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Notorious (1946 film)
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Wikipedia article
{{Infobox film
| name = Notorious
| image = Notorious (1946 film poster).jpg
| alt =
| caption = Theatrical release poster
| director = Alfred Hitchcock
| producer = Alfred Hitchcock
| writer = Ben Hecht
| starring = Cary Grant
Ingrid Bergman
Claude Rains
Louis Calhern
Leopoldine Konstantin
| music = Roy Webb
| cinematography = Ted Tetzlaff
| editing = Theron Warth
| studio = RKO Radio Pictures
| distributor = RKO Radio Pictures
| released =
| runtime = 101 minutes
| country = United States
| language = English
| budget = $1 million
| gross = $24.5 million[http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1946/0NOTR.php Box Office Information for 'Notorious']. The Numbers. Retrieved November 8, 2012.
}}
'Notorious' is a 1946 American spy film noir directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains as three people whose lives become intimately entangled during an espionage operation.
The film follows U.S. government agent T.R. Devlin (Grant), who enlists the help of Alicia Huberman (Bergman), the daughter of a German war criminal, to infiltrate a circle of executives of IG Farben hiding out in Rio de Janeiro after World War II. The situation becomes complicated when the two fall in love as Huberman is instructed to seduce Alex Sebastian (Rains), a Farben executive who had previously been infatuated with her. It was shot in late 1945 and early 1946, and was released by RKO Radio Pictures in August 1946.
'Notorious' is considered by critics and scholars to mark a watershed for Hitchcock artistically, and to represent a heightened thematic maturity. His biographer, Donald Spoto, writes that '"Notorious' is in fact Alfred Hitchcock's first attemptat the age of forty-sixto bring his talents to the creation of a serious love story, and its story of two men in love with Ingrid Bergman could only have been made at this stage of his life."Spoto, Donald (1983). 'The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock'. New York: Little, Brown and Company. . p. 304. Page numbers cited in this article are from the Ballantine Books first paperback edition, 1984 In 2006, 'Notorious' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot
In April 1946, Alicia Huberman, the American daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, is recruited by government agent T. R. Devlin to infiltrate an organization of Nazis who have escaped to Brazil after World War II. When Alicia refuses to help the authorities, Devlin plays recordings of her fighting with her father and insisting that she loves America.
While awaiting the details of her assignment in Rio de Janeiro, Alicia and Devlin fall in love, though his feelings are complicated by his knowledge of her promiscuous past. When Devlin gets instructions to persuade her to seduce Alex Sebastian, one of her father's friends and a leading member of the Farben executives, Devlin fails to convince his superiors that Alicia is not fit for the job. Devlin is also informed that Sebastian once was in love with Alicia. Devlin puts up a stoic front when he informs Alicia about the mission. Alicia concludes that he was merely pretending to love her as part of his job.
Devlin contrives to have Alicia meet Sebastian at a riding club. He recognizes her and invites her to dinner where he says that he always knew they would be reunited. Sebastian quickly invites Alicia to dinner the following night at his home, where he will host a few business acquaintances. Devlin and Captain Paul Prescott of the US Secret Service tell Alicia to memorize the names and nationalities of everyone there. At dinner, Alicia notices that a guest becomes agitated at the sight of a certain wine bottle, and is ushered quickly from the room. When the gentlemen are alone at the end of the dinner, this guest apologizes and tries to go home, but another insists on driving him, implying that he will kill him.
Soon Alicia reports to Devlin, "You can add Sebastian's name to my list of playmates." When Sebastian proposes, Alicia informs Devlin; he coldly tells her to do whatever she wants. Deeply disappointed, she marries Sebastian.
.
After she returns from her honeymoon, Alicia is able to tell Devlin that the key ring her husband gave her lacks the key to the wine cellar. That, and the bottle episode at the dinner, lead Devlin to urge Alicia to hold a grand party so he can investigate. Alicia secretly steals the key from Sebastian's ring, and Devlin and Alicia search the cellar. Devlin accidentally breaks a bottle; inside is black sand, later proven to be uranium ore. Devlin takes a sample, cleans up, and locks the door as Sebastian comes down for more champagne. Alicia and Devlin kiss to cover their tracks. Devlin makes an exit. Sebastian realizes that the cellar key is missing yet overnight it is returned to his key ring. When he returns to the cellar, he finds the glass and sand from the broken bottle.
