Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946): Nazis! We Hate Those Guys!

Believe it or not, my first experience with Notorious was when I saw, not Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s intense 1946 romantic thriller, but rather a 1992 made-for-TV retread starring John Shea (Missing) and Jenny Robertson (Bull Durham), because the video rental folks didn’t have the original version at the time!  Really?  Really?!  Please!  I remember my dear late mom and me having a better time fun poking fun at the dull, witless script!  What were they thinking with their silly attempts to “improve” upon it?  It’s like those wackos in H.P. Lovecraft’s supernatural stories about the evil monster Cthulu, whose followers always think the beast will be their best buddy after they summon it, only to be stunned when the monster lays waste to the villains.  It just goes to show that when it comes to classic movies, film fans must accept no substitutes! 

Screenwriter Ben Hecht (Spellbound; His Girl Friday) introduces us viewers to the beautiful but troubled Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman from Casablanca; her Oscar-winners Gaslight and Murder on the Orient Express) has been a party girl and a heavy drinker for some time.  In fact, she’s only been along for the ride in life ever since her father was convicted of treason and collaborating with the enemy.  Since then, Alicia broke family ties with her disgraced father, and made booze her constant companion, aside from partying.  After another one of her parties, Alicia chats up a potential conquest, a handsome stranger.  When Alicia speeds way past the speed limit without the cop him giving him a summons,  she realizes the handsome stranger is a Fed, one T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant, who also worked with Hitchcock on  Suspicion and North by Northwest), and boy, is she furious when she discovers he’s a Fed!  Dev doesn’t let Alicia’s wildcat antics bother him—it’s just lights out for Alicia!  The next morning, she wakes up at Dev’s place with a splitting headache, a glass of milk (always popular in Hitchcock movies), and bittersweet news:  Alicia’s father has died by his own hand.  Even Alicia herself is surprised at her own unexpected sorrow for her late father: “I don’t know why I should feel so bad.  When he told me a few years ago what he was, everything went to pot.  I didn’t care what happened to me.  But now I remember how nice he was he once was, how nice we both were, very nice. It’s a very curious feeling, as if something had happened to me and not to him.  You see, I don’t have to hate him anymore, or myself.”

Make a note of that, Crime-stoppers!

From there, Alicia and Dev work with spymaster Paul Prescott (Louis Calhern of Duck Soup; The Asphalt Jungle) and his Washington colleagues, who send her and Dev to infiltrate the Nazi scum in Rio (by the sea-o)!  Don’t let their suave clothes and good manners fool you—they’re no-goodniks, no matter how sensitive and dashing they look underneath it all!  With Alicia sobering up, both she and Dev succumb to each other’s magnetism and they can’t help falling in love with each other, in spite of the fact that they both have more issues than a Hudson’s News stand!   Dev can be a prickly pear in any case, considering his serious trust issues where women are concerned.  In fact, sometimes Notorious feels like a version of The Lost Weekend with sexier stars!  But when Alicia and Dev do let their hair down, those scenes are among the hottest, most romantic scenes on film; I’m surprised the film stock didn’t simply burst into flames!  Notice how cold Dev acts when Prescott mentions how their main target, Alexander Sebastian (Oscar nominee Claude Rains from The Invisible Man; Casablanca) acts toward Dev when Prescott mentions Alicia’s long-ago “hunger” for Alicia when he was in love with her.  Tsk, tsk, Devlin sure isn’t being very business-like!   What would James Bond say?

Emile freaks out when it seems he’s got the wrong
bottle of wine at dinner.  Maybe he’d prefer a nice Ripple?
Or maybe cement shoes? 

