Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious was originally released 63 years ago in 1946 and was Hitchcock’s second post-war film (following Spellbound (1945)) and is arguably the beginning of a phenomenal period of creativity that lasted two decades until the release of Torn Curtain (1966). Notorious is a pre-Cold war, post-war romantic suspense thriller set in the present (1946) where the Nazis are still the enemy. They are represented by a rump of Nazi sympathisers, doctors and scientists who are involved in the covert extraction of uranium ore from a location in Brazil. We are left guessing as to whether this Rio-based cabal has some plan for world domination, or at least a nuclear attack on the USA, because we never discover their exact intentions. However, this really doesn’t matter one bit because we are in the hands of Hitchcock and he has other claims on our reason and our senses.

Alicia Huberman’s (Ingrid Bergman) unrepentant father - a second generation German immigrant with American citizenship - is sent to jail for 20 years in Miami for treason against the USA. As the daughter of an American traitor, Alicia is followed by detectives who need to monitor her sympathies and movements. As it happens, the surveillance is just a precaution because we soon find out that her house has been bugged and the acetate recording discs reveal her to be an American patriot unwilling to go along with her father’s treacherous plans. Alicia, a notorious socialite on the Miami party scene, holds a house party after her father’s incarceration. She is getting drunk and sounding-off to her friends about the spooks she has seen following her when a suave, gatecrasher catches her eye. He turns out to be TR Devlin (Cary Grant), or just Devlin as Hitchcock would have us know him, an FBI agent with a brief to engage Alicia in a covert mission to discover what some of her father’s at-large Nazi friends are up to in Rio.

Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia is transfixed by the - unbeknown to her, initially professional - interest that Devlin shows towards her. True to her reputation, and Devlin’s research, the drunk and flirtatious Alicia invites Devlin outside for a late night ‘picnic’. Devlin accepts and one of the most erotically-charged onscreen relationships in cinema gets its pedal to the metal.

Alicia: You’re quite a boy. (Unsteady on her feet) My car is outside.
Devlin: Naturally.
Alicia: Wanna go for a ride? (laughs).
Devlin: Very much. What about your guests?
Alicia: They’ll crawl out under their own steam. I-I’m going to drive.
Th-That’s understood.
Devlin: Don’t you need a coat?
Alicia: You’ll do (laughs).

The playful prediction that Devlin is going to be wrapping himself around her is characteristic of much of the interplay between the two central characters. Bergman is quite simply playing the role the man was supposed to; in life and on celluloid. Furthermore, Grant’s reticence is more symbolic of the traditional portrayal of feminine coyness. This is 1946 after all. Women had been important for the war effort and had become more accustomed to a degree of independence, financially and sexually. In this way, Alicia’s passionate and outspoken character may have resonated with the audience of the times, but her liberated desires would still have shocked. This was a new post-war era where governments were embarking on propaganda campaigns to promote the importance of women’s domestic role in the home. Bergman’s Alicia didn’t fit the mould. She agrees to help the American state, flies to Rio and on her first night with Devlin she volunteers to cook, even though she ‘hates cooking’, and completely burns the chicken!

Devlin has completely fallen for her. They silently enter Alicia’s apartment, stand out on the veranda looking over the Copacabana beach and begin a three minute kiss which was described in the original publicity blurbs as the ‘longest kiss in screen history’. Actually, in between a lot of kissing, hugging, brushing of cheeks and shoulder nestling, is beautiful whispered dialogue and including a telephone call by Devlin to his boss! This evocative scene is typical of Hitchcock’s deft ability to play with the form and mess with audience expectations. The kissing is episodic, intensely passionate then playful. It is not a climax nor the succumbing of one partner (usually the woman) to another but the last moment of intimacy before Alicia becomes a US agent. Hitchcock’s visual language is subversive and the influences he drew from rich and layered. He had only just completed Spellbound (1945) with Bergman and another matinée idol, Gregory Peck, where he worked with surrealist Salvador Dalí who designed the dream sequence for that movie. The Notorious kissing sequence evokes another famous surrealist’s work, René Magritte’s 1928 painting, The Lovers, where hooded lovers embrace. Magritte’s painting and Hitchcock’s kissing sequence tells of love both restrained and perverse. And lest we forget, it was 1946 after all and although Bergman was about to go under cover for the American state, she was not allowed to get under the covers.

It is the first third of the film and the setting up of the ‘very strange love affair’ between Alicia and Devlin that so cleverly contributes to the heightened tension when the FBI operation keeps the lovers apart. Hitchcock chose to work with legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht, who had written Spellbound (1945), and went to work with Hitchcock on four more occasions. Hecht was a very adaptable writer and one of his skills was tightly written comic dialogue; Some Like It Hot (1939) and His Girl Friday (1940), also starring Cary Grant, were already under his belt by the time he worked on Notorious, for which he received an Academy Award Nomination. When the action shifts to the Nazi house and Alicia feigns to fall in love with a former lover Alex Sebastian (Claude Reins) in order to find out what he and his Nazi friends are planning, Hecht’s writing keeps us in suspense as we wait for Alicia’s next meet with Devlin to update him with her discoveries. Alicia is in too deep for Devlin’s liking but he has no moral ground for disapproval. She has started sleeping with Sebastian; Sebastian proposes to her; she marries him; goes on honeymoon with him (all with FBI approval) and Devlin’s emotions are in a classic double-bind. As she reminds him: ‘That’s what you wanted wasn’t it?’.

Claude Reins is excellent as the counterweight to Grant’s Devlin. He worships Alicia and is arguably more loving towards her until he realises that she is an American agent. The film is full of Hitchcock trademarks including, the dominating and ugly mother-figure, played here by Leopoldine Konstantin, Sebastian’s controlling mother. Alfred Hitchcock employs his MacGuffin plot device in the whole uranium story. (The MacGuffin was a technique designed to create suspense but is ultimately of no particular consequence apart from being a coat-hanger on which to hang the central story.) In 1944, Hitchcock was researching uranium (months before the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in order to try and convince his skeptical producer, David O Selznick, of the plausibility of his atomic bomb plot device. Hitchcock went to speak to a top scientist at the Manhattan project and, in his own words, asked him:

“Doctor, how big would an atom bomb be?” The scene that follows! He jumps up, yelling, “Do you want to be arrested? Do you want to get me arrested, too?” Then he spends an hour explaining to me that it was impossible to make the atom bomb, that the atom bomb would never be made, and that consequently I should not make the atom bomb my MacGuffin.”(1)

Hitchcock’s thorough research aroused FBI suspicion, and they watched him closely for three months. He cynically congratulated himself for his foresight:

..and two years [...] later the bomb exploded on Hiroshima. And the movie made eight million dollars.

Notorious is not, however, a cynical film, nor is it a film about an atomic bomb plot. The power of the story lies ultimately in the portrayal of Alicia by Ingrid Bergman; a complex character who is trying to atone for her father’s guilt whilst also putting her own frivolous past behind her. Her secret meetings with Devlin where she reports on her Nazi partner’s activities – and her activities with him – are wonderfully conceived, and Bergman captures the torment of a woman who wants to complete the job but realises her commitment to it may lose her the person she really loves.

1) Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews, Sidney Gottlieb (editor). University Press of Mississippi, 2003.