Film Review: Notorious (1946)

(source: tmdb.org)

The defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War removed the greatest of all villains from the world. Hollywood, however, needed those villains for its films, at least in a few years before the emerging Cold War would establish Communist Russians as their replacement. The best known among those early post-war films was Notorious, a 1946 spy thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which would later be celebrated as one of the finest works in the filmography of the Master of Suspense.

The plot begins in April 1946 in Miami. Alicia Huberman (played by Ingrid Bergman) had just seen her pro-German father sentenced to twenty years in prison for wartime espionage. Constantly followed by police and hounded by the press, she tries to find escape from life’s sorrows through excessive drinking and not being particularly choosy when it comes to company. At one of her parties, she meets T. R. Devlin (played by Cary Grant), a charming man who later reveals himself to be a federal agent involved in the case against her father. The authorities, thanks to detailed surveillance, know that Alicia secretly resents her father’s treachery and is actually a true American patriot. They want to use that for a very delicate mission in Brazil, where a group of top-ranking executives of the German Nazi-connected company IG Farben found refuge following the end of the war. She is to infiltrate that group through Alex Sebastian (played by Claude Rains), one of its members who used to be Alicia’s father’s friend and was in love with her.

Alicia soon finds that Alex still has feelings for her, which Devlin’s boss, Captain Prescott (played by Louis Calhern), wants to use in an elaborate scheme during which she would seduce and, later, marry Alex. Things are complicated because Devlin and Alicia have fallen in love with each other. Devlin, rather reluctantly, reconciles himself to her mission, while Alicia embraces the mission in order to prove herself to Devlin. At Sebastian’s home, Alicia uses her cover as a loving wife to investigate the mysterious contents of the wine cellar, while at the same time Sebastian’s old mother, Anna (played by Leopoldine Konstantin), becomes increasingly suspicious about the true loyalties and agenda of her daughter-in-law.

Notorious is best known for what used to be advertised as “the longest kissing scene in the history of cinema”. The three-minute scene featuring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman actually consists of multiple kisses, each not lasting longer than three seconds. It was devised by Hitchcock in a way not to break the rule about a kiss’s length in the MPAA Production Code, and it could be interpreted as Hitchcock’s ingenious way to show the middle finger to the Hays Office, Hollywood’s notoriously prudish and tyrannical censorship agency. But this challenge to the Code is nothing compared with the way famed scriptwriter Ben Hecht established the “notoriety” of the protagonist by implicitly but undoubtedly portraying her as promiscuous. And an even greater challenge to conventions is the portrayal of the US government – an institution that, following the end of WWII, enjoyed a respect it had never enjoyed before or since – as deeply cynical and amoral in its treatment of a psychologically damaged “easy woman” as a cheap intelligence asset, a treatment that would cause even an experienced and tough operator like Devlin to have second thoughts.

To get away with such subversive content in mid-1940s Hollywood, you needed a lot of talent and clout. Hitchcock definitely had the former and gained a lot of the latter, especially after managing to negotiate a deal that would gradually phase out his partnership with the talented, but at times overbearing, producer David O. Selznick, and that would make Notorious the film where he was also a producer himself. Hitchcock had great resources at his disposal and worked wonders with them, easily reconstructing the relatively distant locations of Miami and Rio de Janeiro with superb use of rear projection and Californian studios. Notorious represents another example of his mastery at work, helped by excellent black-and-white cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff and a solid, although not particularly memorable, musical score by Roy Webb.

There isn’t much action in Notorious, but when there is, Hitchcock again displays his superb talent for creating suspense. The scene that takes place in the wine cellar, in which Devlin and Alicia try to find the horrible secret behind the Nazi plans, is one of those iconic Hitchcockian moments. What could have been just another of Hitchcock’s famous “MacGuffins” works even better here because uranium, which was, according to Hitchcock’s own claims, used in the script as an unrelated plot element before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, made the film more disturbing to an audience familiar with the Nazis and the new powers of the atomic bomb and quite wary of the way those two could be connected. Even the ending, which is often the weak spot of many otherwise perfect Hollywood films, works excellently with the simplicity and elegance of its twist.

Notorious has, like many Hitchcock classics, benefited a lot from an excellent cast. Ingrid Bergman, who had worked with Hitchcock on his previous film Spellbound, delivered here one of the strongest performances of her career. Her character starts as a drunk, continues as an enamoured woman, then she gets scared and spends the last segment drunk and vulnerable. And, in all that time, she easily gains sympathy from the audience despite her character being beyond the standards of mid-1940s morality. Bergman, one of Hollywood’s greatest stars at the time, was, like so many of Hitchcock’s famous leading ladies, the object of the director’s obsession, but their relationship on the set was unusually collaborative and later evolved into a genuine lifelong friendship. Cary Grant was also one of Hitchcock’s old associates, and here he delivered one of the more complex characters, a seemingly routine portrayal of a suave, attractive spy who actually hides a much darker side and internal doubts. Another great performance came from Hitchcock’s old friend Claude Rains, who, while portraying the film’s nominal villain, actually evoked even some sympathy from the audience by showing the character’s vulnerability and ultimately making him into a victim. He achieved that through the character of Sebastian’s overbearing and ruthless mother, played by renowned Austrian actress Leopoldine Konstantin in her only English-speaking role.

The result of all those talents being gathered was an enormous success at the box office that would confirm Hitchcock’s status as one of the greatest Hollywood film-makers of his time and allowed him to continue a career that would lead to some of the most celebrated films made. All those who watch Notorious today are likely to conclude that such success was deserved.

RATING: 8/10 (+++)