Alicia makes contact with Alex, thanks to the old runaway horse trick, and suave Alex and Alicia pick up where they left off, while Dev acts like a jealous lover instead of the cool spy-type guy he needs to be on this assignment.   It’s amazing any work gets done at all with these two, especially when jealous Alex takes the next big step: marrying Alicia!   Prescott thinks it’s a swell idea; now it’ll be even easier for the new Mrs. Sebastian to keep her eyes and ears on the Nazi scum, to Prescott’s delight and Devlin’s passive-aggressive frustration!   Frankly, Devlin is especially in danger of shooting himself in the foot, perhaps literally!  Someone needs to give those crazy kids a time out, or maybe just a smack in the head!  No doubt it must annoy Dev no end that Alex is so suave and attentive to his lovely new wife.  Too bad Alex is both a Nazi and an insecure older man trying to keep his new bride happy.  Sheesh, where’s Ingrid Bergman in another romantic Hitchcock thriller when you need her:  Dr. Constance Petersen from Spellbound! 

A key moment in the film!

Instead of a honeymoon, our sexy spies throw a party to celebrate the newlyweds, with their old pal Dev keeping their eyes and ears open.  They hit pay dirt when Dev accidentally knocks over a wine bottle that’s actually “vintage sand!”  In fact, it's actually metal ore; that’s one way to perk up a honeymoon, as well as giving Dev and Alicia an opportunity for some romance, by George!  But  jealous Mama Sebastian (the regal, superb Leopoldine Konstantin) has Alicia’s number, and it’s gonna come up snake-eyes unless Dev stops acting like a jealous dolt and saves Alicia so that, as Grant said in North By Northwest: “You and I are going to do a lot of apologizing in private!”

Ingrid Bergman gives one of her very best performances as Alicia, juggling danger and romance in a relationship that’s complicated, to say the least!  Dev can be glacial or sizzlingly romantic at the blink of an eye.  The “Good Guys” essentially force Alicia to prostitute herself by marrying her off to suave Alex.   The hell of it is that Alex, an old friend of her father’s, is far more loving and romantic than Dev, despite his insecurity about his beautiful young wife, especially with Alex’s Mother-in-Law From Hell.  In any case, this sure tosses a monkey wrench into Alicia’s sizzling yet stormy romance with Dev!  It’s one of the most adult movies Hitchcock ever made; despite Bergman and Rains seemingly sleeping in separate beds, this film was quite adult for its era.  It’s not only a crackerjack espionage thriller, but also a moving, disturbing look into the dark recesses of the human heart.

For goodness sakes, hasn’t
Bing Crosby ‘s horse come in yet? 

In Robert A. Harris & Michael S. Lasky’s book The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Citadel Press, 1976), Hitchcock realized he and co-author Ben Hecht  (Spellbound; His Girl Friday), had turned out to be ahead of their time when they decided to make uranium metal ore Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, a.k.a the item that makes our heroes hot and bothered, suspense-wise!  Indeed, Hitchcock used the uranium gambit even before it was used at Hiroshima!  Nobody was supposed to know about its powers, or that it would be used in an atom bomb for the movie.  In fact, producer David O. Selznick thought it was such a preposterous idea that instead of producing Notorious himself, Selznick sold the package to RKO (including Duel in the Sun).  Apparently even having the term “uranium” in the script was scaring the producers!  I was amazed by the visuals of Director of Photography Ted Tetzlaff (My Man Godfrey; The More the Merrier), especially that long shot at the party that ends on the key in Alicia’s hand—wow!

 Can't you fix it for me? For old times' sake? 

Hitchcock’s talented daughter Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell was a triple threat herself, having co-starred in her father’s films;  Stage Fright was her debut); then Strangers on a Train; (for which she deserved an Oscar nomination, if you ask me); Psycho; and many appearances on TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents as she eventually became a producer.  I was lucky enough to interview Pat (if I may be so bold) in 1990 for Video Review, and she explained:  “My father was really able to do all the things he enjoyed doing artistically and technically.   He also used brilliant actors down to the smallest parts, like the Germans—especially Leopoldine Konstantin as Alex Sebastion’s mother…The only problem was that because of the politically sensitive plot about making a bomb out of uranium, my family was followed by the FBI for months.”  How’s that for cinematic realism?

