We saw another one yesterday-the snow is keeping us inside--found it a little choppy and the ending didn't quite grab us-still it did hold our interest for the most part-I see the critics just loved it. Regards, Len
August 16, 1946
1. 'Notorious,' Hitchcock Thriller, Opens at Radio City
By BOSLEY CROWTHER
It is obvious that Alfred Hitchcock, Ben Hecht and Ingrid Bergman form a team of motion-picture makers that should be publicly and heavily endowed. For they were the ones most responsible for "Spellbound," as director, writer and star, and now they have teamed together on another taut, superior film. It goes by the name of "Notorious" and it opened yesterday at the Music Hall. With Cary Grant as an additional asset, it is one of the most absorbing pictures of the year.
For Mr. Hecht has written and Mr. Hitchcock has directed in brilliant style a romantic melodrama which is just about as thrilling as they come -- velvet smooth in dramatic action, sharp and sure in its characters and heavily charged with the intensity of warm emotional appeal. As a matter of fact, the distinction of "Notorious" as a film is the remarkable blend of love story with expert "thriller" that it represents.
Actually, the "thriller" elements are familiar and commonplace, except in so far as Mr. Hitchcock has galvanized them into life. They comprise the routine ingredients of a South African girl set to spy upon it and a behind-the-scenes American intelligence man. And the crux of the melodramatic action is the perils of the girl when the nature of her assignment is discovered by one of the Nazis whom she has wed.
But the rare quality of the picture is in the uncommon character of the girl and in the drama of her relations with the American intelligence man. For here Mr. Hecht and Mr. Hitchcock have done a forthright and daring thing: they have made the girl, played by Miss Bergman, a lady of notably loose morals. She is the logically cynical daughter of a convicted American traitor when she is pressed into this job of high-echelon spying by the confident espionage man. The complication is that she and the latter fall passionately and genuinely in love before the demands of her assignment upon her seductive charms are revealed. And thus the unpleasant suspicions and the lacerated feelings of the two as they deal with this dangerous major problem form the emotional drama of the film.
Obviously, that situation might seem slightly old-fashioned, too. But Mr. Hecht and Mr. Hitchcock have here treated it with sophistication and irony. There is nothing unreal or puritanical in their exposure of a frank, grown-up amour. And Miss Bergman and Mr. Grant have played it with surprising and disturbing clarity. We do not recall a more conspicuous -- yet emotionally delicate -- love scene on the screen that one stretch of billing and cooing that the principals play in this film. Yet, withal, there is a rich and real emotion expressed by Miss Bergman in her role, and the integrity of her nature as she portrays it is the prop that holds the show.
Mr. Grant, who is exceptionally solid, is matched for acting honors in the cast by Claude Rains as the Nazi big-wig, to whom Miss Bergman becomes attached. Mr. Rains' shrewd and tense performance of this invidious character is responsible for much of the anguish that the situation creates. Reinhold Schunzel and Ivan Triesault are good, too, as Nazi worms, and a splendid touch of chilling arrogance as a German mother is added by Madame Konstantin. Louis Calhern and Moroni Olsen are fine in minor American roles.
Check up another smash hit for a fine and experienced team.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes ... eview.html
2. “The ragged end of nowhere”: Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946)
Lauren Carroll Harris
June 2015
Cinémathèque Annotations on Film
Issue 75
Notorious (1946) is widely known as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most lucid and pure works, emblematic of the auteur’s take on suspense and love, and his simplified, stylised cinematic storytelling. Its synopsis is straightforward: a spy pushes the woman he loves into sleeping with the enemy to retrieve secrets. But one of the film’s greatest ironies is that it is one of the muddiest of Hitchcock’s films to interpret.
In black and white, with the barest dialogue and economical camerawork, Notorious declares its ambient anxiety from the very start. We open with an extreme close-up of a newsman’s camera, and immediately we are put at hazard – someone is being watched and hunted. Next we peer through the panels of a Miami courtroom door from the point of view of one of the media vultures, as John Huberman is convicted of treason against the United States. He remains faceless, but his protestation rings clear: “You can put me away, but you can’t put away what’s going to happen to you and this whole country. Next time! Next time we are going to…” With that warning he is silenced by his lawyer, but a sense of foreboding is set. It is 1946: the Second World War is over, the Cold War has commenced, and the world is in flux.
The subject of the news cameras – trained as rifles upon their marks – is Huberman’s daughter Alicia (Ingrid Bergman). Her notoriety is twofold: her father is a war criminal, and she is a drinking, partying, good time girl. As she refuses the reporters’ questions, we overhear a conspiratorial exchange between two shady suits in the background, “Let us know if she tries to leave town.” Though this is an archetypal Hitchcock film, Bergman’s Alicia is not the archetypal Hitchcock woman, most popularly characterised as cool, withholding and unknowable. Bergman brings a warmth, vulnerability and frankness to the role of the hunted woman. But like Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, we suspect Bergman may be tougher than her male counterpart, despite the fact that she becomes steadily disempowered as the film progresses.
