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 convicted German spy, to infiltrate a group of German emigrés 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), an IG 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 attempt—at the age of forty-six—to 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." 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". It has been considered one of the best films of all time.
Plot
In April 1946, Alicia Huberman, the American daughter of a convicted German spy, is recruited by government agent T. R. Devlin to infiltrate a group of German émigrés who escaped to Brazil after World War II. When Alicia refuses to help the authorities, Devlin plays recordings of her fighting with her father, insisting that she loves the United States.
While awaiting the details of her assignment in Rio de Janeiro, Alicia and Devlin fall in love, though his feelings are complicated by her promiscuous past. When Devlin receives instructions to persuade her to seduce Alex Sebastian, her father's friend and a leading IG Farben executive, Devlin fails to convince his superiors that it is too much to ask of Alicia. The superiors cynically observe that seduction is not out of character for her. Told that Sebastian was once in love with Alicia, Devlin puts up a stoic front when informing Alicia about the mission. Mistakenly, Alicia infers that he was pretending to love her as part of his job.
Devlin contrives to have Alicia meet Sebastian at a riding club. Recognizing her, Sebastian pursues her, saying he always knew they would be united. He invites Alicia to a dinner party at his home, where he will host a few business acquaintances. Devlin and Captain Paul Prescott of the U.S. Secret Service instruct Alicia to memorize the names and nationalities of everyone there. At dinner, Alicia observes a guest become agitated at the sight of a certain wine bottle; he 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 the neurotic and untrustworthy associate will be killed.
Alicia soon reports to Devlin, "You can add Sebastian's name to my list of playmates." Later, Alicia informs Devlin and Prescott that Sebastian has proposed to her. Disappointed by Devlin's indifference, she marries Sebastian.
After returning from her honeymoon, Alicia tells Devlin that the key ring her husband gave her lacks a key to the wine cellar. Devlin suggests that Alicia throw a grand party and invite him, 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. Taking a sample, Devlin hastily cleans up and locks the door. As Sebastian comes down for more champagne, Devlin kisses Alicia to create a distraction from their search. Alicia insists to Sebastian that Devlin is drunk and persistent; she brought him down to the cellar to prevent him from making an embarrassing scene in front of the party guests.
Sebastian realizes that the cellar key is missing from his key ring, but the next morning, he finds that Alicia has reattached it during the night. Returning to the cellar, he finds remnants of glass and sand from the broken bottle. Sebastian knows he must silence Alicia but cannot expose her without revealing his own blunder to his unforgiving co-conspirators, who will kill him if they learn that he has married an American agent. Sebastian discusses the situation with his mother, who suggests that Alicia "die slowly" by poisoning. Alicia soon falls ill, and her illness worsens until she collapses and is confined to her room, where the telephone has been removed. Too weak to leave, she perceives that she has been exposed.
Alarmed by Alicia's continuing absence, Devlin sneaks into Alicia's room, where she tells him that Sebastian and his mother are poisoning her. Shaken by Alicia's peril, he confesses his love for her. He supports her down the steps in full view of Sebastian and his co-conspirators. To avoid the others catching on, Sebastian feigns husbandly concern, helping Devlin support Alicia down the steps, and accepting Devlin's story that hearing Alicia call out, Devlin found her condition worsened and needing immediate hospitalization. The conspirators are suspicious. Outside, Sebastian begs Devlin and Alicia to take him with them in Devlin's car, but they contemptuously drive away, leaving him behind to suffer a grim fate at the hands of his co-conspirators.
Cast
Cast notes
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." 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."
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 U.S. had just dropped atomic bombs on Japan; Selznick argued that the first film out about atomic weaponry would be the most successful and Grant was not available for three months. Selznick also believed Grant would be difficult to manage and make high salary demands, but most telling of all—Selznick owned Cotten's contract. Hitchcock and RKO production executive William Dozier invoked a clause in the project sale contract and blocked Selznick's attempts; Grant was signed to play opposite Bergman by late August 1945.
Hitchcock had wanted Clifton Webb to play Alexander Sebastian. 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. 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 Schünzel 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." 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". By this time, he had one of the single-word titles he preferred: Notorious. 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. Although the story was a nominal starting point that "offered some inspiration, the final narrative was pure Hitchcock".
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 11 p.m., 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, Duels 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 the California Institute of Technology in mid-1945. 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.