The whole cast is absolutely stellar, including the always-suave Rains, terrific in a complex role that requires him to be believable not only as a suave lover and villain, but also a doting yet jealous and insecure husband of a lovely young wife, as well as being a villain, and having to put up with a domineering mother to boot;  to quote North by Northwest, I'm beginning to think Rains was underpaid!  I think his Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination was richly deserved.   (I understand Rains was quite the romantic lover in real life!)   At times, I almost felt sorry for Alex, knowing Alicia was just stringing him along and coping—and even worse, he has to put up with The Mother From Hell, too, always a staple in Hitchcock’s wicked little arsenal!   With a forbidding matron of a mom like Mme. Leopoldine Konstantin as Alex’s mother, it’s no wonder Alex is still under Mama’s thumb despite his suave manners.  I must admit that the first time I watched the climactic love/rescue scene with Alicia and Dev’s “pillow talk,” in which Dev rescues Alicia from an agonizing death from slow poison had seemed a little corny at first.  But when I watched it again after all this time, now with a fresh outlook, I found it touching my heart!  Roy Webb’s swoony score is excellent, yet sometimes I wish I could somehow build a time machine or Way-Back Machine or the like, so that Hitchcock could have met and worked with Bernard Herrmann earlier in his career!

Claude Rains was only 5' 6" tall, a good three inches shorter than Bergman.  They were able to hide the difference when everyone was moving about, and in scenes where they stood next to each other, he just stood on a small platform.  But when he was moving and Ingrid stood still, they had to rely on strategically-placed ramps he'd walk up as he approached.  Watch how much taller he gets as he walks towards the camera here!

 

Steve Martin used footage from Notorious in his comedy Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.  Here's how two scenes from very different parts of the film were stitched into one very differently-toned one!

Try to Remember: The Amnesia Trilogy. Part 3: SPELLBOUND

To wrap up The Amnesia Trilogy, here’s the amnesia film that started it all, at least for me: Alfred Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning thriller Spellbound.  I first saw it on WPIX-TV on a Sunday afternoon when I was a youngster in the Bronx. After the literally breezy opening credits, Spellbound sets the stage with a foreword by the film’s medical advisor, Dr. May Romm (more about her shortly):

“Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear…..and the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul.”

Got all that? Yeah, it may sound quaint in today’s more sophisticated, complicated world, but somehow I find Dr. Romm’s foreword (which has also been attributed to screenwriter Ben Hecht) endearingly earnest. In fact, Spellbound’s more dated aspects, like its approach to psychotherapy, intrigues me when I think of how these things have changed over time.

The lovely, luminous, gentle-voiced Ingrid Bergman plays Dr. Constance Petersen, the youngest member of the crackpot, er, crack team of psychoanalysts at Green Manors, a posh psychiatric institution. Constance brims with book smarts, but her people smarts still need fine-tuning. Dr. Fleurot (John Emory), who’s a bit of a scholarly wolf in shrink’s clothing, is always trying to pitch woo at Constance, but she’s just not that into him. He says, “You approach all your problems with an ice pack on your head….I’m trying to convince you that your lack of human and emotional experience is bad for you as a doctor...and fatal for you as a woman.” Constance wryly replies, “I’ve heard that argument from a number of amorous psychiatrists who all wanted to make a better doctor of me.”

Doctor on Call-Me-Anytime!

If you could see Constance’s feet now, you’d see bobby sox on her feet! *swoon!*

Well, I can tell you from family therapy experience that sometimes it takes a few tries with a few different therapists to find one you really click with—and Constance soon discovers love can work that way, too, when Green Manors’ elderly head honcho Dr. Murchison (veteran Hitchcock player Leo G. Carroll) is about to retire, albeit reluctantly. Constance and the staff are sorry to see Dr. Murchison go, even though his imminent replacement, the renowned Dr. Anthony Edwardes, is supposed to be hot stuff. “Hot” is the word for the ruggedly handsome new doc on the block, especially considering Dr. Edwardes is played by young Gregory Peck, who became an Oscar nominee himself that year for The Keys of the Kingdom. (Little did Peck know he’d be playing another amnesiac in peril twenty years later in another New York-set suspense film, the 1965 thriller Mirage!) Cool Constance’s pleasant but prim demeanor thaws rapidly, Dr. Edwardes’ agitation at the sight of  lines scratched into a tablecloth notwithstanding, and those crazy kids fall in love lickety-split. Heck, how could anyone not fall in love with Bergman and Peck in this movie, with both of them at the peak of their yumminess? I can’t help smiling every time I see the scene with Constance and Edwardes (I’ve never once heard our heroine call him “Anthony” in the film’s early scenes) on their impromptu get-to-know-you picnic in the sunshine, and the way she dreamily accepts a sandwich from him. She says, “Liverwurst” as it if were the loveliest word she’s ever heard, bless her heart!

