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Post by Fading Fast on Mar 11, 2024 9:17:54 GMT
Notorious from 1946 with Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains and Leopoldine Konstantin
A funny thing about Alfred Hitchcock movies is that almost all of the pictures from the "master of suspense" are really love stories with a suspense wrapper. Notorious is one of his best movies in no small part because it's one of his best love stories.
Ingrid Bergman plays the daughter of a convicted German spy who, with the war now over, is a wanton party girl in Florida. The United States Government, knowing she had an American mother, wants to recruit her to spy on an enclave of German expat Nazis in Brazil.
Despite her dicey character, the US believes her father's imprisonment by the United States will give her immediate credibility with the Nazis. Cary Grant, playing the US agent who would be Bergman's handler, has the responsibility of convincing her to take the job.
After a bumpy start, Grant and Bergman begin an affair, which Bergman says has made her a "changed" woman. Still, when Grant doesn't object, she accepts the job to spy knowing she'll have to make "nice nice" in the sheets with a German played by Claude Rains.
Grant is angry that Bergman accepted the position and Bergman is angry that he let her, but they have a job to do. Hence, now down in Brazil, Bergman flirts with Rains because he and his very Teutonic mother, played by Leopoldine Konstantin, are the center of the expat Nazi cabal.
Bergman gets close to Rains and eventually marries him - anything for the cause, apparently - which drops her right in the middle of the scheming Nazis as they use Rains and his mother's mansion for their headquarters.
Employing one of Hitchcock's most famous macguffins, the unrepentant Nazis plan to leverage uranium as part of their strategy to resurrect the Reich. For Hitch's purposes, it gives Bergman something - the uranium intriguingly hidden in wine bottles - to find.
From here, the movie is Grant denying he cares that he whored Bergman for his government and Bergman denying that she minds being whored. Yet still, they work well together trying to unravel the German plot.
When Konstantin, who is much smarter than her son, finds out that Bergman, her son's wife, is an American spy, she utters to her son one of the great lines in movie history, "We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity, for a time." But are they?
The climax, no spoilers coming, has Rains and Konstantin slowly trying to poison Bergman to death, so that the other Germans won't discover her true identity. Grant, thus, is forced to balance the value of the mission versus the value of the life of the woman he loves.
It's perfect Hitchcock. Bergman is excellent as the beautiful, icy blonde with a surprisingly innate Mata Hari skillset. Grant, too, is well cast as the man who finds himself in love with a woman he sends off to sleep with another man. That angry friction is the glue in the film.
After Grant and Bergman fall in love, they both aggressively hurt each other, while we know they still love each other. Their meetings as spy and handler crackle with sexual tension, ignited by the complex interplay of the love and hate they feel for each other.
Rains, too, is smartly cast as the German mama's boy who falls for the wrong woman and then comes crying to mama to save him. But it's Konstantin's portrayal of a cold and ruthless Nazi mother that gives the picture its atmosphere of genuine evil.
Hitchcock, as always, framed every scene, every shot, every angle and every shadow almost perfectly. He even has you on edge as a bottle of wine teeters on a shelf. It's obviously constructed, but beautifully so.
Yet after watching Notorious, it's not really Nazis, spying, uranium or a potentially resurrected Reich that you're thinking about, it's Bergman and Grant's bumpy love affair that matters. So much so, one might even think that Hitch was just a romantic at heart.
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Post by Andrea Doria on Mar 11, 2024 12:44:18 GMT
Great review! Now I'm thinking of all the Hitchcock films I can remember and, yes, they're all love stories. The first two I thought of were romances with bad mothers added; Marnie and The Birds.
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Post by topbilled on Mar 11, 2024 14:34:34 GMT
NOTORIOUS is a film I enjoy, even though it fails to connect with me on any profound level while I am viewing it. I suppose it’s because in some ways, it feels like the main drama is accented with slow romantic scenes and feels stretched out beyond the normal running time for such a piece.
This isn’t to say the performances aren’t good, or that Hitchcock’s direction and RKO’s production values aren’t good…because they are all very good indeed. But I think it takes too long to get to the scene where Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant discover the uranium ore in the wine bottles in Claude Rains’ cellar. That is actually the first time we see them do anything remotely dangerous and exciting as espionage agents.
Also, I don’t quite buy Grant’s pushing Bergman away in the line of duty, without experiencing any sort of pain. We should see him more conflicted, even if he isn’t allowed to telegraph it openly to Bergman, when he pushes her into the assignment with Claude Rains, then has to stand by and allow her to marry Rains later on.
In fact, a scene that did not make it into the film, and might have been a good one to include, would have been where Grant decided to take a post in Spain. That decision would have been made because of the pain he felt about losing Bergman. If we had seen him visit boss Louis Calhern and suddenly request a change in location, instead of learning about it after the fact, we may have seen something genuine in him earlier in the movie.
As for Bergman’s relationship with Rains in the movie, much of that develops rather slowly. It takes a while for her to realize she needs to get her hands on a key to the wine cellar. And then it takes awhile for her to realize her hubby and wicked mother-in-law are gaslighting her. How could a woman who was raised the daughter of a Nazi be so dense about the way people operate in the shadows?