Now Sebastian has a problem: he must silence Alicia, but cannot expose her without revealing his own blunder to the rest of the Nazi emigres. When Sebastian discusses the situation with his mother, she suggests that Alicia "die slowly" by poisoning. They poison her coffee and she quickly falls ill. During a visit from Sebastian's friend Dr. Anderson, Alicia realizes both where the uranium has been mined and what is causing her sickness. Alicia collapses and is taken to her room, where the telephone has been removed and she is too weak to leave.
Devlin becomes alarmed when Alicia fails to appear at their rendezvous for five days and sneaks into Alicia's room, where she tells him that Sebastian and his mother poisoned her. After confessing his love for her, Devlin carries her out of the mansion in full view of Sebastian's co-conspirators. Sebastian and his mother go along with Devlin's story that Alicia must go to the hospital. Outside, Sebastian begs to go with them, but Devlin and Alicia drive away, leaving Sebastian behind to meet his fate.
Cast
Cast notes
and Ingrid Bergman in 'Notorious' (1946)
Biographer Patrick McGilligan writes that "Hitchcock rarely managed to pull together a dream cast for any of his 1940s films, but 'Notorious' was a glorious exception."McGilligan, Patrick (2004). 'Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light'. New York: Harper Perennial. . p. 376 Indeed, with a story of smuggled uranium as a backdrop, "[t]he romantic pairing of Grant and Bergman promised a box office bang comparable to an atomic blast."Leff, Leonard J. (1999). 'Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick'. Berkeley: University of California Press. . p. 207
Not everyone saw it that way, however, most notably the project's original producer David O. Selznick. After he sold the property to RKO to raise some quick cash, Selznick lobbied hard to get Grant replaced with Joseph Cotten; the United States had just dropped atomic bombs on Japan and Selznick argued that the first film out about atomic weaponry would be the most successfuland Grant was not available for three months.Leff, p. 207 Selznick also believed that Grant would be difficult to manage and make high salary demands,McGilligan, p. 374 but most telling of allSelznick owned Cotten's contract. Hitchcock and RKO production executive William Dozier invoked a clause in the project sale contract, blocked Selznick's attempts, and Grant was signed to play opposite Bergman by late August 1945.Leff, p. 206
Hitchcock had wanted Clifton Webb to play Alexander Sebastian.Spoto, 'Dark', p. 302 Selznick pressed for Claude Rains in typical Selznick memo-heavy style: "Rains offers 'an opportunity to build the gross of 'Notorious' enormously... . [D]o not lose a day trying to get the Rains' deal nailed down.'"Leff, p. 209 Whether they were thinking in Selznick's box office terms or in more artistic ones, Dozier and Hitchcock agreed, and Rains' performance transformed Sebastian into a classic Hitchcock villain: sympathetic, nuanced, in some ways as admirable as the protagonist.
The final major casting decision was Mme. Sebastian, Alex's mother. "The spidery, tyrannical Nazi matron demanded a stronger, older presence", and when attempts to obtain Ethel Barrymore and Mildred Natwick fell through, German actor Reinhold Schnzel suggested Leopoldine Konstantin to Hitchcock and Dozier. Konstantin had been one of pre-war Germany's greatest actresses. 'Notorious' was Konstantin's only American film appearance, and "one of the unforgettable portraits in Hitchcock's films".
Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearance, a signature occurrence in his films, takes place at the party in Sebastian's mansion. At 1:04:43 (1:01:50 on European DVDs and 64:28 of the edited cut) into the film, Hitchcock is seen drinking a glass of champagne as Grant and Bergman approach. He sets his glass down and quickly departs.
