Critics Choice: Notorious (1946)

by Andrew Sarris
  • Leading film critic Andrew Sarris praises Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime masterpiece
  • Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant and Claude Rains come together in deadly ménage à trois
  • Conflicted loyalties: Psychosexual fireworks explode against the backdrop of World War II
  • Ambiguous: As is so often with the Master of Suspense, a true happy ending is a pipe dream

Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.

Notorious: Writing on a Classic; Critics Choice; Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Home video

Notorious aka Les Enchaînés (1946, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) French poster by Pierre Segogne

“The chained”: French poster (alt/alt) by Pierre Segogne

Hitchcock’s classic of danger, desire and deception.
Notorious is Alfred Hitchcock’s first stab at creating a great love story. The film’s cloak-and-dagger mechanics about Nazis in Rio, industrial diamonds and uranium bottles is strictly secondary to Hitchcock’s treatment of the dark, death-haunted fears of love and the inexpressible yearnings for atonement. Ingrid Bergman is a woman of dubious morals, a jailed Nazi agent’s daughter, who is recruited by an American agent, Cary Grant, to work for the U.S. Her assignment—to meet and seduce Nazi tycoon Claude Rains—is complicated when she falls helplessly in love with Grant. Notorious is a model of intricate plotting and bravura direction: the famous crane shot which goes, in one take, from the midst of a crowded party to a close-up of a key in Bergman’s hand; the long, incredibly long, balcony kissing scene which interweaves food and desire; and the final doom-laden descent along a grand staircase. Rightfully it’s one of Hitchcock’s classics. – US CBS/Fox VHS (1987)

Pick of the Pictures: Notorious – Liberty


Notorious has always been considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most effective and efficient entertainments. But in the post-war year of 1946 in which The Best Years of Our Lives set the standard for social significance, Notorious could hardly have been expected to acquire a serious critical reputation. Its plot is a curious blend of audacity and conventionality. A dissolute young woman, the daughter of a convicted Nazi agent, is induced by an American intelligence operative to use her contacts with her father’s old Nazi crowd in order to assist her adopted country, the United States of America.

Here the action shifts from Miami to Rio, mostly through process shots. Of course, the audience does not need many clues to suspect a budding love between Ingrid Bergman as the woman spy and Cary Grant as the American agent. The billing would be sufficient even without the binary cross-cutting of luminous close-ups, first Bergman, then Grant, then Bergman, then, perhaps, a torrential two-shot within the same frame, and, finally and climactically, a swirling camera movement around the embracing couple to express the lyrical transport of the kiss. It is precisely at this moment of consummate bliss that the telephone rings, a jarring aural dissonance in the visual melody of love. We are made uneasy more quickly and more economically in a Hitchcock movie than in any one else’s, which is to say that if the kissing sequence (which made 1946 Radio City Music Hall audiences gasp) were any less lyrical, the ring of the telephone would be far less disruptive.

Grant is called away from his rendezvous with Bergman to a meeting with his superiors. They tell him that a key Nazi (Claude Rains) has returned to Rio, and that he was infatuated with Bergman before the War. Hence, he would be susceptible to her charms to the point of inviting her to his mysterious house where all sorts of Nazi demons congregate. Grant is both stunned by the scandalous nature of his beloved’s mission, and stung by the revelation that she once had a Nazi admirer (and who knows how many lovers).

The beauty of Grant’s performance is manifest in his facial expression, which reflects a struggle between love and suspicion, a recurring struggle in Hitchcock’s films. Yet the pivotal scenes in which the Grant-Bergman relationship is ruptured are reinforced by the metaphor of the champagne bottle which Grant misplaces in true Freudian-phallic fashion. The reverse close-ups of the bottle itself left behind at intelligence headquarters, and of the knowing glance directed at the bottle by Grant’s superior (Louis Calhern) is Hitchcock’s cinematic way of showing us (as well as telling us) that love has flown away.

With the entrance of Claude Rains as the Nazi fish before whom Ingrid Bergman is being dangled as bait, Notorious achieves its pre-ordained triangular form. Rains’s Alexander Sebastian is one of the most sympathetically tragic villains in all of cinema. Afflicted with a domineering mother (Leopoldine Konstantin), menaced by a murderous cohort (Ivan Triesault) Sebastian lives in a luxurious mansion which time and treachery will transform from a lair to a tomb. But first he must be humiliated right before our eyes in every way a man can be humiliated.

Curiously, we come to know more about him than we know about the ostensible hero and heroine. Cary Grant’s Devlin and Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia Huberman are relatively rootless creatures of instant romance. Indeed, they are more like two powerful magnetic fields than like bona fide characters. From a certain sadistic point of view which Hitchcock expresses at every turn, Devlin and Alicia exist primarily to torture Sebastian, first with pangs of sexual jealousy, then with the shock of political betrayal, and finally with virtual execution, always, of course, from his point of view.

