Notorious (1946) Director: Alfred Hitchcock
“You don’t think a woman can change?”
★★★★★
Based on a two-part short story called “The Song of the Dragon” (written by John Taintor Foote as featured in the Saturday Evening Post in 1921), Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious offers a star-studded, moody espionage thriller wherein an American intelligence bureau (the CIA was formed after this film was made) employs a beautiful woman with a somewhat loose reputation to infiltrate a secret ring of Nazis. Like Orson Welles’s The Stranger, Notorious deals with post-war Nazis hiding in plain sight. There are two films that defined the career of Ingrid Bergman —Casablanca (1940) and Notorious (1946), and in some ways, Notorious (Ingrid Bergman’s second of three Hitchcock films, and Carey Grant’s second of four Hitchcock films) serves as a natural bridge between Hitchcock’s early spy classic The 39 Steps (1935) and Hitchcock’s later spy classic North By Northwest (1959).
At the beginning, screenwriter Ben Hecht takes us to a particular time and place: Miami, Florida, three-twenty PM, on April 24th, 1946. Note that this timeframe occurs after the end of World War II. We are welcome into a District Court in Florida where a German man named John Huberman is sentences to twenty years in prison for treason. His daughter, Ms. Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), is a “marked woman” who “hates low underhanded people like policemen.” At a party later that evening, an older commodore wants to take Alicia away from the U.S. to Havana, but she remains fascinated by a handsome silent-silhouetted mystery man. After drinking late into the night, she and this man go for a ride that only ends with a policeman pulling them over, but the cop releases them after viewing this strange debonair man’s identification card. We learn his name is T.R. Devlin (Carey Grant), a government agent who has been sent to persuade Alicia to use her familial connections and sleazy reputation in order to infiltrate a lingering Nazi organization which has relocated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She reluctantly agrees.
En route to Rio, they quickly fall in love –Devlin tries to resist Alicia’s allure, while Alicia wonders if he believes that a woman change and fall in love (“I’ve always been scared of women, I get over it”). Can a woman with a “notorious” reputation for drinking and promiscuity be trusted? Their passion secretly grows, but then the mission becomes clear: Alicia is asked to use her powers of seduction to gain the trust of an exiled former Nazi named Sebastian (Claude Rains). He resides at an ornate hilltop estate. The Nazis quickly trust Alicia due to her father’s recent conviction, and his suicide by poison capsule. Apparently, Sebastian once found her attractive– the implication is that Alicia should sleep her way into the enemy’s heart. From this point, Devlin grows increasingly frustrated since he cannot reveal his true love for Alicia, and yet he must encourage her to jump into the arms of another man.
Alicia quickly earns the trust of Sebastian and he asks Alicia to marry him against his domineering German mother’s wishes –cue the Freudian infantilization of this former Nazi (his mother Madame Anna Sebastian is played by Leopoldine Konstantin). Between parties and horse-races, Alicia struggles to keep her allegiances a secret. The central MacGuffin in this film is a key that leads to the wine cellar, and in Hitchcock’s famous swooping camera sequences, during a lavish party Alicia reveals to Devlin that she has stolen the key. When they break into the cellar, and accidentally smash a bottle, they find that the wine bottles are actually filled with uranium ore. To disguise their efforts, they pretend to kiss outside as if Devlin forced himself upon Alicia. However, Sebastian soon catches onto the game in a painful series of scenes –he spots the missing key which has been miraculously returned the following morning and he ventures down to his wine cellar to discover that a bottle has been broken. He goes to his mother, an unforgiving woman, and they devise a plan to poison Alicia. She soon realizes the ploy, but it is too late. Meanwhile, Devlin begins to doubt Alicia when she stops showing up to their secret meetings. He visits Sebastian’s estate to discover that Alicia has been poisoned. After finally confessing his love for her, they walk out together and down the large stairway (only Hitchcock could devise such a tense moment of characters slowly descending a staircase). Devlin makes a gamble that Sebastian will not say a word of the situation because the other Nazis in his group have been known to kill people who harbor spies. Thus, Devlin and Alicia escape but Sebastian is left behind against his wishes, forced to meet what is sure to be a grisly demise. This ending to the film is brilliant –rather than a Hollywood scene featuring the American heroes arriving to bust up this Nazi contingent in an explosive confrontation, the film’s villain is forced to face his friends who will surely kill him. He is called back into his own house, knowing he will never come out alive. In many ways, the true horror of the film is what happens in a subtle way, off screen.
In Notorious, every scene simply sings with beauty. We are treated to image after image of Ted Tetzlaff’s gorgeous cinematography and Theron Warth’s succinct film editing. The innovative use of the camera is on full display as it frequently swoops down into scenes –showing the audience without telling– revealing scenes of drunkenness, obscured vision via poisoning, dark shadows and moral ambiguity, as well as the famous wide-sweeping shot of the dinner party thats pares down closer and closer until we spot Alicia’s hand holding the key to the wine cellar. Another notable scene is when Alicia and Devlin engage in an extended scene of erotic kissing. This is notable as the censorship rules at the time (the Hay’s Code) allowed for only three seconds of kissing, so the characters only kiss briefly but then lay in each others arms for a longer period –it was once called the ‘longest kiss in film’ though that is certainly not true any longer.
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Credits:
- Director: Alfred Hitchcock
- Written by: Ben Hecht
- Produced by: Alfred Hitchcock
- Starring:
- Cary Grant…..T. R. Devlin
- Ingrid Bergman…..Alicia Huberman
- Claude Rains…..Alexander Sebastian
- Louis Calhern…..Captain Paul Prescott, an officer of the U.S. Secret Service
- Leopoldine Konstantin…..Madame Anna Sebastian
- Cinematography: Ted Tetzlaff
- Edited by: Theron Warth
- Music by: Roy Webb
- Production Companies: RKO Radio Pictures and Vanguard Films
- Distributed by: RKO Radio Pictures
Other Notes:
- Hitchcock Cameo: Just over an hour into the film, Hitchcock is seen drinking a glass of champagne as Grant and Bergman approach. He sets his glass down and quickly departs.