Production
Pre-Production
'Notorious' started life as a David O. Selznick production, but by the time it hit American screens in August 1946, it bore the RKO studio's logo. Alfred Hitchcock became the producer, but as on all his subsequent films, he limited his screen credits to "Directed by" and his possessive credit above the title.Its first glimmer occurred some two years previously, in August 1944, over lunch between Hitchcock and Selznick's story editor, Margaret McDonell. Her memo to Selznick said that Hitchcock was "very anxious to do a story about confidence tricks on a grand scale [with] Ingrid Bergman [as] the woman ... Her training would be as elaborate as the training of a Mata Hari."Spoto, 'Dark', p. 297 Hitchcock continued his conversation a few weeks later, this time dining at Chasen's with William Dozier, an RKO studio executive, and pitching it as "the story of a woman sold for political purposes into sexual enslavement".Spoto, 'Dark', p. 298 By this time, he had one of the single-word titles he preferred: 'Notorious'.'Notorious' was his tenth single word-titled film: 'Downhill, Champagne, Blackmail, Murder!, Sabotage, Suspicion, Saboteur, Lifeboat' and 'Spellbound' preceded it; 'Rope, Vertigo' and 'Frenzy' followed. His other one-worders, 'Rebecca, Psycho, Marnie' and 'Topaz' take their titles from the one-word titles of the novels they derive from. Spoto, 'Notorious', p. 195n The pitch was convincing: Dozier quickly entered into talks with Selznick, offering to buy the property and its personnel for production at RKO.
Dozier's interest rekindled Selznick's, which up to that point had only been tepid. Perhaps what started Hitchcock's mind rolling was "The Song of the Dragon", a short story by John Taintor Foote which had appeared as a two-part serial in the 'Saturday Evening Post' in November 1921; Selznick, who owned the rights to it, had passed it on to Hitchcock from his unproduced story file during the filming of 'Spellbound'. Set during World War I in New York, "The Song of the Dragon" told the tale of a theatrical producer approached by federal agents, who want his assistance in recruiting an actress he once had a relationship with to seduce the leader of a gang of enemy saboteurs.McGilligan, p. 366 Although the story was a nominal starting point that "offered some inspiration, the final narrative was pure Hitchcock".Spoto, Donald, (2001). 'Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman'. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press. . p. 195
Hitchcock travelled to England for Christmas 1944, and when he returned, he had an outline for Selznick's perusal. The producer approved development of a script, and Hitchcock decamped for Nyack, New York for three weeks of collaboration with Ben Hecht, whom he had just worked with on 'Spellbound'. The two would work at Hecht's house, with Hitchcock repairing at night to the St. Regis New York. The two had an extraordinarily smooth and fruitful working partnership, partly because Hecht did not really care how much Hitchcock rewrote his work:
Hitchcock delivered his and Hecht's screenplay to Selznick in late March, but the producer was getting drawn deeper into the roiling problems of his western epic 'Duel in the Sun'. At first he ordered story conferences at his home, typically with start times of eleven p.m.,Spoto, 'Dark', p. 301 to both Hecht's and Hitchcock's profound annoyance. The two would dine at Romanoff's and "pool their defenses about what Hitchcock thought was a first class script". Shortly, though, 'Duel's problems won out and Selznick relegated 'Notorious' to his mental back burner.
Among the many changes to the original story was the introduction of a MacGuffin: a cache of uranium being held in Sebastian's wine cellar by the Nazis. At the time, it was not common knowledge that uranium was being used in the development of the atomic bomb, and Selznick had trouble understanding its use as a plot device. Indeed, Hitchcock later claimed he was followed by the FBI for several months after he and Hecht discussed uranium with Robert Millikan at Caltech in mid-1945.Truffaut, Franois (1967). 'Hitchcock By Truffaut'. New York: Simon and Schuster. In any event, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the release of details of the Manhattan Project, removed any doubts about its use.McGilligan, p. 375
By June 1945, 'Notorious' reached its turning point. Selznick "was losing faith in a film that never really interested him"; the MacGuffin still bothered him, as did the Devlin character, and he worried that audiences would dislike the Alicia character. More worrisome, though, was the drain on his cash reserves imposed by the voracious 'Duel in the Sun'. Finally, he agreed to sell the 'Notorious' package to RKO: script, Bergman and Hitchcock.
The deal was a win-win-win situation: Selznick got $800,000 cash, plus 50% of the profits, RKO obtained a prestige production with an ascendant star and an emerging director, and Hitchcock, though he received no money, did escape from under Selznick's stifling thumb. He also got to be his own producer for the first time, an important step for him: "supervising everything from the polishing of the script to the negotiation of myriad post-production details, the director could demonstrate to the industry at large his skill as an executive." RKO assumed the project in mid-July 1945, and furnished office space, studio space, distributionand freedom.