That counterpart is Cary Grant’s Devlin, a smooth American spy who becomes caught in a “strange love affair” with Alicia and convinces her to move to Rio de Janeiro to work for his agency. Only after they become involved do they realise the true nature of her assignment: to seduce suspected Nazi Alex Sebastian and betray his political secrets. Most painfully, Alicia and Devlin must maintain a charade of cordiality in the wake of their forced breakup and the growth of his animosity toward her. A neat subversion of a typical Hitchcock setup arises: not the wrong man, but the wronged woman.
Notorious film review
Notorious was initially advertised as a melodrama, a genre that relies on the delineation and advocacy of clear moral ground. Though it borrows many syntactical camera moves from that genre (the rhythm of single close-ups and medium close-ups between the lovers when they quarrel, two-shots when they are in harmony), Notorious takes a remarkably compassionate and nonjudgmental view of Alicia’s supposed waywardness. It is this generous depiction that forces the audience to feel her dread, and invokes atmospheric doom. Generically mixed, Notorious is a thriller with an emotional core with which to connect – a wartime spy film with a pure love story at the centre. While the suspense is created by stretching out time and zooming in on objects of symbolic significance (a key, a wine bottle), Francois Truffaut saw the love torn aspect of the film as a triangle in which two men adore the same woman (1) – a classic melodramatic premise. At his most pathetically controlling (despite the fact he is controlled by another woman already, his mother), Sebastian asks Alicia if she is with any other man. She responds, “There is no-one.” Sadly, this is true at the time: she believes Devlin is lost to her. This simple exchange says much about how Hitchcock underscores a typical generic setup with intricately psychological, neurosis-laden character dynamics.
Love triangles aside, we might also read the film, as Adrian Martin does, as a tale of couples’ miscommunications (2). How easily a few unsaid words divide Alicia and Devlin (in this way Notorious directly continues the concern of Hitchcock’s preceding film, Spellbound [1945] whose premise hinges on a slip of the tongue) and how we’ve all been guilty of this. Upon receiving the awful news of her proposed mission, Alicia is stark with Dev: “Do you want me to take the job?” But he refuses to respond frankly. The next day the plan is sparked into action, and her new life of rented jewellery and enforced relationships begins.
Before her fake marriage and after her father’s verdict, Alicia declares, “I don’t have to hate him anymore. Or myself.” Hitchcock protagonists are often caught in a black hole of delusion and denial, but with this comment Alicia marks a rather unusual Hitchcock theme of self-acceptance and liberation from self-loathing, even as the past holds stubbornly on. At first she is free in Brazil with Devlin, pledging (relative) sobriety: she is no longer a “no good girl”. But her freedom cannot last, and unfeeling men force her into unthinkable compromises, yet she is judged all the same. “Why won’t you believe in me,” Alicia pleads to Dev. “Just a little. Why won’t you?” Sebastian’s mother lays perhaps the lowest blow in this respect, telling Alicia, “You resemble your father very much”. Alicia’s redemption is bound up with another man, Devlin, who finally admits, “I was a fat-headed guy full of pain.”
Today Notorious reads as an indictment of the terrible things women are forced to do and then judged for, rather than a moral tale of punishment for ‘unfeminine’ behaviour. The film is easily understood as a story of cowardly men. First of these are the US agents who are happy to let an endangered woman do their dirty work for them (“We want someone who’s good at making friends with gentlemen”). Second is Devlin, who refuses to admit his feelings for Alicia and then pushes her into a fraudulent relationship (with a fascist, no less), and whose characterisation relies on Grant bouncing obnoxiousness against his suave, charismatic screen presence. Finally is his competitor, the frightened villain Sebastian, initially a slimy character who becomes rather pitiful as he fails to fight his fate amongst his fellow Nazis.
It is far too easy to watch a film and extract its moral themes through the lens of your own ideological framework: that might be one of cinema’s greatest tricks. The multiplex readings viewers and scholars have taken from Notorious are only made possible by the core strategy of switching the narrative’s vantage through the camera’s point of view (3), starting with the reporters, before moving between the three leads, and ending with Sebastian. This swaying character subjectivity means we align ourselves naturally with the one we relate to most strongly: the attachments are more personal than usual. As such, the shifty nature of Notorious (including its slippery gender politics) is structural. This explains why the film’s life is not over, and we will continue to renovate its secrets for some time.
http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/cteq/not ... hitchcock/
William Holden was just superb. What a nice touch having Director Cecil B. DeMille and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper playing themselves!