Seldom Scene
Movie reviews by Gerald Panio

Notorious (1946)

Devlin (Gary Grant): Don’t you need a coat?

Alicia (Ingrid Bergman): You’ll do.

“I don’t get all this talk about chicken.” –screenwriter

Ben Hecht to director Alfred Hitchcock

Two things make it difficult for me to write a review of Notorious (1946), my favourite Hitchcock film of them all. The first is that Alfred Hitchcock has been a lightning rod for film criticism in the same way that Shakespeare has been for drama. This means that almost anything I might say has probably been said better and more insightfully by someone else. The analysis of Notorious in Baseline’s Motion Picture Guide Review, for example, is so informative it makes me ill. Fortunately for me, however, Baseline is basically only available on CD-ROM, and you’re not likely to be able to make any comparisons.

The other problem is a much more pleasant one. I have a tough time taking my eyes off Ingrid Bergman long enough to jot down notes. One watches emotions play across her face as one admires the ceaselessly shifting play of light on the waters of Kootenay Lake. Ms. Bergman has never looked more beautiful than she does here. Or sexier. The love scenes between her and co-star Cary Grant are extraordinarily sensual. Watch this movie on Valentine’s Day with someone you love. There’s a three-minute plus kissing scene that’s more genuinely erotic than anything in a thousand X-rated films. Actually, virtually every encounter between the two stars has an intimacy rarely caught on the screen. It must have driven the Hollywood censors crazy.

Bergman and Grant are the main reasons I’ve come back to Notorious more than once since I first saw it. Of course, there’s also the usual masterful Hitchcockian suspense—generated by some superb camera work by cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff), dialogue, scene layout, scripting, and music (by Roy Webb). And what’s suspense without a villain? There’s a superb one here. Not, as one might suspect, the well-heeled but love-struck Nazi industrialist (Alexander Sebastian) played by Claude Rains. Nor one of the loathsome, suited-up, banally evil Nazi entrepreneurs collaborating with Sebastian on the development of a secret weapon. Not even one of the American intelligence agents in Rio who is willing to prostitute a vulnerable young woman for the sake of Country & the Higher Good.

No, the Big Nasty is this film is…Mom.

Sebastian’s mom, to be exact. She’s scarier than Norman Bates in Psycho. At least Norman Bates used a knife. Mrs. Sebastian (Mme Konstantin) just needlepoints while you waste away from slow-acting poison. If the prolonged kissing scene is one highlight of Notorious, another is where Alexander has to tell his mom that he’s married an American agent. Mom is in bed at the time. She is very happy to find out her son has been a sap because it proves that she was right about Bergman all along. Mother knows best. She is so happy that she sits up straighter in bed, sticks a cigarette in her nice, sweet, grandmotherly face, and offers consolation: “We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity.”

Notorious is in the best tradition of film noir. The whole movie is an exercise in chiaroscuro and hard-boiled dialogue. It’s a perfect illustration of why so many movie lovers were outraged when colourization of black & white films was introduced. Colourization would destroy this film. Every scene is a deliberate play in light and shadow. The first time the viewer sees Cary Grant, he’s sitting in darkness and he’s filmed from behind. The effect is reminiscent of Magritte’s famous surrealist work The Secret Life IV. Hitchcock plays such cinematic games throughout the film. There are at least two other scenes where we watch the play of expressions on Bergman’s face, while staring at the back of her co-star’s head. It’s the perfect metaphor for their relationship: both passionately in love, but Grant incapable, unwilling to let his guard down. There are other brilliant shots: looking down onto the chessboard- like floor of the ballroom in Sebastian’s mansion (another neat metaphor for the way espionage turns human lives into de-humanized pieces in The Game); the repeated close-ups on simple objects (a key, a bottle) which balance life and death; low-angle and distorted shots to reinforce menace or bewilderment. Where Orson Welles used deep focus to bring every detail of the background into a scene, Hitchcock docs the opposite: pulling background action out of focus to create an almost abstract scrim for his leading actors to play against. Check out the great zoom shots as Bergman first realizes she has been exposed, and the tracking shot which closes the film like a slow-motion guillotine.

The screenwriter for Notorious was Ben Hecht, one of the best Hollywood ever produced. This was the same man who gave us Scarface, The Front Page, His Girl Friday, and Spellbound. By the time he was 16, Hecht had been a promising concert violinist, circus acrobat, and Chicago reporter. Thanks to writers like Hecht, characters in Hollywood movies from the Thirties and Forties talk a lot. A lot of that talk is fast, clever, poignant, frank, or cruel. Lines are aimed straight at the heart, or below the belt. Here’s Grant trying to push Bergman to finish the mission, despite fact that he hates what he’s forcing her to do:

Devlin: You’ve got work on him and land him.

Alicia: Mata Hari. She makes love for the papers.