There was no getting away from Selznick completely, though. He contended that his 50% stake in the profits still entitled him to input into the project. He still dictated sheaves of memos about the script, and tried to oust Cary Grant from the cast in favor of his contractee, Joseph Cotten. When the United States detonated two atomic bombs over Japan in August, the memos commenced anew and centered mainly on Selznick's continuing dissatisfaction with the script. Hitchcock was abroad, so Dozier called on playwright Clifford Odets, who previously wrote 'None But the Lonely Heart' for RKO and Grant, to do a rewrite. With Hitchcock and Selznick both busy, Selznick's script assistant Barbara Keon would be his only contact.
Odets's script tried to bring more atmosphere to the story than had previously been present. "Extending the characters' emotional range, he heightened the passion of Devlin and Alicia and the aristocratic ennui of Alex Sebastian. He also added a soupon of high culture to soften Alicia: She quotes French poetry from memory and sings Schubert." But his draft did nothing for Selznick, who still thought the characters lacked dimension, that Devlin still lacked charm, and that the couple's sleeping together "may cheapen her in the eyes of the audience".Leff, p. 208 Ben Hecht's appraisal, handwritten in the margin, was straightforward: "This is really loose crap." In the end, the Odets script was a blind alley: Hitchcock apparently used none of it.Spoto, 'Dark', p. 299
What he 'did' have in his hand, though, was the script for "... a consummate Hitchcock film, in every sense filled with passion and textures and levels of meaning".McGilligan, p. 379
Production
Principal photography for 'Notorious' began on October 22, 1945 and wrapped in February 1946. Production was structured the way Hitchcock preferred it: with almost all shooting done indoors, on RKO sound stages, even seeming "exterior" scenes achieved with rear projection process shots. This gave him maximum control of his filmmaking through the day; in the evenings he exercised similar control over the nightly soires at his Bellagio Road home.Spoto, 'Dark', p. 303 The only scene requiring outdoor filming was the one at the riding club where Devlin and Alicia contrive to meet Alexander Sebastian on horseback; this scene was shot at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden in Arcadia, California. Second unit crews shot establishing exteriors and rear-projection footage in Miami, Rio de Janeiro and at the Santa Anita Park racetrack.With everything stage-bound, production was smooth and problems were few, and smallfor instance, Claude Rains, who stood three or four inches shorter than Ingrid Bergman. "[There's] this business of you being a midget with a wife, Miss Bergman, who is very tall", the director kidded with Rains, a good friend. For the scenes where Rains and Bergman were to walk hand-in-hand, Hitchcock devised a system of ramps that boosted Rains's height yet were unseen by the camera.McGilligan, p. 380 He also suggested Rains try elevator shoes: "Walk in them, sleep in them, be comfortable in them." Rains did, and used them thereafter. Hitchcock gave Rains the choice of playing Sebastian with a German or his English accent; Rains chose the latter.
Ingrid Bergman's gowns were by Edith Head, in one of her many collaborations with Hitchcock.
One of the signature scenes in 'Notorious' is the two-and-a-half-minute kiss that Hitchcock interrupted every three seconds to slip the scene through the three-second-rule crack in the Production Code. "The two stars worried about how strange it felt", writes biographer McGilligan. "Walking along, nuzzling each other with the camera trailing behind them, seemed 'very awkward' to the actors during filming, according to Bergman. 'Don't worry', Hitchcock assured her. 'It'll look right on the screen.McGilligan, p. 376
Although the production proceeded smoothly it was not without some unusual aspects. The first was the helpfulness of Cary Grant toward Ingrid Bergman, in a way that "was remarkably calm and pointedly unusual for him".Spoto, 'Notorious', p. 198 Although this was Bergman's second outing with Hitchcock (the first was the just-finished 'Spellbound'), she was nervous and insecure early on. The often moody, sometimes withdrawn Grant, though, "came to 'Notorious' full of bounce" and coached her through her initial period of adjustment, rehearsing her the way Devlin rehearses Alicia. This began a lifetime friendship for the two.