Those who scratch the tablecloth do not get fruit cup!

When Dr. Edwardes doesn’t recognize a caller’s voice, he’s initially annoyed, then laughs it off as a practical joke. Moreover, Dr. Edwardes takes a personal interest in Mr. Garmes (Norman Lloyd, frequent Hitchcock player and later producer of TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour), a patient with a guilt complex about his late father. Garmes also seems to be way too intrigued with knives and letter-openers. When Garmes tries to kill himself, Constance and Edwardes assist at the emergency surgery. But to everyone’s shock, Edwardes freaks out and faints. In fact, this is the first of four fainting spells Dr. Edwardes has over the course of the movie. If you happen to have a thing for watching handsome men being rendered unconscious, Spellbound is your cup of Sleepytime Tea!

With a few more jokes and scientific types, we’d have Ball of Fire!

Uh-oh! Someone’s got some ‘splainin’ to do!

Love opens doors for Constance

Constance realizes what’s up when she compares the signature on Dr. Edwardes’ autographed book to a note he’d left for her. Turns out Dr. Dreamboat is an impostor with amnesia, and the lovebirds have to figure out why and how! They’d better hurry, because the initials “J.B.” on his cigarette case are their only clue to his real identity. But the jig’s up when Dr. Edwardes’ worried office assistant comes to Green Manors herself, confirming the ruse. Constance ends up playing footsie with a note J.B. had slipped under her door when the local police drop by. Apparently the real Dr. Edwardes is missing and presumed dead, with J.B. as a person of interest! Poor Constance—she lets her hair down for once, falls in love, and wouldn’t you know the guy might be a killer? No wonder more and more people meet through online dating services nowadays! Anyway, before he fled, J.B. left Constance a note saying he can be reached at the Empire State Hotel in NYC until the heat dies down. For the rest of the film, Constance is essentially a female detective, a comparatively rare bird in suspense stories. Cool! She can start by delving deeper into why J.B. resents smug women. Smugness is infuriating in both genders, but J.B. doesn’t seem to mind smug men!

Aww, J.B. sleeps so cute! (Faint #1)

When she hits NYC, Constance gets some unexpected but welcome help from the house detective (Bill Goodwin, who was also the announcer for The Burns and Allen Show on both CBS and NBC), who pegs Constance as a gal in trouble, “a schoolteacher or librarian.” I love the way the hotel dick comes so close and yet so far in his assessment of her as he helps her in his amateur “psychologist” capacity without revealing her mission! Oh, and what would a Hitchcock movie be without one of the director’s famous cameos? It’s in this very scene, about 37 minutes into the movie; you’ll see Hitch walking out of an elevator at the Empire State Hotel, wearing a fedora, carrying a violin case and smoking a cigarette. If you can’t wait that long, go back to the beginning of this blog post and click here for the trailer.

Ground floor, Hitchcock cameo, everybody off!

Pesky tourist Wallace Ford puts the “Pitts” in “Pittsburgh”!

Danger between the lines!

