Thu 14 Feb 2019
A Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: NOTORIOUS (1946).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews[6] Comments
NOTORIOUS. RKO Radio Pictures, 1946. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern. Screenplay: Ben Hecht. Director: Alfred Hitchcock.
A lot of ink has been spilled on interpreting Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, the romantic thriller starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Some critics have posited that the film is primarily a romance in which love, despite numerous obstacles, ultimately triumphs at the end; others that it belongs in that every amorphous cinematic category known as “film noir.â€
Others have focused less on the film’s plot and more on its signature visual style and the manner by which Hitchcock creates and refines the very language of cinema. The one through which he is able to tell the story through both the placement of inanimate objects and the imposition of meaning to them.
All of the above, I think, are valid ways in which to interpret Notorious. I personally have my doubts whether this particular RKO release should be considered a proper film noir. Yes, it’s on the more cynical side of things and its subject matter – in which the U.S. government through the persona of one of its agents, T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant), essentially prostitutes Alicia, a deeply damaged young woman and the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy (Ingrid Bergman), persuading her to infiltrate a group of Nazis in postwar Brazil – is obviously less pure than many of the morale boosting films put out by the major studios during the Second World War. But it’s a far cry from the cynical and gritty lower budget crime dramas that are now rightly considered films noir.
For me, the film is essentially about losing and winning, both on the personal level (romance) and on the political (thriller). It’s the universalism of this subject matter that makes it compelling to viewers seventy some odd years after it first premiered. The plot, as Hitchcock himself agreed, boils down to a man who is forced to choose between his emotions (his love for Bergman’s character) and his duty to his country.
More significantly, it’s about Devlin’s desire to win at nearly any cost. He wants to win Alicia over his competitor, the Nazi industrialist (Claude Rains) whom she has been spying on for Uncle Sam. He wants his country to win over the Nazis even after the war has ended. There’s rarely a moment in the film in which Devlin ceases to want to win on both a romantic and political level. There is no “dark night of the soul†for Devlin in which he questions his ultimate desires and goals.
If we are to see Alicia as the film’s main character – and I think she is – then the question becomes whether Notorious is fundamentally all that different from other motion pictures about women who want to change their lives. As the film’s title indicates, she’s notorious. She drinks and has numerous love affairs with men. Devlin knows this. Yet he’s deeply conflicted about it, which is why he is alternatively madly in love with her and deeply cruel to her.
By the end, she thinks that she has changed, that she has found her white knight in Devlin who carries her down the stairs and out of harm’s way. But no one realistically thinks that this is a fairy tale ending. Once the mission is complete and Devlin realizes he has won against the Nazi villain in two ways, will he want to stick around to “make things work,†as modern family therapists would say, or will he be poised for the next assignment?
I should note that I recently watched the brand new Criterion Collection blu-ray release of this Hitchcock classic. There are some truly worthwhile supplemental features including an illuminating 2009 documentary about the film in which the political context at the time of the film’s writing and release is discussed by leading film critics and historians.
Of note is the fact that soon after the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, Hitchcock directed a short documentary film about the horrors discovered there. This was one of his main completed projects before working directing Notorious, which of course features Nazi industrialists who have relocated to South America after the war’s end.
In 1946, the Cold War hadn’t yet made West Germany a vital ally to the United States so Nazis, rather than the communists, were still the villains. It’s doubtful whether such a film would have been of as much interest to studio executives had screenwriter Ben Hecht and Hitchcock pitched the film in 1950.
February 14th, 2019 at 9:20 pm
I’ve always assumed Devlin was one of the chief models for James Bond, which does beg the question if Devlin was going to be faithful to Alicia in the long run. That way of looking at Notorious could apply to many Hitchcock films. You have to wonder if Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint have much future after NORTH BY NORTHWEST or if John Robie and Francie really have that much chance in his villa.
Quite a few spy films in this general era are generally included in film noir, though I grant the milieu here is slicker and certainly more upper crust than what we think of as noir.
NOTORIOUS is one of my favorite Hitchcock films whatever it is, a teasingly dark romance that dares to present Rains as a sympathetic monster and Grant as a monstrous hero. At one point in the film Rains seems a better choice for Alicia than Devlin, which is some trick.
Madame Konstantin is the real monster here though, one of a fairly long list of troublesome mothers and mother figures in his film. Whatever Hitchcock is saying about the female of the species he makes no bones that she is more ruthless and dangerous than her easily fooled Nazi son.
February 14th, 2019 at 9:37 pm
I’m seventy-one and this has been my favorite Hitchcock film since I first saw it sometime in the late 1960s.
February 14th, 2019 at 9:49 pm
I have no problem putting Devlin at the head of the class. A hero par excellence. And I do not equate him with John Robie or Roger Thornhill in what are confections the might be called comedy. Not so Notorious. As for Ilsa and Devlin, I don’t believe they can last, not for reasons of character, but she has been successfully murdered by a slow poison. Or at least, that is a likely long term scenario. The only disturbing element, and not on this board, but others I have recently read, or heard about, is the sympathy viewer have for Claude Rains playing a little rat. Make that a mother fixated, murderous little rat. And as we know, Devlin essentially kills him. So, a happy ending.
Final thought: The Nazi’s and the Communists are the same people, just with different speech patterns. There is, in my view no time a major studio would not have wanted this package, But with Cary Grant, not Donald O’Conner. And as Grant was first choice to play James Bond….
So happy he did not. Don’t like Bond, love and admire Devlin.
February 15th, 2019 at 8:27 am
Well we’ve all had relationships like that, haven’t we?
February 15th, 2019 at 5:19 pm
Barry
I agree, Notorious is almost foolproof. I think the studios would have been on board regardless of time period.
Even in his wartime propaganda films Hitchcock was too good a director to draw simple portraits of evil. Walter Slezak in LIFEBOAT is the most telling example, an arrogant and unregenerate Nazi deserving his fate, but in the film Hitch creates a little UN and shows that what at one point seems to be the weakness of such a disparate group against a ruthless enemy is in reality a kind of strength that wins out in the end. Alone none of them are Slezak’s equal, but together they are far stronger.
In NOTORIOUS he is saying again the monsters don’t always seem like monsters, but that doesn’t make them less monstrous, something that goes back to the charming murderous Robert Young in SECRET AGENT. Hitch often relies on that moment when you realize the charming reasonable and intelligent fellow is a monster.
Ben Hecht’s James Bond script confirms there are some ties between Bond and Devlin, not that I think Devlin is Bond like, only that Bond shares some traits with Devlin though the latter is a more rounded human and Bond less so by design.
I’m not sure about the future of many of Hitchcock’s romantic pairs, not just the ones played by Cary Grant. I wouldn’t have bet much on the future of James Stewart and Grace Kelly, Joel McCrea and Laraine Day, or Sean Connery and Tippi Hedrin either, and I have wondered at times if that wasn’t an added bit of suspense Hitch teased us with, happy endings that maybe were just a happy pause before reality set in in the colder light of morning.
And I agree, there is no real evidence that Ingrid Bergman will even survive until Cary Grant can get he to the hospital at the films end. Rains is dead man walking, Grant has discovered his humanity, and Bergman knows he really loves her, but beyond that the viewer is exercising their own imagination. It’s a bit like the argument whether Shane is dead or alive in that final shot, eye of the beholder stuff.
February 15th, 2019 at 9:12 pm
Well obviously I am going to have to see this one again. I watched it so long ago, I probably was not shaving yet. All I remember are bits and pieces of certain scenes, and while they fit in with the basic story line that Jon and you others have been discussing, who knows? They could be from another Hitchcock film altogether.