The Definitives
Notorious (1946)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, and Louis Calhern
Rated: Unrated
Runtime: 101 min.
by Brian Eggert
Entered into
The Definitives:
11/14/2007
Original Release Date:
9/6/1946
François Truffaut called Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious “the quintessential Hitchcock film,” as if there could ever be just one. While Hitchcock made an impressive number of masterpieces, three seem to pollinate his other work: Vertigo draws on his sexual obsessions and cinematic voyeurism; North by Northwest perfects his frequent Wrong Man thrillers, signifying the director foremost as an entertainer; Notorious configures a career-wide metaphor within its narrative structure, outlining how the director often diverts from his film’s true intent by use of a “MacGuffin” or plot device.
Notorious is a love story first and foremost, shrouded by a curtain of espionage. As viewers, our primary interest is what remains hidden behind that curtain. His numerous spy yarns were some of his most popular, films like Saboteur and The Man Who Knew Too Much; Notorious might also be a spy yarn, except every element of its espionage design serves only to advance the film’s true, romantic intent. It is a deceptive film, in that its quintessence works as metaphor for Hitchcock’s filmic tropes, yet also represents an antithesis for typical Hitchcockian composition by diverting from his classic storylines and character functions.
The story involves Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a Nazi agent hiding in America circa 1946, just after WWII. Alicia is played by Ingrid Bergman, who had just finished filming Spellbound with Hitchcock the year before. Alicia is commissioned by T.R. Devlin (frequent Hitchcock collaborator Cary Grant), an agent who convinces her to go undercover in Rio de Janeiro where a consortium of Nazis plot their party’s return. Her specific function there is yet unknown to them, only that her familial affiliation with the ousted party, which she has denounced, will help American interests. She agrees, and she and Devlin fly to Brazil where they ignite a brief but meaningful love affair. Devlin is eventually told Alicia’s mission: she is to bed Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), an undercover Nazi agent living surreptitiously in South America. Alicia’s well-known promiscuity and reputation as a party girl would seem to make her perfect for this Mata Hari assignment, to discover what Sebastian and his group of Nazis plot. Ripped away from her newfound love, Devlin, she must pretend with, and even marry another man in hopes of uncovering the Nazi secret.
That Nazi secret, better known as a filmic contrivance or “MacGuffin”, is meaningless to how the film’s setup tears at Alicia and Devlin. Hitchcock’s “MacGuffin” disguises the picture’s love story, making it about something other than love, when in actuality love is all there is, as they say. The “MacGuffin” is any film’s fabricated cause, utterly pointless in its specificity, but nonetheless, the reason everything happens. Hitchcock adopted the term “MacGuffin” in realizing that each of his films relied on such a device.
Or, as Hitchcock explained to François Truffaut in their seminal 1966 interview:
It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a MacGuffin.' The first one asks 'What's a MacGuffin?' 'Well' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no MacGuffin!' So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all.Hitchcock would often add the MacGuffin lastly to the script, as it was the film’s least important detail, despite all events revolving around it. His goal was to first imagine scenarios, and then afterward fit a MacGuffin that would allow those scenarios to progress naturally and to their full cinematic possibility.
In Notorious, the MacGuffin is a wine bottle, specifically a 1934 Pommard filled with uranium, and in lieu of this MacGuffin, Hitchcock’s romance drama blossoms. Replace the wine bottle with the frozen body of Hitler, a roll of microfilm, or any other thingamajig relatable to Nazis, and the plot would remain the same—centered on the love triangle between Alicia and Devlin and Sebastian. What is interesting about Notorious is not the spy yarn, rather the games and suspense and romance denoted by it. Never mind that the ore in Sebastian’s wine cellar could be used for an Atom Bomb. The audience does not care. Our concern resides in Alicia and Devlin’s eventual love, the suspense of stealing the wine cellar key, and their remaining in character while in the presence of Nazis.
The ‘34 Pommard allowed Hitchcock to conceive one of his most suspenseful set-ups, involving Alicia stealing Sebastian’s Unica-brand wine cellar key, getting into the cellar, and uncovering just what the Nazis are planning. After her and Sebastian’s honeymoon, Alicia is told by Devlin to propose that Sebastian throw a party, so that she might meet Rio de Janeiro’s elite. Her first task requires taking the Unica key from Sebastian’s keychain. While he dresses in another room, she sneaks in to remove it. Just as she has the key, he enters, now dressed, and embraces his wife. Holding her endearingly on the forearm, Sebastian kisses the palm of her right hand; in her left hides the Unica key. Before he can kiss her left palm, she thrusts both arms around his neck—what might seem a desperate cuddle provides a narrow escape.
