- Revisiting contemporary and modern critical appreciation
- Alfred Hitchcock goes atomic with a prescient plot about uranium
- His famous MacGuffin was the secret ingredient for nuclear bombs
- Acclaimed tale of a fictional Mata Hari was an instant blockbuster
- Notorious is also lauded for its bravura camera work and that kiss…
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 is a very special film, much more so dramatically than just a thriller. The director and his writer Ben Hecht went beyond that elementary purpose to create a compelling drama about human relationships, fidelity, betrayal and guilt. Cary Grant plays Devlin, a secret service agent. Ingrid Bergman plays Alicia, the daughter of a convicted traitor who Devlin enlists in a scheme to investigate the activities of surviving, post-war Nazis in Brazil.
Bill Collins: “The development of their love for each other, deeply disturbing for both, the means which thwart their romance and the circumstances forcing her to marry another man, a suspected Nazi, are the basis of a dramatic situation as powerful as the storyline itself.” A movie filled with true Hitchcock suspense that prompted The New York Times to say, “Directed in brilliant style, as thrilling as they come – velvet smooth in dramatic action, sharp, and sure of its characters and heavily charged with the intensity of warm emotional appeal!” The New Yorker: “The suspense is terrific!” – Australian ABC Video VHS
Picture of the Month: Notorious/part 2 – Modern Screen
Ingrid on a Bender
In her last film, The Bells of St. Mary’s, Ingrid Bergman was a nun; sometime this fall she will be Joan of Arc in Maxwell Anderson’s new play, Joan of Lorraine. Meanwhile, and possibly by way of a cinematic bender between halos, the Swedish star is playing fast and loose in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious.
Offhand, the idea of casting Miss Bergman as Alicia Huberman borders on the sacrilegious. Alicia drinks more than is good for her and likes men more than they deserve. The payoff, however, is first-rate melodrama and further confirmation that Miss Bergman is just about the screen’s most versatile actress. In Notorious her calculated carousing is necessitated by a tall and rather thin tale concerning postwar Nazi activities in Brazil.
Alicia goes on the wagon when an American agent, Devlin (Cary Grant), persuades her to calm down and help him poke holes in a hornet’s nest of Nazis in Rio. As Devlin’s decoy, Alicia is required to exert her reliable charms on one Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) and subsequently to marry her victim. These orders from higher up (Louis Calhern) are tough on Devlin, who has fallen in love with his assistant; but it is even tougher on Alicia when Sebastian and his enterprising mother (Madame Konstantin) discover her duplicity.
With all credit to a fine cast and Ben Hecht’s literate and expertly fashioned script, Notorious is Hitchcock at his subtle best. The director has staged a love scene between Alicia and Devlin that the so-called “women directors” should clip for future reference; and the climax in which Devlin rescues his embattled assistant from her husband’s mansion—achieved without knives, gun play, or even a left hook to the jaw—is an exercise in suspense by a past master in the business. – Newsweek

US Magnetic/Fox LaserDisc
There have been many, perhaps too many, imitators of Alfred Hitchcock but Hitch, as he was known to his friends, remains the undisputed master of elegant suspense. Notorious, released in 1946, is among the best films the Master produced and stands as an archetypical example of why Hitchcock is still unequalled in the field.
Hitchcock’s films are both brilliantly simple and wonderfully complex. His simplicity of plot and his total control of style combine with a rich pattern of shifting moral tensions. His stories may be simple (though complicated in their twists and turns) but his message is ambiguous and it is precisely because of this ambiguity that Hitchcock has been so seriously studied and will continue to be. The heroes and the villains of his films are neither black nor white. Occasionally, as in Notorious, the villain is in some ways more sympathetic than the hero. The willingness to inject ambiguity, surprise and moral complexity into his films is why Hitch will forever remain unique. People try to copy his style (and rarely succeed at that) but no one can match the sense of humor. the elegance and the complex moral universe that distinguishes Hitchcock’s films.
Notorious is a bravura film, even for Hitch, filled with unforgettable passages of cinematic mastery. But they are, as always, subordinated to the telling of the story. Notorious is a spy story, a formula popular during the war and just after, as American filmmakers used the new science of intrigue that was perfected in our fight against the Nazis. Here, Cary Grant is Devlin, a government agent assigned to crack a Nazi ring in Rio. He enlists Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the daughter of a convicted Nazi. Alicia has become a playgirl, given to much drinking and carousing. She couldn’t care less about politics but Devlin appeals to her patriotic spirit. Devlin and Alicia also appeal to each other and fall in love.