Once Constance and J.B. are reunited (and it feels so good), they’re able to figure out that J.B. is a doctor (“The eminent Doctor X,” he says ruefully). They also deduce that J.B. must have been with the real—and still missing and presumed dead—Dr. Edwardes when foul play apparently befell him. J.B. feels this is only further proof that he must have knocked off Dr. Edwardes. Also, J.B. has burn scars on his left hand, with a skin graft, and he relives the pain and horror of his accident as if it was happening all over again, poor guy. Well, at least it’s a start—but when the bellboy brings up the afternoon papers, there’s an article about the manhunt, including a lovely photo of Constance! Oops, gotta run—to Pennsylvania Station for train tickets to wherever it was that J.B. went with Dr. Edwardes. Constance figures when J.B. left the mountains after Dr. Edwardes’ accident, he must have passed through New York, so asking for train tickets might jog his memory. Poor J.B. can only stammer “Rome,” then collapse. If J.B. is gonna have these dizzy/fainting spells on a regular basis, I think Constance should get a wheelchair for him! So all roads lead our fugitive sweethearts not to Rome, but to Grand Central and Rochester, NY to see Constance’s dear old professor and fellow psychoanalyst Dr. Alex Brulov (played by Michael Chekhov, famed acting teacher, former member of the Moscow Art Theater, and nephew of playwright Anton Chekhov. Alex was one of my favorite Spellbound characters, so I was happy to learn he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his delightful performance).  On the way, Constance helps J.B. remember the fiery wartime plane crash in which he was burned, reliving the horror: “I hated killing. I can remember that much….”

One perk to J.B.’s fainting spells; he’s got the lovely and devoted Constance to catch him!
(Faint #2)

Yikes! Talk about unwanted publicity!

When our fugitive couple reaches Alex’s Rochester home, claiming they’re honeymooning newlyweds, there’s a nice little scene with two police detectives (Art Baker and Regis Toomey of Burke’s Law), with one of them complaining about his clingy mother and accusations of being a “mama’s boy.” Even John Law has neuroses! And once again, poor J.B. can’t catch a break: the line pattern on the coverlet upsets him so badly that he faints again. When he wakes up after everyone’s asleep, the poor guy gets freaked out again by the relentlessly white bathroom fixtures; with his white phobia, he can’t even wash up or shave, though he  seems perfectly capable of wandering dazedly through Alex’s house with a straight razor. Could’ve been worse, though; Spellbound could’ve taken place in the 1970s, with all those harvest gold and avocado green fixtures! Luckily, Alex turns out to be wilier than Constance gave him credit for; he slips bromides into J.B.’s milk, and it’s beddy-bye time!

“You like close shaves, don’t you?”

From the folks who brought you the Fisticam: The Dairycam!

But Alex, this is a good boy...this is a nice boy...this is a mother's angel!  (Faint #3)

Next time J.B. comes over, we’re giving him the plastic cups! (4th and Final Faint!)

It takes lots of convincing, but the next day, Constance and Alex are able to get J.B. on the fast track toward helping him find out who he is and what happened to Dr. Edwardes. One more fainting spell and a look out the window on this snowy day, and our intrepid heroes realize the lines that freaked out J.B. were skiing tracks in the snow!  That’s where the dream sequence comes in:
 

Sled tracks on a snowy day gives our heroes the major clue they need: Dr. Edwardes had been into sports, saying it was a boon to the treatment of mental disorders. That’s why the dark lines in the white snow freaked out J.B. so severely. Using the notes from J.B.’s dream, they figure out that J.B. and Dr. E. went to Gabriel Valley for what turned out to be their ill-fated therapy vacation. Constance and J.B. go there to recreate the events leading to Dr. Edwardes’ death. The couple opts for downhill skiing, and the tension is almost unbearable as J.B. starts to remember the horrible thing he was trying to forget: the accidental death of his little brother as young J.B. tried to yell warnings to him. The point of impact where the poor kid is impaled lasts only seconds, but it still breaks my heart and chills me to the bone every time I see Spellbound. But the evil spell is broken as J.B. grabs Constance and saves her from flying off the cliff in the proverbial nick of time. Now they can forget the past and forge a future together as husband and wife, as well as Doctor and Doctor Ballantine (the “J” is for “John”). Nice day for a white wedding….