Devlin: There are no papers. You land him.

Alicia: Don’t get sore. I’m only fishing for a little bird call from my dream man.

Or this, from an earlier scene:

Alicia: This is a very strange love affair.

Devlin: Why?

Alicia: Maybe the fact that you don’t love me.

Devlin: When I don’t love you, I’ll let you know.

One final historical note (which I owe to an anonymous editor at Baseline): when Hitchcock and Hecht were looking for a suitable “Macguffin” (Hitch’s term for a plot element that catch the viewer’s attention and focus suspense), they chose uranium as the linchpin for their Nazis’ secret research activities in Brazil. This was in 1944, when the Manhattan Project was still highly classified. Hecht and Hitchcock actually spent several hours interviewing a leading scientist at Cal Tech about the possibility of an atomic bomb. This scientist, Dr. Robert Andrew Millikan, denied that uranium had anything to do with such research. After that interview, Hitchcock claimed that the FBI kept him and Hecht under surveillance for months.

Looking Back & Second Thoughts

Still one of my favorite Hitchcock films, for two reasons.

The first is the flawless performances from Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. They’re perfect as lovers so trapped in their past histories of manipulation of others that they can’t quite grasp that they have a chance to live without an ulterior motive. Talk about hurting the one you love—Grant and Bergman cut one another with some of the cruellest barbs imaginable. There’s blood on that dialogue. Claude Rains and Leopoldine Konstantin are no slouches either.

The second is Hitchcock’s absolute mastery of his craft. It begins with his decision to make the audience’s first sight of Cary Grant just the black-silhouetted back of his head. Here’s a guy who literally plays from the shadows. And check out the way Hitchcock shoots Bergman’s hangover scene. More Cary Grant creepiness, and humor. Throughout the film there’s are razor-sharp choices in lighting, with maximal use of moonlight and shadows. Superb cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff, a veteran of over 100 films. From Chronicle of the Cinema: “…Hitchcock delivers another directing tour de force at one the film’s most suspenseful moments: with a little help from the cameraman Ted Tetzlaff, Hitchcock pulls off an extraordinary crane shot which begins at the top of a lengthy staircase and then swoops down to the floor below, where a party is in progress, finally to focus in close-up on a key clutched in the hand of Bergman. Evidently, Tetzlaff ribbed Hitchcock on the set with the playful remark, ‘Getting a bit technical, aren’t you, Pop?’” The final shot of Rains walking up the steps of his house to his certain doom is one of the best closing shots in the history of film noir.

Notorious is also a particularly disturbing film because it reminds us that we still live in a world where it’s a societal norm that men and women are trained to kill other human beings, and to risk their lives & souls by going undercover to engineer the downfall of targeted enemies. I’m not sure I’d like to see what Devlin’s and Alicia’s lives might look like a couple of years down the road. Then again, the ability of human beings to shake off the past is occasionally nothing short of miraculous.

A shout-out to master costume designer Edith Head, whose creations allow Ingrid Bergman to add perfection to perfection. In the course of a career that spanned six decades and 750 films, Ms. Head racked up 35 Academy Award nominations & 8 Oscars. She and Art Director Cedric Gibbons would have made Hollywood’s ultimate power couple.

Point of trivia: Notorious apparently had the longest kiss in cinema history, clocking in at two-and-a-half minutes. But censorship rules dictated that physical contact be broken every 30 seconds by at least a few spoken words. (In Shanghai, in the same year, Chinese audiences got to see the first screen kiss in the history of Chinese cinema, tastefully played out behind an open parasol.)

Movie Information

Genre: Drama, Film Noir
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Actors: Cary Grant, Ingrid Berman, Claude Rains, Paul Prescott, Leopoldine Konstantin
Year: 1946
Country:
Original Review: July 1994

Cyberspace:

The Simpsons Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrXM7dC9PoQ

The creators of The Simpsons recognize quality when they see it. Here’s a two-minute clip of their tribute to the work of the great Japanese anime artist, Hayao Miyazaki. There are references to at least five of Miyazaki’s best-known films: My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away.

They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?

http://www.theyshootpictures.com/index.htm

Bill Geogaris’s crème de la crème of movie lists. You could spend a lot of time browsing the smartly-annotated entries of “The 1,000 Greatest Films,” “1,000 Noir Films,” and “21st Century’s Most Acclaimed Films.” There are also over 200 director profiles. This site is the product of some very serious film scholarship. Dive in, now. Here’s an extract from one of Mr. Geogaris’s introductions:

“Beginning on this page is TSPDT’s detailed look (in alphabetic order) at the 1,000 Greatest Films. Each film’s current ranking and previous ranking (in brackets) is provided with each entry, along with cast lists, review quotes (with external links to full review), links to IMDB, Sight & Sound and Amazon, and a sampling of five critics/filmmakers who voted, at one time or another, for the film in question. You can, of course, also browse the full list of 1,000 films in descending ranking order.”