There were two passionate turmoils going on on-set, and both served to inform the final product: one was Hitchcock's growing infatuation with Bergman, and the other was her torturous affair with Robert Capa, the celebrity battlefield photographer.Spoto, 'Notorious', p. 197 As a result of this simpatico connection, and "to accomplish the deepest logic of 'Notorious', Hitchcock did something unprecedented in his career: he made Ingrid his closest collaborator on the picture":
When production wrapped in February 1946, Hitchcock had in the can what Franois Truffaut later told him "gets a maximum of effect from a minimum of elements ... Of all your pictures, this is the one in which one feels the most perfect correlation between what you are aiming at and what appears on the screen ... To the eye, the ensemble is as perfect as an animated cartoon ..."Truffaut, p. 173
Music
The music for 'Notorious' is the least celebrated of the major Hitchcock scores, writes film scholar Jack Sullivan, one that few writers or fans talk about. "The neglect is unfortunate, for Roy Webb composed one of the most deftly designed scores of any Hitchcock film. It weaves a unique spell, one Hitchcock had not conjured before, and the hip, swingy source music is novel as well."Sullivan, Jack (2006). 'Hitchcock's Music'. New Haven: Yale University Press. . p. 124The composer was Roy Webb, a staff composer at RKO, who had most recently scored the dark films of director Val Lewton for that studio. He wrote the fight song for Columbia University while he was there in the 1920s, then served as assistant to film composer Max Steiner until 1935; his reputation was "reliable, but unglamorous".Sullivan, p. 124 Hitchcock had tried to get Bernard Herrmann for 'Notorious', but Herrmann was unavailable; Webb too was a Herrmann fan: "Benny writes the best music in Hollywood, with the fewest notes", he said.Sullivan, p. 125
Before the sale of the property to RKO, Selznick attempted, with typical Selznick gusto, to steer the course of the music.Sullivan, p. 126 He was miffed that no hit pop song had come out of his previous Hitchcock picture 'Spellbound', so he considered eighteen "gooey, sentimental songs" like "Love Nest", "Don't Give Any More Beer to My Father" and "In A Little Love Nest Way Up on a Hill" for inclusion in 'Notorious'. However, the sale removed Selznick as the decision-maker.
Hitchcock was glad to be out from under Selznick's thumb. There would be "no sudsy violins in big love scenes, no more recycling of Selznick's favorite cues from past movies. He made sure there were no south-of-the-border cliches." Selznick's exit also brought Hitchcock and Webb together into their natural sympatico. "Selznick deplored 'Hitchcock's goddamned jigsaw cutting', the dreamlike, jagged images that create his signature subjectivity. But Webb didn't mind jigsaw cutting at all. It complemented his fragmented musical architecture, just as the blocked passions of the film's characters reflect his unresolved harmonies. Like Hitchcock, Webb favored atmosphere and tonal nuance over broad gestures. Both men were classicists dealing in darkness and chaos." They featured complementary personalities, too: "Webb had a modest ego, a handy trait when working for a control addict like Hitchcock."Sullivan, p. 130 'Notorious' was, however, their only film together.
Alicia and Devlin fall quickly in love once they arrive in Rio, and Webb uses tambourines, guitars, drums and Brazilian trumpets swinging into Brazilian dance music to provide "sensuous foreplay for the tumultuous love affair".Sullivan, p. 127 Numbers include "Carnaval no Rio", "Meu Barco", "Guanabara" and two sambas "Ya Ya Me Leva" and "Bright Samba". Yet understatement and atypical use are everywhere:
Often, Webb and Hitchcock use no music at all to undergird a romantic scene. The two-and-a-half minute kiss begins with distant music when it commences out on the balcony, but goes silent when the couple move inside.Sullivan, p. 132 Other times, they flout conventional wisdom: when Alicia asks the band to stop playing stuffy waltzes and liven things up with Brazilian music to cover her trip to the wine cellar with Devlin, Latin dance tunes replace the expected suspense cue.
Aspects of Hitchcockian humor are present: When Alicia first enters the Sebastian mansion, loaded with sinister Nazis, Schumann is playing. "Wicked they may be, but these terrorists have artistic sensibilities and impeccable taste."
