them in the
wine cellar, quickly concocting an explanation, which leads him to discover the
missing key from his key ring, which is reattached the next morning. Returning to the cellar afterwards, he finds
remnants of glass and sand from the broken bottle, knowing he’s been
compromised, and that he’s married to an American agent. Discussing the matter with his monstrously
controlling mother, she devises a vile plan to have Alicia “die slowly” from arsenic
poisoning, which leaves her too weak to defend herself once she realizes the
horrible game she’s gotten herself into, suddenly becoming life-threatening, where
she’s viewed as little more than disposable goods, A Scene from NOTORIOUS
YouTube (2:01), like a gloomy, nightmarish sequence out of Polanski’s
horrifying ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968).
Confined to her room with the telephone removed, she is at their mercy, yet
Devlin, who incidentally asked to be reassigned to Spain after the reported marriage,
suspects something is up as she appears sick and frail, which he mistakenly
believes is that she’s returned to drinking, then goes missing altogether, where
she keeps missing their appointments, yet he fails to grasp that he loves her
until he realizes something has gone terribly wrong, sensing her mortal danger,
and that he's in danger of losing her for good.
Gorgeously shot by Ted Tetzlaff in luminous monochrome, tinged in dark
tones, creating an elaborate choreography where even the most minute gestures
are charged with eroticism and violent potential, Hitchcock has crafted an emotionally
tortuous love story, with the stars looking and acting their best, where the
evolution of Alicia’s character from a carefree woman with no purpose to a
highly skilled operative is at the center of the picture, where she generates
such an erotic intensity to the screen, subverting the detective role of male
film noir counterparts like Bogart, Mitchum, or Glenn Ford, bringing such an
electric screen magnetism and personal intimacy to the role. Hitchcock places the blame of violence against
women on the male abusers and the patriarchal system which enables them. Alicia is a complex figure who boldly resists
that patriarchal structure, yet Devlin must prove that he’s evolved as well,
developing a more compassionate understanding of the deadly predicament that he
sent her into. The finale is extremely
unnerving, with silence punctuating the suspense of a sweeping romantic
gesture, as Devlin sneaks into the upstairs room and rescues her in plain sight
of the invited guests, who wonder what Sebastian is up to, allowing his wife to
be carried out by another man in a long descent down the stairway, as clearly
things are not right, pointing an accusatory finger at Sebastian, who will have
to answer for this, poetic justice perhaps, where she’s being rescued from much
more than a gang of spies, leading to a passionate, protecting embrace in a riveting
finale, Alfred
Hitchcock's Notorious - Final Scene YouTube (7:56). Along with Shadow
of a Doubt (1943), this is a nasty piece of work that reaches the highest
echelon of Hitchcock films, among his richest and most seductive efforts, a
perfect combination of stylization and simplicity, perhaps his most fully
achieved film at this point. While Vertigo
(1958) is generally regarded as Hitchcock’s most critically acclaimed film, yet
the star power of the leads in this film suggests more perfect casting, more compelling
performances by Bergman and Grant, in combination with Claude Rains, who by the
end is actually a sympathetic Nazi, and let’s not forget the hovering presence
of Madame Konstantin, who are much more emotionally and dramatically impactful
than Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart, though the self-obsessed psychological aspect
may go to VERTIGO. NOTORIOUS, in fact,
may be Hitchcock’s greatest achievement.
Notorious (1946) Film In
English | Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman ... HD version, YouTube (1:39:09)
Cristina
Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
video essay on a scene from Hitchcock’s Notorious (6:27)