Cut to the night of the party, where a high crane shot gives us full view of Sebastian’s massive foyer, and tightens on Alicia standing nervously next to Sebastian; in the same move, the camera zooms to a detailed close-up of Alicia’s hand, where she hides the Unica key. This bravado shot is one of the most impressive of Hitchcock’s career, one of many in Notorious, and certainly complicated, requiring a number of shifting focuses, from wide-to-mid to mid-to-tight. Devlin, invited to the party, warns that their time is limited, as the butler is running low on serving wine and may have to enter the cellar soon; furthermore, Sebastian, jealous of the “very good looking” Devlin, is keeping an eye on his wife. Sneaking away, Alicia and Devlin enter the cellar to find the mysterious contents of the bottle. She keeps watch while he snoops. The sequence is spliced with shots back to the butler’s ice tub housing the party’s wine stock, counting down: first eleven bottles, then seven, then three. Back in the cellar, a bottle slips from the shelf and breaks on the ground, spilling the uranium hidden inside. Quickly cleaning up, they replace the ore into an empty 1940 Pommard bottle, an inconsistency that Sebastian later notices, thus realizing Alicia is an American spy.
The central plot was inspired by John Taintor Foote’s story called “The Song of the Dragon”, published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1921. Foote’s yarn entailed a WWI-era theatrical producer smitten with an actress, who, volunteers herself to seduce an enemy spy for a group of feds. Producer and Hollywood legend David O. Selznick became fascinated with “Song” as early as 1939, with Vivien Leigh as a potential star. Ingrid Bergman was later offered the role. Bergman disproved of the story, believing a propaganda angle existed within its pages; upon a second reading some time later, the actress agreed with Selznick that it was a ripe part for any actress, specifically working under Hitchcock. Selznick believed the material to be seasoned with Hitchcockian qualities; and after Hitchcock agreed to adapt it, he cast Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in the lead roles (despite Selznick wanting Joseph Cotten for Devlin).
Hitchcock worked with writer Ben Hecht, starting in 1944, to rework Foote’s Mata Hari account into Notorious; not much else besides the basic plot of “Song” survived the transfer. Hitchcock updated the story by moving its events to WWII, afterwards even, in spite of the war having not yet ended as Hitchcock and Hecht worked. They conceived the uranium wine bottle plot device after a long period of deliberation. “A bomb is always good” Hitchcock would say, as a plot detail or in this case a MacGuffin.
Strange that Hitchcock and Hecht knew the significance of uranium in 1944, one year before America dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Selznick had certainly never heard of it, and scoffed when it was pitched. Uranium seemed an odd MacGuffin, and a risky one given the political climate of the period—not to mention that general audiences at the time would be unfamiliar with, therefore unresponsive to its onscreen suggestion.
Hitch learned of uranium and the A-Bomb through Hollywood friends, a number of them spies for the British Ministry of Information. It was not unheard of for everyday people, if not minor celebrities (such as actor Reginald Gardiner), to be asked to seduce enemy operatives for information. Everyone wants to talk to a star, even spies. Trade secrets were communicated by a few good loose-lipped men.
For scientific details, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Robert A. Millikan at the California Institute of Technology was paid a visit by Hitchcock and Hecht, though this meeting was very hush-hush and undocumented, making it nearly impossible to verify. In later interviews, Hitchcock referred to his chat with Dr. Millikan, giving us indication that he indeed researched his MacGuffin well. The director would later claim that the FBI kept an eye on him for three months subsequently, hearing of Hitch’s interest in a subject no one was yet supposed to know about.
Nevertheless, Hitchcock and Hecht insisted on their idea. More than half a year was spent on writing, working out plot details, and pinning down what, exactly, this film’s MacGuffin would be. Selznick was adverse to the uranium idea, but had better things to worry about—other over-budget projects he was more invested in and had further control over, such as Duel in the Sun. Two sides developed, as was often the case on Selznick productions: Selznick, representing the studio brass disconnected from artistic vision, and a massive creative half fronted by Hitchcock, Hecht, Bergman and Grant.
Selznick was all but turned on his head when, after a budgetary argument, he threatened to sell the whole production to Hal B. Wallis at Warners Bros., and found that everyone on the creative end seemed pleased with the idea. It was a moot threat, however; Wallis rejected Notorious on the basis that the uranium was an unproven MacGuffin.