Or is it? When the police catch up with them, they confirm that Dr. Edwardes’ body is where our heroes deduced it would be, all right—but they didn’t figure on finding the cause of death was a bullet! After a montage of Constance desperately trying to convince the jury that John is innocent,to no avail, our heartbroken heroine returns to Green Manors. Ah, but the film and the surprises aren’t over just yet:

The screenplay by Ben Hecht and Angus MacPhail is loosely based on Francis Beeding’s 1927 novel The House of Dr. Edwardes; indeed, the opening credits specifically say “Suggested by Francis Beeding’s novel The House of Dr. Edwardes.” I’ve read in various sources that the original novel was a lot more gimmicky and Gothic-y. Hitchcock had no qualms about retooling a novel to serve his movie’s needs, so he, Hecht, and MacPhail improved upon it. But there’s one writer few can improve upon: William Shakespeare, whose lines from Julius Caesar open Spellbound with a most appropriate quote: “The fault…is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Spellbound was released in theaters in 1945, when World War 2 ended and soldiers were coming home suffering from shell shock, nightmares, and “battle fatigue” (or as we know it today, PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder), so it was inevitable that Spellbound would strike a chord with moviegoers at that time (and even now, really, since war is unfortunately still with us). It also struck a chord with its producer, David O. Selznick, since he was undergoing psychoanalysis on account of his own family tragedy: Selznick’s brother Myron, a top Hollywood agent, had died after many years of alcoholism. On top of that, Selznick’s marriage broke up, so he wound up in therapy with psychoanalyst/psychiatrist Dr. May Romm. Interestingly, in 1944, the year before Spellbound was released, life during wartime was the subject of another acclaimed Selznick drama, Since You Went Away (which I must confess is known here at Team Bartilucci H.Q. as one of the most depressing movies ever made! But I digress….)

Miklós Rózsa is one of my favorite composers, and it’s no wonder that he won an Oscar for his glorious Spellbound score! It sets the film’s tone in every way, its theremin weaving foreboding throughout the emotion-packed, lushly romantic orchestrations. Ironically, according to Wikipedia, Selznick originally wanted a musical score from future Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann, another favorite of mine! But Herrmann wasn’t available, so Rózsa got the gig. Indeed, Spellbound also received five other Oscar nominations, not only for Chekhov’s supporting performance (James Dunn won for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), but also for George Barnes’ gorgeous black-and-white cinematography (The Picture of Dorian Gray won); Jack Cosgrove’s special photographic effects (the Oscar went to another of my favorite movies, the Danny Kaye comedy Wonder Man); Hitchcock’s direction; and a Best Picture nomination for Selznick International (though I can't complain about The Lost Weekend winning the prize). Also, Ingrid Bergman won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for her performance. It’s also worth noting that Rhonda Fleming, only 22 at the time, made quite an impressive debut in the small but memorable role of Green Manors patient Mary Carmichael, whose flirty manner and beauty disguises a vicious hatred of men. Team Bartilucci favorite Dave Willock of the animated Hanna-Barbera series Wacky Races and Robert Aldrich films such as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte played the bellboy who recognized Constance in New York. Vinnie recognized Willock’s voice; he's got an ear for such things, bless him. Many folks reading this may also remember Willock from another Team B. fave, It's in the Bag. 

Hello, Dali!

The scenes in Spellbound involving Salvador Dali’s surrealism were originally going to be even more surreal and elaborate than the classic dream sequence we movie fans know and love! However, as is explained in the Spellbound DVD’s special features, the rushes showed lighting problems, and worst of all for a romantic thriller, the footage just plain wasn’t packing the emotional and visual punch that Hitchcock had hoped for. So Selznick contacted production designer William Cameron Menzies, with whom he’d worked on Gone with the Wind. Menzies redesigned the shots, and the film certainly seems to have retained the impact and entertainment value that Hitchcock & Company wanted. Heck, I could go on and on about Menzies’ own extraordinary career alone, considering that in addition to being a brilliant production designer (a title Menzies created, by the way), he was also an Oscar-winning producer, director, and screenwriter in his brilliant 50-year career—but that deserves a blog post all its own, if someone hasn’t written one about him already!

If a honeymoon on a train was good enough for Mr. & Mrs. Thornhill, it's good enough for Dr. and Dr. Ballantine!

Sweet mystery of life, at last I've found you....