Here are the first ten films profiled in the H-L section: La Haine, Halloween, Hana-Bi, Hannah and Her Sisters. Happiness, Happy Together, Harakiri, A Hard Day’s Night, Harlan County U.S.A, Harold and Maude.

Looking Back & Second Thoughts

Still one of my favorite Hitchcock films, for two reasons.

The first is the flawless performances from Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. They’re perfect as lovers so trapped in their past histories of manipulation of others that they can’t quite grasp that they have a chance to live without an ulterior motive. Talk about hurting the one you love—Grant and Bergman cut one another with some of the cruellest barbs imaginable. There’s blood on that dialogue. Claude Rains and Leopoldine Konstantin are no slouches either.

The second is Hitchcock’s absolute mastery of his craft. It begins with his decision to make the audience’s first sight of Cary Grant just the black-silhouetted back of his head. Here’s a guy who literally plays from the shadows. And check out the way Hitchcock shoots Bergman’s hangover scene. More Cary Grant creepiness, and humor. Throughout the film there’s are razor-sharp choices in lighting, with maximal use of moonlight and shadows. Superb cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff, a veteran of over 100 films. From Chronicle of the Cinema: “…Hitchcock delivers another directing tour de force at one the film’s most suspenseful moments: with a little help from the cameraman Ted Tetzlaff, Hitchcock pulls off an extraordinary crane shot which begins at the top of a lengthy staircase and then swoops down to the floor below, where a party is in progress, finally to focus in close-up on a key clutched in the hand of Bergman. Evidently, Tetzlaff ribbed Hitchcock on the set with the playful remark, ‘Getting a bit technical, aren’t you, Pop?’” The final shot of Rains walking up the steps of his house to his certain doom is one of the best closing shots in the history of film noir.

Notorious is also a particularly disturbing film because it reminds us that we still live in a world where it’s a societal norm that men and women are trained to kill other human beings, and to risk their lives & souls by going undercover to engineer the downfall of targeted enemies. I’m not sure I’d like to see what Devlin’s and Alicia’s lives might look like a couple of years down the road. Then again, the ability of human beings to shake off the past is occasionally nothing short of miraculous.

A shout-out to master costume designer Edith Head, whose creations allow Ingrid Bergman to add perfection to perfection. In the course of a career that spanned six decades and 750 films, Ms. Head racked up 35 Academy Award nominations & 8 Oscars. She and Art Director Cedric Gibbons would have made Hollywood’s ultimate power couple.

Point of trivia: Notorious apparently had the longest kiss in cinema history, clocking in at two-and-a-half minutes. But censorship rules dictated that physical contact be broken every 30 seconds by at least a few spoken words. (In Shanghai, in the same year, Chinese audiences got to see the first screen kiss in the history of Chinese cinema, tastefully played out behind an open parasol.)

Films Worth Talking About:

The Pastoral Symphony, La Bataille du rail, Ziegfeld Follies, Desiderio, My Darling Clementine, Five Women Around Utamaro, Sciuscia (Shoeshine), Gilda, Great Expectations, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The Courage of Lassie, The Big Sleep, The Killers, Murderers Among Us, The Jolson Story, The Best Years of Our Lives, Beauty and the Beast, Humoresque, It’s a Wonderful Life, Undercurrent, Cluny Brown, Margie, Till the Clouds Roll By, The Razor’s Edge

The Bigger Picture

Films: Spellbound (1945

Music: any anthology of Bernard Hermann’s film scores (Hermann was Hitchcock’s pre-eminent musical collaborator)

Books: William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp

The Word on the Street

“Ingrid Bergman was never so starkly sensual and frank on screen, as she is as “Alicia.” And Cary Grant, as agent Devlin, was perfectly directed to play cold and largely unresponsive to Bergman’s unrestrained and ultimately heartbreaking heat.
Grant is given subtle moments early on, to show his falling in love with Bergman. The brief glance he gives her as she leans across his lap in the plane descending into Rio, before Hitchcock quickly fades it out, is almost pornographic (for the era).
Their repartee is so fraught with sexual tension and mutual challenge as to be unparalleled in cinema up till that time — and perhaps even since….

This is an amazingly daring film in terms of female sexuality, for its day or ours. Hitchcock asks us, as he asks Devlin, to sympathize with — and love — a woman who not only sleeps around just as men do, but who is willing to sleep around under false pretenses for the good of her adopted country. If that’s a stretch for audiences now, consider what it was for audiences in the late 40s.
Is there another “heroine” in cinema history who blatantly sleeps with a man she despises in order to win the love (and successfully) of another man whom she adores?
Name one.
Not “Mata Hari,” who, no matter that she was played by Garbo, had anywhere near the emotional/political/moral complexity of Alicia.”

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