Never pleased with Hitchcock’s MacGuffin nor the writers’ “contemporary” plot, Selznick sold the entire kit and caboodle to RKO producer William Dozier for a hefty $800,000. The producer would still retain fifty percent of all profits, but Hitchcock demanded that Selznick have no creative say on their production while at RKO. Though there was still occasionally one of Selznick’s infamous memos attempting to change some minor detail here or there, the contract with RKO allowed Hitch and Hecht to freely construct their Notorious vision, without having to humor Selznick by pretending to consider his off ideas.
Filming began in October of 1945 after more than a year of groundwork, and it was completed in January of 1946. Hitchcock and Hecht worked on the script while shooting, in sequence as Hitchcock often did, finishing pages sometimes the night prior to filming. Here we see an alternative to the customary Hitchcock preparation myth. Traditionally, Hitch was thought to have storyboarded every shot and work solely from script direction, which would be perfected in his laborious writing and storyboarding processes during pre-production. With Notorious, Hitch not only proves this myth false, but shows how well he improvises without notes there in front of him. The director essentially produced Notorious under RKO, with Selznick contractually powerless on or off set. His usual, legendary scheme of detailed preparation came about chiefly after working with David O. Selznick or other dictatorial producers, wherein such early groundwork left nothing in the air for a nosy producer to tamper with.
Notorious skews Hitchcockian convention with its characters as well, reversing Alicia and Devlin’s gender roles—roles that in Hitchcock’s oeuvre usually have bound designations. Hitchcock’s obsessions repeated a frequent need to place the lead female, usually a blonde, certainly sexually attractive, in precarious situations, demanding that she be rescued by a heroic male. This male character is often an ordinary or “wrong man” thrown into an impossible set of circumstances.
And yet, in Notorious, few of those all-too-frequent Hitchcockian stereotypes exist. Rather than a blonde ideal present merely to be rescued, Ingrid Bergman is a brunette, sexually experienced, even a drunk. Like many Hitchcock women, Alicia eventually needs to be rescued, yet only because she has thrust herself into a waning suicidal position. Devlin is not Cary Grant’s Roger O. Thornhill from North by Northwest, a likable, good-humored everyman. Devlin is a spiteful character, sarcastic and sour toward Alicia, whom he loves, but hates himself for loving her, thus derides her for his own self-loathing.
The night following her father’s trial, we see Alicia dressed in a risqué faux zebra-print midriff outfit (by costume designing legend Edith Head), partying with drunken friends. She finds Devlin there, and though he says nothing, she says she likes him. Feminist writer Tania Modleski argues in her book The Women Who Knew Too Much that Alicia’s role is strangely both a female object subjected to sexual investigation (a Hitchcockian ideal), and more significantly a sexual investigator. An interesting duality—even though Alicia is an object, it is she who leads the story. She demands the glances of voyeurs, and yet has clearly tamed her own sexuality enough to explore.
Hitchcock wants us to adore our hero, but also experience the film through her eyes, so his camera illustrates Alicia’s duality. Third party camera positions place us in a spectator role. At the post-trial party, we first see only Devlin’s back, himself an observer watching Alicia pour drinks and act a fool (in a charming way, of course). That might be us, sitting in Devlin's chair. In contrast, several point-of-view shots occur and work to identify the audience with Alicia. The morning after meeting Devlin, Alicia wakes, hung over, catching him in her bedroom’s doorway; when he approaches, the camera twists as she turns in her bed, rolling until the audience gets an upside-down view of Cary Grant.
Joseph I. Breen, Director of the Production Code, scoffed at an early draft of the screenplay for Notorious in 1945, finding Alicia “grossly immoral” and “superficially” a prostitute. A more Freudian explanation to her behavior resides in her feelings toward her Nazi father: she explains, “When I found out about him, I just went to pot. I didn’t care what happened to me.” She loves but despises her father, torn between her family commitment and her opposition toward Nazism, just as we are torn between Alicia’s amorality and her clear hold over us as a protagonist. For that, her self-punishment extends far, to where she nearly dies in the same manner as her father—by poison.
Sebastian discovers his wife is a spy after the key incident, and in going to his mother, played by actress Leopoldine Konstantin, they develop a plan to slowly poison Alicia. Killing her quickly would draw attention from Sebastian’s Nazi cohorts, and to confess that he has married an American agent would mean his own death. Poison is the only way to keep her secret his. Alicia, pained with guilt and loving hatred for Devlin, keeps her poisoning a secret. When she and Devlin meet for one of their intermittent information exchanges, she pretends to be hungover, hiding that she is sick. Perhaps she has resolved that without love, suicide, the same out as her father, is her only solution, and so resigns herself to inaction, thus accepting her death with suicidal extreme.
