The story stars Bergman as a patriotic American named Alicia Huberman, whose father is a convicted Nazi spy. Alicia is known for drinking and apparent promiscuity, and is recruited by an agent named Devlin (Cary Grant) to fly to Rio and insinuate herself into the household of a spy ring led by Sebastian (Claude Rains). Sebastian once loved her, and perhaps he still does; Devlin is essentially asking her to share the spy’s bed to discover his secrets. And this she is willing to do, because by the time he asks her, she is in love—with Devlin.
All of these sexual arrangements are, of course, handled with the sort of subtle dialogue and innuendo that Hollywood used to get around the production code. There is never a moment when improper behavior is actually stated or shown, but the film leaves no doubt. By the time all of the pieces are in place, we actually feel more sympathy for Sebastian than for Devlin. He may be a spy but he loves Alicia sincerely, while Devlin may be an American agent but has used Alicia’s love to force her into the arms of another man.
Hitchcock was known for his attention to visual details. He drew storyboards of every scene before shooting it, and slyly plays against Grant’s star power in the scene introducing Devlin to the movie. At a party the night her father has been convicted, Alicia drinks to forget. The camera positions itself behind the seated Devlin, so we see only the back of his head. He anchors the shot as the camera moves left and right, following the morally ambiguous Alicia as she flirts, drinks, and tries to forget.
There are more famous shots the next morning. Alicia awakens with a hangover, and there is a gigantic foreground close-up of a glass of Alka-Seltzer (it will be paired much later in the movie with a huge foreground coffee cup that we know contains arsenic). From her point of view, she sees Devlin in the doorway, backlit and upside down. As she sits up, he rotates 180 degrees. He suggests a spy deal. She refuses, talking of her plans to take a cruise. He plays a secret recording that proves she is, after all, patriotic—despite her loose image. As the recording begins, she is in shadow. As it continues, she is in bars of light. As it ends, she is in full light. Hitchcock has choreographed the visuals so that they precisely reflect what is happening.
The film is rich with other elegant shots, the most famous beginning with the camera on a landing high above the entrance hall of Sebastian’s mansion in Rio. It ends, after one unbroken movement, with a close-up of a key in Alicia’s nervously twisting hand. The key will open the wine cellar, where Devlin (posing as a guest) will join Alicia in trying to find Sebastian’s secret. One of the bottles contains not wine but a radioactive substance used in bombs. Of course, it could contain anything—maps, codes, diamonds—because it is a MacGuffin (Hitchcock’s name for that plot element that everyone is concerned about, although it hardly matters what it is).
The Hecht screenplay is ingenious in playing the two men against each other. Sebastian, played by Rains, is smaller, more elegant, more vulnerable, and dominated by his forbidding mother (Leopoldine Konstantin). Devlin, played by Grant, is tall, physically imposing, crude at times, suspicious where Sebastian is trusting. Both men love her but the wrong man trusts her, and the plot leads to a moment of inspired ingenuity in which Devlin is able to escort Alicia out of the Nazi mansion in full view of all of the spies, and the circumstances are such that nobody can stop him. (There is a point earlier in the film where Devlin walks up the same staircase, and if you count his steps you will find that on the way down he and Alicia descend more steps than there actually are—Hitchcock’s way of prolonging the suspense.)
Throughout Hitchcock’s career, he devised stories in which elegant women, usually blond, were manipulated into situations of great danger. Hitchcock was the master manipulator, with the male actors as his surrogates. Vertigo treats this theme so openly it almost gives the game away. But look how it works in Notorious, where Devlin (like the Jimmy Stewart character in Vertigo) grooms and trains an innocent women to be exactly who he desires her to be, and then makes her do his bidding.
The great erotic moment in Vertigo is the one where the man kisses the woman of his fantasy, while the room whirls around him. There is a parallel scene in Notorious, and it was famous at the time as the longest kiss in the history of the movies. It was not, however, a single kiss, as Tim Dirks points out in his essay on the film (www.filmsite.org/noto.html). The production code forbade a kiss lasting longer than three seconds, and so Bergman and Grant alternate kissing with dialogue and eye play, while never leaving each other’s arms. The sequence begins on a balcony overlooking Rio, encompasses a telephone call and a discussion of the dinner menu, and ends with a parting at the apartment door, taking three minutes in all. The three-second rule led to a better scene; an actual 180-second kiss might look like an exercise in slobbering.
The choice of Ingrid Bergman for the role was ideal; she subtly combined the noble and the carnal. Consider Casablanca (all of the viewers of Notorious would have), in which she lives with a resistance hero but in her heart loves a scruffy bar owner, and yet emerges as an idealistic heroine. In Notorious, we never seriously doubt that she is the heroine, but we can understand why the Grant character does. She appears to be a dipsomaniac, and besides, she sleeps with Sebastian. But she does it because she loves Devlin. Devlin has difficulty in loving a woman who would do that; one is reminded of Groucho Marx, who refused to join any club that would have him as a member.
So many movies have ended in obligatory chases and shoot-outs that the ability to write a well-crafted third act has almost died out. Among its many achievements, Notorious ends well. Like clockwork, the inevitable events of the last ten minutes take place, and they all lead to the final perfect shot, in which another Nazi says to Sebastian, “Alex, will you come in, please? I wish to talk to you.” And Alex goes in, knowing he will never come out alive.
Out of the Past
NO MPAA RATING, 97 m., 1947
Robert Mitchum (Jeff Bailey), Jane Greer (Kathie Moffat), Kirk Douglas (Whit Sterling), Virginia Huston (Ann), Dickie Moore (Jimmy), Paul Valentine (Joe Stephanos), Steve Brodie (Fisher), Rhonda Fleming (Meta Carson). Directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Warren Duff. Screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring, based on his novel Build My Gallows High (both written under the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes).
Most crime movies begin in the present and move forward, but film noir coils back into the past. The noir hero is doomed before the story begins—by fate, rotten luck, or his own flawed character. Crime movies sometimes show good men who go bad. The noir hero is never good, just kidding himself, living in ignorance of his dark side until events demonstrate it to him.
Out of the Past (1947) is one of the greatest of all film noirs, the story of a man who tries to break with his past and his weakness and start over again in a new town, with a new job and a new girl. The movie stars Robert Mitchum, whose weary eyes and laconic voice, whose very presence as a violent man wrapped in indifference, made him an archetypal noir actor. The story opens before we’ve even seen him, as trouble comes to town looking for him. A man from his past has seen him pumping gas, and now his old life reaches out and pulls him back.