Notorious - L'amante perduta (1946, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) Italian 1960s re-release two sheet poster by Basilio Morini

Green with envy: Italian 1960s re-release two sheet poster by Basilio Morini

And what of the two lovers? They must torture not only their mutual victim, but each other. Their verbal exchanges are coarse and unfeeling. “What a rat you are, Devlin,” Alicia declares. For his part, Devlin treats Alicia as a congenitally wayward woman. Ben Hecht’s very brittle dialogue scrapes away at the idealized images of the two stars, but, strangely, without dimming their luster. It is as if they were insulated from the sordidness of the situation by their own majestic morbidity.

Meanwhile Alicia’s intrigue succeeds beyond her wildest expectations: Sebastian asks her to marry him. Instead of being merely a guest in the house of mystery, she will be its mistress. Devlin is dismayed by this sensational turn of events, but he somehow lacks the will to claim the young woman for himself. For her part, Alicia is convinced that Devlin doesn’t trust her, and thus she surrenders masochistically to the arrangement. Devlin continues to serve as her outside contact, and each meeting is a ghastly charade of their former connection.

One evening Alicia and Devlin steal down to the wine cellar during a gala party at Sebastian’s mansion. There they accidentally drop a wine bottle which spills out a mysterious substance known minerally as uranium and cinematically as Hitchcock’s McGuffin. A reviewer of the period complained that two experienced agents should not be so clumsy as to drop the wine bottle. This reviewer, like many of his contemporaries, assumed that Notorious was primarily a spy yarn when, actually, the espionage elements were merely incidental to the psychological conflicts. Again, Hitchcock builds up the suspense by cutting between the major characters and such metaphorical artefacts as the key to the wine cellar downstairs and the dwindling number of champagne bottles at the party upstairs.

Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) by Alejandro Mogollo Díez, 2018

Alicia holds the key… by Alejandro Mogollo Díez, 2018 | books

The audience is torn between the excruciating fear of seeing the lovers caught and the subconscious desire to witness the break-up of a deceitful marriage. When Sebastian comes upon them in the cellar, Alicia and Devlin avert the immediate disaster of being discovered as spies by pretending to be lovers, a comic switch on all the old jokes about the excuses devised by adulterous couples in compromising situations.

Then, after Alicia and Devlin have departed, Sebastian discovers that they are spies. From being the most ignorant member of the triangle, he becomes the most knowing. But now he must return his mother to a position of absolute authority in his life in order to hide the disgrace of his having been duped from his co-conspirators. Together, Sebastian and his mother set out to poison Alicia slowly and almost imperceptibly. Misunderstandings within misunderstandings.

Then, magically, almost miraculously, Devlin intuits that Alicia is in danger. He goes to the house, and slips up to the bedroom where he and the very ill Alicia are reconciled. Clifford Odets claimed that he walked out of the screenplay assignment because only a pervert would make love to a dying woman. There is a perversity of sorts in the spectacle of Devlin leading the ailing Alicia to salvation, but it is consistent with their bitterly twisted relationship throughout the film.

Notorious - L'amante perduta (1946, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) Italian 1960s re-release four sheet poster by Basilio Morini

Italian 1960s re-release four sheet poster by Basilio Morini; insert

Sebastian and his mother are caught between the irresistible force of Devlin’s desire on the landing above, and the implacable discipline of the Nazi agents below. Suddenly, four people are descending the stairs to very separate destinies, Sebastian alternating between bravado and panic, his mother pleading for prudence with every step, Alicia delivered by an ecstatic helplessness in Devlin’s arms, and Devlin at last binding her fate to his own. The succession of shots diminishes the distance between the fearful foursome and the arena of ultimate decision. But the audience’s fear is diffused because of Sebastian’s very palpable predicament.

Significantly, the last image of the film is concerned not with Alicia and Devlin, but with Sebastian’s slowly mounting the steps outside his home toward his inevitable doom. Inevitable because Devlin has refused to let him enter the getaway car. It is an act of somewhat gratuitous revenge, and it further clouds the apparently “happy ending.” Thus, Notorious, far from being a simple spy story, turns out to be an incredibly intricate exercise in irony and ambiguity, and one of the outstanding testaments of Hitchcock’s complexity as an artist. – US CBS VHS/Beta (1986)

Alfred Hitchcock in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 – Andrew Sarris

Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

A most dangerous game: Devlin and Alicia weigh up the odds

Notorious: Writing on a Classic; Critics Choice; Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Home video


This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.

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