We have no choice but to identify with Alicia, whose self-destructive behavior surfaces in heavy drinking. Alicia is not unlike Laraine Day’s Carol Fisher in Hitchcock’s 1940 film Foreign Correspondent—a woman pinched by her morality to do good after discovering her father is an enemy agent. Ironically, Alicia beds a Nazi to clear her guilty conscience, derived from her Nazi father. Victimized by her love for Devlin, all of the film’s pains and conflicts for the viewer reside in her, with Devlin as the distant spectator, out of the action but overseeing and judging, if not administering a kind of shock cure for Alicia’s guilt. Analogous to placing a child’s hand on a hot burner to teach it not to touch such things, Devlin thrusts Alicia into the film’s conflict nearly killing her to prove where guilt-driven promiscuity and reckless behavior get you.
The centerpiece of Notorious is Alicia and Devlin’s broken romance. After they meet, Alicia confesses to Devlin, “I don’t like gentlemen who grin at me.” How true, since her bitter enemy, Sebastian, is a gentleman, while Devlin, her love, is anything but. Devlin is as his devilish name suggest, cruel and punishing toward Alicia for her willingness to participate in a Mata Hari plot against Sebastian. While at first her behavior is shocking to Devlin, he does not mind, insomuch that he falls in love with her. Love would seem to wash away her promiscuous reputation, giving her a new start. When he tests her upon first divulging what her role in Brazil is to be, he gives her a choice, which certainly would be no choice at all. She chooses duty, unaware that Devlin is placing her on trial to prove her confessed love for him. After this betrayal from Devlin’s point of view, he never misses an opportunity to scorn her. And when she tries to explain, she receives a customary “Skip it.”
Indeed, their relationship throughout the film, until its harrowing, romantic climax, consists of two heartbroken lovers attempting to hurt the other through indirect action. Devlin behaves as if he were aware of what his role in a Hitchcock film should be, but resists that role—he derides Alicia with resentment, all but calling her a tramp on numerous occasions. That masochistic type of punishment goes both ways. Alicia may not be able to place Devlin into a Mata Hari situation akin to where he has placed her, but she tortures him as a spectator. She refuses to make it easy on him, twisting the knife whenever she can initially, to drive him mad with guilt for putting her in such a spot. Alicia tells Devlin “You can add Sebastian to my list of playmates.”
The third member of Hitchcock’s twisted love triangle, Sebastian, is played as gallant and kind, like a daring hero, whereas Devlin is more cowardly, if not villainesque. Furthermore, Devlin will not stand up and fight for Alicia, to prevent her impeding position under Sebastian, and she despises him for it. Instead, Cary Grant plays an almost spineless character, trite and angry, working in the shadows. Sebastian, in contrast, is forthright, even polite and direct in his actions. Only actor Claude Rains could make a Nazi somehow sympathetic and charming. These temporary stations held by either character, of course, are later switched when Devlin makes his final dashing rescue of Alicia from the Nazi home, with Sebastian quiet, resigned to accept his doomed fate.
The final scenes play out in true Hitchcock fashion, with silence punctuating suspense. Having learned of Alicia’s illness, blown cover, and poisoning, Devlin arrives at Sebastian’s and races up the stairs for his first truly active participation thus far. Sebastian and his mother are powerless to stop him. Should they attempt to, they would give up that their syndicate has been penetrated by an American mole, allowed entry via Sebastian’s heart; should they accept that guilt, it would mean curtains. Devin bravely walks downstairs toward a Nazi greeting party with Alicia in his arms, the frightened Sebastian and his mother leading them, themselves fearing their deaths. Nazi goons standby watching the scene, finding holes in Sebastian’s explanation that Alicia is off to hospital. Devlin puts Alicia in his car and Sebastian follows in an uncharacteristic shift to cowardice, begging Devlin to open the door, to save him from his partners. But Devlin has locked it, forcing Sebastian to accept his likely death.