Cinematography
Roger Ebert described 'Notorious' as having "some of the most effective camera shots in hisor anyone'swork". Hitchcock played off Grant's star power in his first scene, introducing his character with shots of the back of the actor's head showing him observing Alicia carefully. The excess of her drinking is reinforced the next morning with a close-up and zoom out from a glass of fizzing aspirinAlka-SeltzerBromo-Seltzer beside her bed. The camera switches to her point of view and the viewer sees Grant as Devlin, backlit and upside down. The film also contains a tracking shot at Sebastian's mansion in Rio de Janeiro: starting high above the entrance hall, the camera tracks all the way down to Alicia's hand, showing her nervously twisting the key there.Duncan, Paul, (2003). 'Alfred Hitchcock: Architect of Anxiety 18991980'. Los Angeles: Taschen. . p. 110
Production credits
The production credits on the film were as follows:* Director - Alfred Hitchcock
* Screenplay - Ben Hecht
* Director of photography - Ted Tetzlaff
* Art direction - Albert S. D'Agostino and Carroll Clark (art directors); Darrell Silvera and Claude E. Carpenter (set decorations)
* Special effects - Vernon L. Walker and Paul Eagler
* Music - Roy Webb (music), Constantin Bakaleinikoff (musical director), Gil Grau (orchestral arrangements)
* Editor - Theron Warth
* Sound - John E. Tribby and Terry Kellum
* Costumes - Edith Head (design of Ingrid Bergman's gowns)
* Assistant director - William Dorfman
* Production assistant - Barbara Keon
Themes and motifs
The predominant theme in 'Notorious' is trusttrust withheld, or given too freely.Spoto, 'Notorious', p. 196 T. R. Devlin is a long time finding his trust, while Alexander Sebastian offers his up easilyand ultimately pays a big price for it. Likewise, the film addresses a woman's need to be trusted, and a man's need to open himself to love.
Hitchcock the raconteur positioned it in terms of classic conflict. He told Truffaut that
Sullivan writes that Devlin sets up Alicia as sexual bait, refuses to take any responsibility for his role, then feels devastated when she does a superb job. Alicia finds herself coldly manipulated by the man she loves, sees her notorious behavior exploited for political purposes, then fears abandonment by the lover who put her in the excruciating predicament of spying on her late father's Nazi colleague by sleeping with hima man who genuinely loves her, perhaps more than Devlin does. Alex is Hitchcock's most painfully sympathetic villain, driven by his profound jealousy and ragenot to mention his enthrallment to an emasculating motherculminating in an abrupt, absolute imperative to kill the love of his life.
Hitchcock's own mother had died in September 1942, and 'Notorious' is the first time he addresses his mother issues head-on. "In 'Notorious', the role of mother is at last fully introduced and examined. No longer relegated to mere conversation, she appears here as a major character in a Hitchcock picture, and all at onceas later, through 'Psycho, The Birds' and 'Marnie'Hitchcock began to make the mother figure a personal repository of his anger, guilt, resentment, and a sad yearning."Spoto, 'Dark', p. 306 At the same time, he blurred mother-love with erotic love,Spoto, 'Dark', p. 307 and poignantly, in both the film and in its director's life, "both kinds of love were in fact limited to longing and fantasy and unfulfilled expectations".
The theme of drinking weaves its way through the film from beginning to end: for Alicia it is an escape from guilt and pain, or even downright poisonous. When a guest at the opening party tells her she has had enough, she scoffs: "The 'important' drinking hasn't started yet." She camouflages emotional rejection with whiskey, at the opening party, the outdoor cafe in Rio, the apartment in Rio,Spoto, 'Dark', p. 308 then drinking becomes even more dangerous as the Sebastians administer their poison through Alicia's coffee. Even the MacGuffin comes packaged in a wine bottle. "All the drinking is valueless and finally dangerous."
Coming as it did on the heels of World War II, the theme of patriotismand the limits thereofmakes it "astonishing that the movie was produced at all (and that it was such an immediate success), since it contains such blunt dialogue about government-sponsored prostitution: The sexual blackmail is the idea of American intelligence agents, who are blithely willing to exploit a woman (and even to let her die) to serve their own ends. The depiction of the moral murkiness of American officials was unprecedented in Hollywoodespecially in 1945, when the Allied victory ushered in an era of understandable, but ultimately dangerous, chauvinism in American life."
Reception
The film was the official selection of the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. 'Notorious' had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on August 15, 1946, with Hitchcock, Bergman, and Grant in attendance.