Caricatured: Claude Rains, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in promotional paper sculpture art by Jacques Kapralik
Alicia’s assignment is to woo Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), who, along with his mother, is the leader of a Nazi ring much feared by the government. Thus, Devlin, the government agent, must convince the woman he loves to prostitute herself in the name of their mission. Alicia is willing to take on the assignment but wants Devlin to tell her not to, to prove his love. Devlin won’t say no but hopes that Alicia will refuse to go. Sebastian indeed falls in love with her and she is able to begin her infiltration of the Nazi ring.
The idea of Devlin allowing the woman he loves to accept the mission introduces a disturbing note into the character of the hero. Refusing to tell Alicia how he really feels almost costs her her life. This is a common motif in Hitchcock. “The words that free,” are not spoken until it’s almost too late. Another fascinating element introduced into Notorious is the fact that we sympathize, after all, with Claude Rains’ Sebastian. We are inclined throughout the film to side with Cary Grant, of course, mainly because he is Cary Grant but also because he’s a “good guy.” But it’s Rains’ Sebastian who seems truly to love Alicia, and it is because he does that he ultimately fails on his pro-Nazi mission. By sympathizing with Rains, we come to understand that villains and bad guys are not all bad and that heroes are not all good.
Notorious also contains one of the great shots in all of cinema. Alicia has been trying to get the key to the wine cellar from Sebastian without his knowing it. She stands on the staircase as we see her in long shot, as the party is in progress. The camera, mounted on a crane, glides across the room and into an extreme close-up of the key in Alicia’s hand. It’s a marvelous shot in a marvelous film. [Which Hitch also pulled off nine years before at the climax of Young and Innocent.]
Clip from Criterion featurette | giving back the key
Producer David O. Selznick, to whom Hitchcock was under contract during the years 1940-1947, showed Hitch a story about an actress who must sleep with a spy in the course of her duties as a counterspy. Hitch and author Ben Hecht worked out the story for Notorious from that idea. They decided to use the idea of uranium hidden in wine bottles as the “MacGuffin.” The MacGuffin for Hitchcock was simply the thing that everybody in the story was trying to get. Hitch didn’t care what the MacGuffin was, for his interest was invariably elsewhere. In Notorious, it was on the romance.
But Selznick didn’t believe that the idea of uranium was feasible. Hitch said it didn’t matter—he’d change it to something else. But Selznick didn’t relate to the project and sold it all—director, script and stars—to RKO for $800,000. The film grossed [well over] $8,000,000, and that was 1946! By the way, the FBI wondered where Hitchcock got the idea for uranium. The atomic bomb was a top-secret project in those days. Hitchcock [claimed he] was trailed for months by the government until he convinced them that he wasn’t a spy! P.S. Look for Hitch at the party sequence in Sebastian’s house. – US Magnetic/Fox LD/CED (1981/1982) LDDb
Place and Space in a Scene | Plot vs Story
The daughter of a convicted Nazi traitor becomes an American undercover agent in this riveting wartime drama. Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant deliver two of their most moving performances as secret agents forced to sacrifice their love affair to a patriotic cause, Claude Rains co-stars as the unscrupulous Nazi Bergman marries to accomplish her mission. As suspenseful as it is romantic, Notorious is first-rate Hitchcock and a vintage Hollywood gem.
Notorious was simply the story of a man in love with a girl…,” Alfred Hitchcock told Joseph Hanzen of Warner Bros., four years after the film’s 1946 release. The studio had turned down the opportunity to buy Notorious from David O. Selznick Productions, complete with director Hitchcock, writer Ben Hecht and stars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant because it was felt that the film’s primary story line focused more on the making of a bomb than a love story.
