Last week, we hunted Nazis in Buenos Aires with Dick Powell. This week, we hunt Nazis in Rio de Janeiro with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Does that mean we’ve gone from the samba to the tango? Discuss amongst yourselves.
The featured image is a departure from the norm as I show the director on the set of Notorious with his stars. And what stars they were: They don’t make them like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman any more. The chemistry between Grant and Bergman is downright electric as they meet cute at a drunken party hosted by Bergman.
Why is the great Ingrid Bergman getting shit faced drunk? Her scientist father was just convicted of treason for working with the Nazis. America used to take such things seriously in the pre-MAGA era. We’ve gone from punching Nazis to coddling them. Oy, just oy.
Cary Grant plays Devlin, an American spy dispatched to recruit Bergman who plays Alicia Huberman. Her house has been bugged so our spooks know that she’s appalled by her father’s treachery. After a hair raising drunk driving scene with Bergman at the wheel, she goes along with the plan.
Grant, however, doesn’t know that the plan is to place Bergman in the bed of a man she already knows, Alex Sebastian played by Claude Rains. Rains is a dapper Nazi with a mother played by Madame Konstantin who makes Ma Barker look tame.
Rains is in cahoots with Nazi scientists who are working on a nuke. In 1946, little was known about how nukes were made: Writer Ben Hecht did some guess work that was accurate enough that some spooks contacted Hecht to ensure he was guessing. As a result, the Notorious MacGuffins are wine bottles filled with a toxic mix of uranium and other heavy metals. Grant and Bergman find them in the wine cellar at a party thrown to celebrate her marriage to the Nazi magnate.
When Rains realizes his wife and her friend are on to him, he knows he’s fucked. What does a Nazi mama’s boy do at that point? Run to mommy dearest who commences poisoning Bergman.
That’s all the plot I care to share. This feature is called pulp fiction, not pulp spoilers, after all. The film does, however, have an ambiguously happy ending but not for Claude Rains:
The acting is splendid. All the parts are perfectly cast. Beyond the players mentioned, Louis Calhern is excellent as the spymaster who helps Bergman look smashing for the big soiree:
The only thing that worries Calhern is that his agents have fallen in love. True dat. They still complete the mission.
Hitchcock’s direction is perfection as is Ben Hecht’s script. The motifs they deploy in the movie are diabolically clever: keys, glasses, and bottles.
Notorious ended up as my second favorite film in the Hitchcock Dozen. Rains was the number 3 villain and Bergman was, what else, the number one cool blonde.
Grading Time: I give Notorious 4 stars and an Adrastos Grade of A. It’s a stone cold classic.
We saw Ingrid Bergman get shit faced earlier, let’s get poster faced. Is that a thing? Beats the hell outta me.
I give you the US and French long sheets side-by-side:
Let’s rejoin the UK Quad Squad whatever the hell that is:
Let’s go to the lobby and see if they have any wine that’s not laced with uranium. I don’t want to set off a Geiger counter.
No wine, just soda. We did, however, see some swell lobby cards:
Now that we’ve been terrified by Madame Sebastian, let’s hitch a ride on the trailer:
The last word goes to the late, great Robert Osborne with a 2013 intro: