Notorious
Alfred Hitchcock (1946)
The shooting of Notorious began only a few weeks after the end of World War II. At this long distance in time, its plot – involving a Nazi cabal in Brazil post-war and the smuggling of uranium ore – seems remarkably quick off the mark. In fact, the script’s development dates back to mid-1944. I’m surprised the film is widely regarded as one of Hitchcock’s greatest but it’s compact, exciting and highly entertaining. Two of the three main performances are excellent.
The starting point, in terms of both place and time, is precise: ‘Miami. Florida. Three-Twenty P.M., April the Twenty-Fourth. Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Six ….’, says the screen. A court sentences John Huberman (Fred Nurney), a Nazi spy, to twenty years in prison for the crime of treason. Huberman appears, almost completely in back view, for only a few seconds but he’s significantly impenitent. Before the judge (Charles D Brown) passes sentence, the convicted man warns that, ‘You can put me away, but you can’t put away what’s going to happen to you and to this whole country next time. Next time we are going to-‘. At which point, Huberman’s counsel (Harry Hayden) discreetly shuts him up.
Huberman’s daughter Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) is recruited by US government agent T R Devlin (Cary Grant) to infiltrate the Nazi ring in Rio de Janeiro. The Americans reason that her father’s reputation will be enough for Alicia to gain the confidence of the boys in Brazil. The reluctant spy and her spymaster are strongly attracted to each other, even though Devlin is uneasy about Alicia’s promiscuous past. He’s even more uneasy, however, when his superiors decide that she should seduce Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), a friend of her father’s and one of the Nazi ringleaders in Rio. When Alex proposes marriage to Alicia, she asks Devlin what she should do. He brusquely tells her to do what she wants. She concludes that Devlin must have feigned his earlier interest in her as a means of getting Alicia to do what he and his secret service boss (Louis Calhern) wanted from her. She marries Alex, while continuing to spy on him and his cronies.
Ingrid Bergman, the best actress among Hitchcock’s succession of blonde muses, plays with extraordinary physical naturalness and absence of emotional inhibition. When Alicia and Devlin meet for a briefing at a racetrack and pretend to engage in small talk there, the witty electricity between Bergman and Cary Grant is exhilarating. Grant is expert too in their early scenes, when Alicia finds Devlin infuriating and herself falling for him. He’s less persuasive as a man whose job or temperament or both prevent him, for most of the film, from expressing the depth of his feelings for Alicia. When Cary Grant plays dead serious, he loses credibility in this viewer’s eyes. (He’s perfect in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, which, although it’s thrilling, is essentially comic.)
Alex Sebastian is officially a villain but the romantic balance of Notorious is further skewed by Claude Rains’s superb and sympathetic portrait. Rains’s lack of stature helps give middle-aged, mother-dominated Alex an underdog quality from the outset. You never doubt he’s in love with Alicia, and anxiously possessive of his new wife. He suspects her of sexual infidelity with Devlin well before he discovers they’re a couple of secret agents. Alex and his now vindicated mother (the arresting, emphatic Leopoldine Konstantin, who appears in the credits as ‘Madame Konstantin’) start poisoning Alicia. This is Madame Sebastian’s suggestion, which Alex, horrified and humiliated, goes along with – a neat reinstatement of the earlier balance of power between mother and son.
Among the supporting cast, Alexis Minotis does a good hard-to-read turn as the Sebastians’ butler. Ben Hecht’s screenplay has plenty of incisive dialogue and is a fine piece of construction: the layers of concealment, on the part of all three principals, are absorbing. Hitchcock delivers some real highlights. At a dinner party, Alicia is introduced to Alex’s friends. Each of the conspirators (Reinhold Schünzel, Ivan Triesault, Eberhard Krumschmidt, Friedrich von Ledebur, Peter von Zerneck) looms up to the camera, in turn, to kiss her hand. The McGuffin is the cache of uranium ore secreted in bottles in Alex’s wine cellar: Alicia’s theft of the cellar key from her husband, followed by her and Devlin’s search of the wine racks, is splendidly suspenseful.
Eventually, Devlin shows his true loving and heroic colours, rescuing enfeebled Alicia from the bedroom where she’s being kept prisoner. The implicitly happy ending for the couple is upstaged by Alex’s helpless, frightened reaction to their departure. He wants to go with them, knowing that, unless he too can escape, he’ll have to face the music with his fellow Nazis, from whom he’s striven to keep secret that he was duped and their cellar stockpile discovered. Devlin and Alicia drive away. Alex turns back to the house, with two of the cabal waiting for him in the entrance. As he goes inside, one of the pair closes the door, swallowing Alex in darkness. It’s the right ending. Claude Rains turns Notorious into the tragedy of a romantically vulnerable Nazi.
22 August 2019