The romantic thriller, set in Rio De Janeiro, stars Ingrid Bergman as party girl Alicia Huberman, daughter of a convicted German-American traitor. Cary Grant, who plays FBI agent T.R. Devlin, uses Bergman to expose a Nazi spy ring in Brazil. The two fall in love, but for sake of a job and country, Bergman must marry Nazi sympathizer Alexander Sebastian, played by Claude Rains. German actress Leopoldine Konstantin, in her only American film role, stars as Sebastian’s domineering mother. [Despite being only three years and eight months older than Rains in real life, much like Grant’s “mother” Jessie Royce Landis being only seven years his senior in North by Northwest!]
A-Bomb
Filming on Notorious began in late 1945, but getting to that point took almost a year. After Hitchcock completed Spellbound, which also starred Bergman, Selznick pressured the director to select a new project. Hitchcock was interested in doing a “story about confidence tricks on a grand scale in which Ingrid could play the woman who is carefully trained and coached in a gigantic confidence trick which might involve her marrying some man.” Hitchcock was infatuated with Bergman, though she never returned the feeling. “Song of the Dragon,” a 1921 story published in the Saturday Evening Post, was the inspiration behind Notorious.
Screenwriter Ben Hecht and Alfred Hitchcock went to New York in December 1944 to write the screenplay. Four months and three revisions later, the script was near final form. There was one difficulty however; the “MacGuffin” – Hitchcock’s term for the main item around which the plot revolves – was not completely thought out. Hitchcock and Hecht, aware there was considerable work going on in military circles to create the atom bomb, decided by pure chance to use the rare, unknown uranium ore as the MacGuffin. At the time, no one had any idea uranium would soon be used in making an atomic bomb!
To fully research this angle, both men visited Dr. Robert A. Milikan at Cal Tech. While the scientist spent several hours explaining the theoretical possibilities of using hydrogen atoms, he totally rejected the idea of using uranium for a bomb. Hitchcock and Hecht decided to use it anyway. A two-fold effect resulted. The FBI [allegedly] assigned surveillance agents to monitor them “to see that they did not accidentally reveal any U.S. top secrets” and, David Selznick decided he did not want to produce the movie. The film was offered to various studios and RKO Pictures bought it, paying Selznick $800,000 plus 50% of the profits.
The Kiss
As the title suggests, Notorious had its own moments of infamy. Hitchcock, who liked to involve his audience as “voyeurs,” created an intimate scene between Bergman and Grant for that purpose. The director regarded it as a “scene where the public had the great privilege of embracing Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman together. It was a kind of temporary ménage à trois.” Both Grant and Bergman were uncomfortable filming the scene, but in his no-nonsense manner, Hitchcock told the actors to just get on with it.
In 1945, movie kisses were not permitted to last longer than a mere three seconds. To work around this restriction, Bergman later recalled [in her autobiography], “A kiss could last three seconds. We just kissed each other and talked, leaned away and kissed each other again. Then the telephone came between us, then we moved to the other side of the telephone. So it was a kiss which opened and closed; but the censors couldn’t and didn’t cut the scene because we never at any one point kissed for more than three seconds. We did other things: we nibbled on each other’s ears, and kissed a cheek, so that it looked endless, and became sensational in Hollywood.”
- Ingrid Bergman: My Story (1980) – Bergman and Alan Burgess | excerpts

Poster by crqsf, 2012
Behind the Scenes
Notorious, considered one of Hitchcock’s most sophisticated thrillers, cost two million dollars to produce. The film opened to critical success in 1946 and grossed nine million dollars in its first year. Alfred Hitchcock, never a man to be ruffled, proved the point when fire broke out on the set of Notorious. The director, in discussion over lighting, finished his sentence and calmly stated, “Will someone please put that fire out?” and calmly went on with his work.
Cary Grant, who previously starred in Hitchcock’s Suspicion, gave a suave performance in Notorious. The actor did have one scene that didn’t go too smoothly – he complained about having to open a door and hold onto his hat with his right hand at the same time. The director replied flatly, “Have you considered the possibility of transferring the hat to the other hand?” Ingrid Bergman, whose own life was no less “notorious” than her film, was involved in an extramarital affair with respected director Roberto Rossellini. She eventually broke her contract with David Selznick. – US ABC/Time Life VHS (1991)

Every birthday boy and girl gets cake on a Hitchcock set. L-R: Unknown (anyone know?), Cary Grant, Hitch and Ingrid Bergman celebrate Cary’s 42nd.
Notorious: Writing on a Classic; Critics Choice; Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Home video
Related articles
This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.