Box office
The film made $4.85 million in theatrical rentals in the United States and Canada on its first release, making it one of the highest-grossing films of the year. Overseas, it earned $2.3 million, for worldwide rentals of $7.15 million, generating RKO a profit of $1,010,000.Reviews
Writing in 'The New York Times', Bosley Crowther praised the film, writing, "Mr. Hecht has written, and Mr. Hitchcock has directed in brilliant style, a romantic melodrama which is just about as thrilling as they comevelvet smooth in dramatic action, sharp and sure in its characters, and heavily charged with the intensity of warm emotional appeal."Crowther, Bosley. "The Screen in Review." 'The New York Times', August 16, 1946 Leslie Halliwell, usually terse, almost glowed about 'Notorious': "Superb romantic suspenser containing some of Hitchcock's best work."Walker, John, ed. 'Halliwell's Film Guide'. New York: Harper Perennial. . p. 873 Decades later, Roger Ebert also praised the film, adding it to his "Great Movies" list and calling it "the most elegant expression of the master's visual style".Ebert, R.[http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19970817/REVIEWS08/40802008/1023 Great Movies:Notorious], August 17, 1997. 'Chicago Sun-Times'. Retrieved 6 September. On the website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an overall positive rating of 96%, with an average rating of 8.9/10 based on 48 reviews, with a consensus of: "Sublime direction from Hitchcock, and terrific central performances from Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant make this a bona-fide classic worthy of a re-visit." As of January 2021, 'Notorious' is one of only eight films with a 100 (perfect) score on the movie critic aggregator website, Metacritic (two other Hitchcock films, 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window', are also on the list).'Notorious' was Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell's favorite of her father's pictures. "What a perfect film!", she told her father's biographer, Charlotte Chandler. "The more I see 'Notorious', the more I like it."Chandler, p. 163
Claude Rains was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and Ben Hecht was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay.
Legacy
Film critic Roger Ebert included 'Notorious' in his 'Ten Greatest Films of All Time' list in 1991, citing it as his favourite of Hitchcocks films. 'Entertainment Weekly' voted it at No. 66 on their list of 'The Greatest Films of All Time' in 1999. 'The Village Voice' ranked 'Notorious' at No. 77 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics. In 2005, Hecht's screenplay was voted by the two Writers Guilds of America as one of the 101 best ever written.The following year, 'Notorious' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". American Film Institute included the film as No. 38 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills and as No. 86 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions. 'Time' magazine listed it among the All-TIME 100 films (a list of the greatest films since the magazine's inception) as chosen by Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel. The film was voted at No. 38 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine 'Cahiers du cinma' in 2008. 'Notorious' was ranked 68th in BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest American films. In 2022, 'Time Out' magazine ranked the film at No. 34 on their list of "The 100 best thriller films of all time".
Adaptations
* The silent film 'Convoy' (1927), co-produced by Victor Halperin, was based on the same 'Saturday Evening Post' story.
* A 'Lux Radio Theater' adaptation was broadcast on January 26, 1948, with Ingrid Bergman reprising her role as Alicia Huberman and Joseph Cotten taking Cary Grant's role of T. R. Devlin. Another radio adaptation was produced for 'The Screen Guild Theater', again starring Ingrid Bergman, although this time with John Hodiak, and was broadcast on January 6, 1949.
* The film was remade in 1992 as the TV film 'Notorious' directed by Colin Bucksey, with John Shea as Devlin, Jenny Robertson as Alicia Velorus, Jean-Pierre Cassel as Sebastian, and Marisa Berenson as Katarina.
* In the animated television series 'Star Wars: The Clone Wars' the season two episode "Senate Spy" is a "compressed" adaptation of 'Notorious', even going so far as to frame the final shot of the episode the same way as the movie.
* 'Mission: Impossible 2' paid strong homage to 'Notorious', but the plot is about a deadly virus instead of uranium, with the core story, many of the scenes, and some of the dialogue from 'Notorious' being used.
* The operatic adaption 'Notorious' by Hans Gefors was premiered in Gothenburg in September 2015, starring Nina Stemme as Alicia Huberman.
Tribute to Hitchcock
On March 7, 1979, the American Film Institute honored Hitchcock with its Life Achievement Award. At the tribute dinner, Ingrid Bergman presented him with the original NICA key to the wine cellar - the single most notable prop in 'Notorious'. After filming had ended, Cary Grant had kept it. A few years later he gave the key to Bergman, saying that it had given him luck and hoped it would do the same for her. When presenting it to Hitchcock, to his surprise and delight, she expressed the hope that it would be lucky for him as well.McGilligan, p. 471References
Sources
* Brown, Curtis F. 'The Pictorial History of Film Stars Ingrid Bergman'. New York: Galahad Books, 1973. , p. 7681
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* Humphries, Patrick. 'The Films of Alfred Hitchcock'. Crescent Books, a Random House company, 1994 revised edition. , p. 8893
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