Other possible endings were conceived, none with the minimalist narrative decorum currently present in the film. Of the suggestions, a bloody shootout was recommended, as well as a number of light postscript scenes that with humor might have lifted the audience from Sebastian’s dreadful demise. Hitchcock refused them all. As is, the last scene in Notorious is perfect, comparable to final shots in Casablanca or The Third Man. Truffaut called Notorious “precise as an animated cartoon,” and goes on to say the film has “a maximum of stylization and a maximum of simplicity.” Certainly this ending attests to Truffaut's statement. We see our lovers drive off and Sebastian walking up the stairs, back into his home where his Nazi partners will surely learn everything. A grim light from inside penetrates the night, with Sebastian’s shadow hanging behind him, as if Death follows him inside.
Hitchcock believed in not pulling his punches, letting the suspense strike in pangs throughout the film until the climax, at which point the film would end with haste. Look at Saboteur, another of Hitch’s espionage thrillers: we follow a Wrong Man escaping authorities, seeking out the person who framed him, catching the true saboteur, and in the last scene watching the villain slip off the Statue of Liberty (in no way a subtle political image). Despite there being some romance in the film, thus potential for falling action after this zenith (perhaps a scene where hero Robert Cummings embraces Priscilla Lane one last time, or even an apology from the authorities for wrongfully arresting him), Hitchcock ends Saboteur with the enemy falling to his death, closing the film in that very shot. The audience is left shocked—Hitchcock wants to sustain that feeling, prolong it as long as possible. He does not wipe it away, putting the audience at ease just in time for us to feel safe again as the credits roll, when we go back into the real world. For this reason, a Hitchcock ending often seems abrupt. His movies are never about the destination; they are about the ride there. Once you have arrived, there is no more story to tell.
As I have asserted, Notorious is a love story shrouded with notes of spy yarn, therefore the stairway ending shows Alicia and Devlin at last embracing romantically and confessing their love for one another. Throughout the picture, Hitchcock’s greatest moments are not of espionage thrills, rather they are of romantic confinement. Look at the scene where Alicia reports to a room of American spies that Sebastian wants to marry her. Hitchcock almost exclusively shoots Alicia and Devlin, though they barely speak. As spy bosses ramble on about their schemes, Hitchcock shows us, with an effectual handling of mise en scène, that the two are in love. The American chief, Prescott (Louis Calhern), talks of opportunity, but Hitchcock avoids keeping the camera on him—in its place, we see agony in Bergman’s face, frustration in Grant’s. Prescott notices their glances and expressions throughout the picture; we suspect he knows they are in love, as certainly their inner romantic woes cannot be concealed.
While the film’s espionage thread offers the daring key sequence to punctuate it, Hitchcock concocts a likewise audacious scene for the couple’s love story. The director filmed what was then claimed to be “the longest kiss in film history” by condensing five pages of dialogue into one shot, extending not one kiss, but several small kisses over a prolonged period. Production Code demanded that screen kisses not last more than three seconds; as is, Hitchcock has upwards of fifteen kisses (depending on your definition of a kiss), each broken up into smaller nibbles that append into one enormous bite.
The kissing scene takes place before Devlin is told what Alicia’s role in Brazil will be, during their brief affair in Rio de Janeiro. Hitchcock wanted the conversation as natural as possible; he demanded that Bergman and Grant improvise their lines, avoid showiness or flair, and instead express an unsophisticated romantic moment. That is not to say the scene is simple: actors Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman were horribly uncomfortable while filming the scene, keeping as intimately, unnaturally close together as Hitchcock demanded they be. What works on camera often does not fit in reality. This scene involves the characters wrapped in each others’ arms, moving from the terrace indoors, Devlin answering the phone, getting a call from Prescott, and then moving to the door where Devlin slips out—all the while, Bergman and Grant are never more than a few millimeters away from each other. Rather than play the scene thick with sexual innuendo, as we would later see in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (in a familiar sequence between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint), the two talk of their dinner, that Alicia will prepare chicken and Devlin will pick up champagne. Hitchcock famously told Tuffaut that he hoped to include the audience in a “temporary ménage à trois” with the stars—a rare, if not odd filmic feature, indeed.
Hitchcock claimed the scene was inspired by something he witnessed while in France, in a small town called Etaples. Two lovers stood against a wall, the boy urinating and the girl holding his hand, casually looking around and then down at the boy’s relieving. That unshakable proximity, to Hitchcock, spelled true love.
