Walter Beardsley: Oh, I don't think any of us have any illusions about her character. Have we, Devlin?
Devlin: Not at all, not in the slightest. Miss Huberman is first, last, and always not a lady. She may be risking her life, but when it comes to being a lady, she doesn't hold a candle to your wife, sitting in Washington, playing bridge with three other ladies of great honor and virtue.
~from Notorious (1946)
It is said to be among Alfred Hitchcock's finest films. Among movies about fallen women seeking redemption and true love, Notorious is second to none. Ingrid Bergman plays what in 1946 was called "a party girl." Ashamed of discovering that her father is a Nazi, Alicia Huberman gives herself over to drinking and men with such abandon that she becomes "notorious." It always strikes me in the opening scenes that how she carries on would not be a matter of notoriety today, just typical youthful behavior. The love story, however, is of an intensity rarely seen on the modern screen, made more poignant because of Alicia's desire not only for atonement but to make herself worthy of being loved by Devlin.
The late Roger Ebert loved it. From Far Out Magazine:
One of the greatest examples of Hitchcock’s pre-colour films is 1946’s Notorious, a movie that Ebert adored almost above all others. It stars Cary Grant as Devlin, a US government agent in Rio de Janeiro who is trying to infiltrate a group of Nazis who, even after the war, are continuing to plot against peace. To gain entry into their inner circle, Devlin teams up with Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the daughter of an imprisoned Nazi who is being courted by one of her father’s associates.
The film is a romance between Devlin and Alicia, but it’s much messier than a simple meet-cute and a happily-ever-after. He mistrusts and even looks down on her for her family connections and her reputation for promiscuity, but he can’t rid himself of his attraction to her. Meanwhile, she is put in the impossible position of having to align herself with another man in order to help the man she loves.
For Ebert, Notorious not only embraces – rather than glosses over – the complexity of its love story and political context, but does so through startlingly effective cinematography. “It contains,” he wrote, “[S]ome of the most effective camera shots in [Hitchcock’s]–or anyone’s–work, and they all lead to the great final passages in which two men find out how very wrong they both were.”
Overall, he argued, it was, “the most elegant expression of the master’s visual style.” (Read more.)
As the heroine finds herself sinking deeper into a chasm from which she might not escape, the relationships become more complicated. Claude Rains portrays a man whom it is truly hard to hate; even though he is a Nazi, his love for Alicia renders him vulnerable and sympathetic. This is where the master storytelling of Hitchcock's camera conveys every nuance of passion and anguish. As one critic expresses it:
Notorious returned Hitchcock to the world of spies and counterspies. But the film primarily is a study of relationships rather than a straight thriller—which is not to say that there still isn’t a great deal of Hitchcockian suspense. The Bergman character is trying to forget, Grant is cynical, and Rains has a genuine, devoted love for our leading lady. Even when he discovers her treachery, it is his mother (Leopoldine Konstantin) who makes the decision to, shall we say, do away with her.
Francois Truffaut said to Hitchcock in his interview book on the director that “It seems to me that of all your pictures this is the one in which one feels the most perfect correlation between what you are aiming at and what appears on the screen . . . Of all its qualities, the outstanding achievement is perhaps that in Notorious you have at once a maximum of stylization and a maximum of simplicity.”
The stylization is fascinating to watch. Some of Hitchcock’s most famous scenes are in this film: the justly acclaimed crane shot, taking the audience from a wide establishing view of the elaborate formal party into a tight closeup of the crucial key to the wine cellar in Ingrid Bergman’s hand; the brilliantly staged party scene itself, which alternates between thoughtfully conceived point of view shots and graceful, insinuating camera moves; and, of course, the wine cellar sequence, during which Cary and Ingrid discover the incriminating bottle containing not vintage nectar but....
The backdrop of the thriller/romance is elegant and exotic Rio and the lavish mansion of the Sebastian family. Every scene is a work of art and yet the beauty does not detract from the sense of dread at knowing that in the midst of it all are evil people who will stop at nothing to achieve their ends. On the other hand, the "good guys" are willing to sacrifice Alicia and any other seemingly disposable person in order to fulfill the mission at hand. In Notorious, the human cost of cold war is assessed; no one is unscathed.
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3 comments:
It is definitely an elegant film, and as with many Hitchcock films he showcases the setting without distracting from the plot.
Only in "Rear Window" was the set limited...but there he had Grace Kelly!
Ingrid Bergman looks like she can't be much older than a teenager here. What a beauty she was!
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