Notorious (USA, 1946)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Leopoldine Konstantin
IMDb Top 250: #146 (21/7/12)
This is the 50th Review I have written since launching Mumby at the Movies.
There are many stories about fights between producers and directors,
some of which have become Hollywood legends in their own right. Think of
Terry Gilliam's quarrelling with Bob and Harvey Weinstein over
The Brothers Grimm, which saw Gilliam's cinematographer fired, his casting
choices vetoed, and ultimately resulted in his worst film. Or go a
little further back, and think of Richard Donner's conflicts with
Alexander and Ilya Salkind, which saw him replaced by Richard Lester
mid-way through the shooting of
Superman II.
But in the golden
age of Hollywood, perhaps no fractious relationship is more famous than
that of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick - a relationship which
peaked early with the Oscar-winning
Rebecca, and gradually deteriorated
until the thoroughly un-suspenseful courtroom drama
The Paradine Case.
Notorious is at the upper end of the work Hitch achieved in his early
years in America, combining a timely, pulpy story with a strong central
relationship. While it never quite fires on all cylinders, and only
truly takes flight in the final reel, it still includes much to be
enjoyed or appreciated.
In order to enjoy
Notorious, you must be
willing to accept a rather big contrivance - namely that a beautiful
woman who knows nothing about spying comes to work for the secret
service, just because she used to date the man that they are targeting.
It is a big suspension of disbelief even for the day, but Hitchcock does
at least give their relationship credibility by crafting a pretty
decent romance out of it. This romance is not as straightforward as
Ingrid Bergman swooning into Cary Grant's arms - they start with a
drunken fight in the car, and their relationship goes up and down from
there.
Notorious benefits in this respect from some good dialogue
courtesy of screenwriter Ben Hecht. The banter between Devlin and
Alicia serves to build them up as characters with a certain amount of
awkward sexual tension. Neither of them desperately like the other one,
neither of them particularly want to be there - and yet as time goes by
they find themselves drawn to one another. Alicia accuses Devlin of
being afraid of women and being cold, and he is content to play along
for the duration of the mission to maintain a professional distance.
Both feel like complicated people with mixed emotions, a lot of which is
internalised.
Fans of
Mission: Impossible II may have realised
by this point just how much their film borrows or steals from
Notorious.
Not only is the premise the same, but the relationship between the
agent, woman and mark goes through the exact same motions. The
rekindling of the relationship between the mark and the woman begins
happily enough, with old memories coming to the fore and bonds
re-forming. This results in the agent being side-lined until they go for
the big break-in, wherein the woman is rescued when things go wrong.
The relationship begins to sour, the agent and woman escape, and the
mark gets what's coming to him. Of course, John Woo is not the only
filmmaker to have stolen from Hitchcock, but it's hard to think of
another film other than
Disturbia which rips him off quite so blatantly.
Notorious
is famous on a technical level for two key scenes. The first is the
kiss scene between Bergman and Grant, which goes on for two-and-a-half
minutes despite a clause in the Motion Picture Production Code which
prohibited "excessive or lustful kissing, particularly when one
character or the other is a 'heavy'." Hitchcock got around the ruling
that an on-screen kiss could only last three seconds by having his
actors kiss for three seconds, murmur to each other, and then start
kissing again. It's a very effective ploy that makes the scene if
anything more passionate - and would have given the priest in
Cinema Paradiso a headache trying to remove every last kiss.
The other
technical matter of note lies in Hitchcock's increasing use of crane
shots and zooms. Perhaps the most famous shot in the whole film is the
one that begins high up at the top of the staircase, and comes right
down into Bergman's hand behind her dress, where the key to the wine
cellar is being concealed. Not only are these shots as slick as his work
on
The Paradine Case, but Hitch's compositions is quite impeccable,
picking up the details in people's faces and the different wine bottles.
The cuts between the different dates on the bottles, as Claude Rains
discovers what has happened, are very simple and effective.
Notorious
has a very good central set-piece involving Devlin and Alicia
infiltrating the wine cellar and coming across the uranium. Not only is
the plot twist handled very well, but Hitchcock builds up suspense
surrounding their discovery in a very novel way. Rather than cutting
between our protagonists in the cellar and the bad guys walking along a
very long corridor to come to them, Hitch cuts between the cellar and
the number of champagne bottles left on ice, after which Alex Sebastian
will make a short trip down to catch them.
This ingenious way of
creating suspense comes back to Hitchcock's thoughts on content vs.
technique and making the best use of the props available in a given
scene. In an
interview with the AFI in the 1960s, he gave the example of
Cary Grant in
North by Northwest, who escapes from an auction by
getting thrown out for making nonsensical bids. Both this and the
champagne bottles are Hitchcock being resourceful with decorative or
incidental features, and in doing so deepening the environment in which
the characters find themselves. This and his ruthless editing make the
whole thing feel a lot less mechanical than it otherwise could.
In
terms of its subject matter,
Notorious sits within a tradition of works
about ex-Nazis hiding out in South America. The natural comparison from
this point of view would be
The Boys from Brazil, Franklin J.
Schnaffner's enjoyably silly romp about Hitler clones based on the novel
by Ira Levin. Both films are fundamentally pulpy in nature, drawing on
and exploiting recent scientific breakthroughs to further a science
fiction-inflected story. While
The Boys from Brazil used the beginnings
of cloning as a springboard to different ethical issues,
Notorious uses
its MacGuffin to tie in with the political tensions in Europe, many of
which had started over the capture of German scientists and the
remaining V2 rockets.
Just as
The Boys from Brazil is silly and
flimsy in comparison to
The Stepford Wives, so
Notorious never entirely
takes flight in the way that
The Lady Vanishes did. Much of the problems
with the film can be put down to Selznick, who made life increasingly
difficult for Hitchcock and attempted to re-cast the film behind his
back. Having failed to replace Cary Grant with Joseph Cotton (who would
later star in
The Third Man), Selznick resorted to sending Hitchcock
constant demands for rewrites and reshoots. He eventually sold the
picture to RKO, allowing him to claim 50% of the profits as well as
$800,000 upfront.
Despite two very good central performances by
Grant and Bergman, some of the supplementary characters feel overly
caricatured to the point of being pantomime. Claude Rains puts in a very
good, nuanced performance as Alex Sebastian, and none of the ex-Nazis
are quite as over-the-top as their
Boys from Brazil counterparts. But
their efforts are almost for nothing when sharing a screen with
Leopoldine Konstantin, whose exaggerated movements rival those of Rosa
Klebb in
From Russia with Love.
There are also little
shortcomings in the plot which, while not disastrous, are rather
irritating. Alicia is told that she should never visit the spies' base
during the operation - and yet when she does, she seems in no danger at
all; no matter how dangerous they make it sound, there is no sign of her
being followed or observed by Sebastian's men. The MacGuffin is also
bothersome on a practical level: we are told that the soil has uranium
in it, and yet everyone uses their bare hands to handle it. You might
argue that it doesn't matter how the MacGuffin works so long as it moves
the plot forward, but it still manages to prey on one's mind.
Notorious
is a good, solid Hitchcock thriller which succeeds through its two
central performances and a number of suspenseful scenes. It never
entirely gets off the ground, stopping and starting until the final reel
and being hamstrung by the odd piece of over-acting. But by and large
it has weathered pretty well, and is still enjoyable even in light of
its problems. If nothing else, it serves as a fitting counterweight to
its disappointing follow-up, which would force Hitchcock from Selznick's
clutches for good.
Rating: 3.5/5
Verdict: Not first-rate Hitch but still suspenseful
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