Alicia Huberman and T. R. Devlin stand out in Ingrid Berman and Cary Grant’s careers, just as they do in Hitchcock’s methodology. Prior to Notorious, Bergman had played ideal women, damsels, even a nun, in movies like Casablanca, Gaslight, and The Bells of St. Mary's. Grant’s name was best associated with Howard Hawks’ screwball comedies, an image he hoped to change. In 1941, Grant and Hitchcock attempted such a transformation of onscreen persona with Suspicion, a film that should have ended with Grant as a would-be wife-killer. Grant’s hopes to finally be depicted as a debased mind were squashed by cowardly studio execs unwilling to show The Cary Grant as a potential murderer. Suspicion now ends with his wife (Joan Fontaine) realizing she has exaggerated her doubts in a severely anticlimactic finale, that it was all just a case of female hysterics (a sexist note to be sure). With Notorious, both performers would play against their respective, predestined Hollywood fronts, offering audiences an unexpected dynamic of character in either case, though neither is underlined as utterly wicked.
Hollywood personas notwithstanding, Bergman and Grant were Hitchcockian ideals, particularly Grant as the director’s prototypical male lead. His suave good looks, onscreen charisma, ability to deliver fast-paced dialogue, and agile physical stature all appealed to Hitchcock, not to mention a few million moviegoers. During a number of his later productions, the director sought out Grant for his lead, accomplishing this task on only the three aforementioned occasions (frequently due to Grant’s busy schedule or high price tag). Few of Hitchcock’s leading men compare. Jimmy Stewart, Hitch’s recurrent voyeur, exists as Grant’s only competition.
I would mark the stellar blonde beauty of Grace Kelly as Hitchcock’s supreme female archetype, but with Ingrid Bergman, Hitchcock shared a curious link. Rumors circulated Hollywood for years about a romantic rendezvous in one of their homes, where Hitch arrived to find a willing Berman coaxing him, yet she was turned down by the director—in spite of his persistent infatuation with his leading ladies, Hitchcock was also a gentleman and loved his wife. Many critics and Hitchcock scholars would balk at this story, sometimes retold by Hitch after a few drinks, details wavering. Certainly it was a piece of mid-career Hollywood lore for the director to recount later in life. The story is not unbelievable, I think. As Patrick McGilligan asks in his exhaustive Alfred Hitchcock biography, A Life in Darkness and Light, “Don’t actresses fall in love with their directors all the time?” A somewhat typical symptom and cliché in Hollywood is the actress smitten with her director, but not incredible for Bergman, who had affairs with directors before (including Victor Fleming). Perhaps she was overly consumed by her character in Notorious, as such a tryst could hardly occur while filming her other two Hitchcock films: Spellbound and Under Capricorn, wherein her characters are less creatures of sexuality.
Years later in 1978, when Alfred Hitchcock was honored by the American Film Institute with a Lifetime Achievement Award, he would join the likes of honoree directors John Ford, Orson Welles, and William Wyler. That night's ceremony featured bittersweet sentiment on the director, whose physical health was waning and usual wit was blanketed by his modesty. François Truffaut and Ingrid Bergman hosted the event. After a series of testaments to the director’s brilliance, Berman approached his table and presented him with the Unica key, an item she and Cary Grant mutually kept as a good luck charm since the production on Notorious, for more than thirty years. She returned the key to him, and Hitchcock accepted it with a loving embrace from a dear friend. Berman and Hitchcock’s connection was undeniable, whatever its origins or circumstances. Grant joined the two, knowing it would likely be the last time the three could be reunited.
Selecting Notorious as my most adored Hitchcock picture, I am forced to wonder why not a more popular choice like The Birds or Psycho, or his other two central pollinators Vertigo or North by Northwest? Perhaps his offscreen camaraderie with Bergman and Grant reflects onscreen; perhaps because his MacGuffin narrative structure keeps us attentive and so readily involved in his love story; perhaps Notorious is just another example, in an almost endless continuation of examples, of Hitchcock’s filmic legend. While keeping us rapt in his spy tale, Hitchcock achieves matchless emotional gratification with Notorious, putting up the most impassioned motion picture in his remarkable career.
Recommended reading:
Krohn, Bill. Hitchcock At Work. London: Phaidon, 2000.
McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.New York: Regan Books, c2003.
Modleski, Tania.The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory.New York: Routledge, 2006.
Petrie, Graham. Hollywood destinies: European directors in America, 1922-1931. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, c2002.
Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
Schickel, Richard. Cary Grant: A Celebration. Boston: Little, Brown, c1983.
Schickel, Richard. The Men who made the movies: interviews with Frank Capra, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, and William A.Wellman. New York: Atheneum, 1975.
Truffaut, François. Hitchcock. With the collaboration of Helen G Scott. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.
Žižek, Slavoj. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock).London; New York: Verso, 1992.