She was obviously savvy during her days as a prostitute / gold digger and should possess understanding of sordid human behavior. But when she marries Rains, she suddenly becomes rather naive. Part of the problem is how Bergman approaches the material, delving too much into ‘victim’ mode and thus losing some of the stronger feminine aspects of what she should be portraying on screen.
Oh, I should add that there was a real-life counterpart to Alicia Huberman Sebastian. An American model/actress named Aline Griffith was recruited by the O.S.S. during the war years for espionage in Spain. She ended up marrying a count, became known as Aline Countess of Romanones and detailed some of her exploits as a spy in a trilogy of bestsellers in the 1980s and 1990s.
The first book is called The Spy Wore Red. In The Spy Wore Red, Aline describes how she underwent basic training as a spy at a house in Virginia just outside the nation’s capitol. Surely Ingrid Bergman’s character in NOTORIOUS would have required similar training. Would they really have thrown her into such a dangerous situation with Rains, his mother and fellow Nazis with only a bit of witty banter and ear nibbling by Cary Grant as the main source of her education?
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Post by Andrea Doria on Mar 11, 2024 14:47:51 GMT
I wondered about all that, too. Asking a young woman to mix with Nazis as a flirtatious party girl would have been bad enough, I can't believe they would go so far as to ask any woman to actually marry a man for spying purposes. Doesn't that go against the morals of a largely Christian nation?
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Post by topbilled on Mar 11, 2024 14:57:33 GMT
I wondered about all that, too. Asking a young woman to mix with Nazis as a flirtatious party girl would have been bad enough, I can't believe they would go so far as to ask any woman to actually marry a man for spying purposes. Doesn't that go against the morals of a largely Christian nation? Of course Hitchcock and screenwriter Ben Hecht have it seem like Alicia is quite willing to go along with marrying Sebastian, because Devlin's been rejecting her. But I still don't think the U.S. government would have even flown her down to Rio and put her anywhere in reach of Rains and his mother if they hadn't given her some basic survival training.
And speaking of the mother, I find it hard to believe she had escaped suspicion by the Americans all this time. I am sure Alicia would have been warned to be careful around her.
A big hole in the movie is that they did not develop any sort of S.O.S. distress signal, where if Alicia got in trouble there was another spy (besides Devlin) working in the house that could send a message to Devlin or the boss. It's highly unrealistic that she is completely on her own in that environment, with nobody but Devlin to help her. Also, the minute she fails to miss a meeting with Devlin, they should have moved in right away.
I really don't think Hitchcock and Hecht fully researched how undercover agents are trained and are able to deal with dangerous situations quickly.
In Aline's books, she talks about how she was trained to glean details about enemies through gossip at parties. Since there is a big party scene in this movie, we could very easily have seen Alicia doing a bit of casual eavesdropping or having what seemed to be random chit chat with guests, but actually gathering information about the Nazis this way. Then when she had her various run-ins with Devlin, it wasn't just about the key to the wine cellar, it was additional details of things she had heard at the party.
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Post by topbilled on Mar 11, 2024 15:09:35 GMT
More about Aline:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aline_Griffith,_Countess_of_Romanones
The trilogy she wrote about her experiences as a spy includes these bestsellers:
The Spy Wore Red The Spy Went Dancing The Spy Wore Silk
There was a later book, The Well-Mannered Assassin, which is more a work of fiction but still draws on her knowledge as a spy.
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Post by Andrea Doria on Mar 11, 2024 15:35:50 GMT
Oh Aline is very interesting! I'd definitely watch a movie about her, 3 degrees when women rarely went to college, followed by a modeling career before spying, and finishing off by marrying a count and hosting great parties.
Here she is using her dachshund as a shield. I do that with mine sometimes.
Oh alright, I'll play cards with you. I'm afraid I'm not very good. Shall we play for money?
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Post by Fading Fast on Mar 11, 2024 15:42:09 GMT
I think a big part of what is going on and it's why I focused on the love story in my review is Hitchcock/Hecht didn't really care about the spy stuff - which is why Topbilled is correct in picking that part of the movie apart - as the love story is the movie.
It follows the usual romcom arc - a meet-cute, then initial fighting ("you're a whore", "you're a cop"), then we love each other (kissy-kissy), then conflict/misunderstanding (the mission leading to "you let yourself be whored out", "you didn't stop them from whoring me out or even ask me not to"), that is the meat of the movie, and, then, the last-minute reconciliation, apology and kissy-kissy again. It's all a macguffin except for the love story.
Hitch almost always does that: he tells a love story with everything else being a not really believable macguffin. Just picking on one other movie, "The Lady Vanishes" is full of spy-stuff plot holes that are all but laughable, but darn it, you want to see Lockwood and Redgrave have their happily ever after.
To emphasize, Topbilled makes great points - the spy story is full of holes, silliness and unrealistic decisions and actions - but IMO, that's cause Hitch only uses the spy stuff to advance the love story and doesn't care if the spy stuff is inaccurate. He has all but said that in interviews.
Also, thank you, Topbilled, I'm going to look into that trilogy.
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