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| Secret agent Devlin (Cary Grant), looking at a hungover Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) as she looks at him from her bed in Notorious (1946). |
Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) has a lot to keep your interest—Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, espionage, Nazi villains, suspense, intrigue, romance, plus excellent camerawork. What's missing from Mr. Hitchcock's usual bag of tricks is humor. This is not a criticism. I simply enjoy Hitchcock's sense of humor, and I miss it when it isn't there.
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Pretty-boy actors, like beautiful female actors, have always had the burden of proof. Do they have acting talent or are they just pretty faces?
Early in his career, Cary Grant wasn't given much to work with. In most of those roles he was just a pretty face. From This Is the Night (1932) through The Toast of New York (1937), with one exception, he delivered one mailed-in performance after another. The exception was Sylvia Scarlet (1935) with Katharine Hepburn, the first of their four pairings. Under the direction of George Cukor, Grant received excellent reviews for his performance, and he always considered Sylvia Scarlet the breakthrough of his career.
He broadened his comic chops with notable performances in The Awful Truth (1937); Bringing Up Baby (1938), pairing him again with Katharine Hepburn; Holiday (1938), again playing opposite Katharine Hepburn; His Girl Friday (1940); My Favorite Wife (1940); and The Philadelphia Story (1940), yet another pairing with Katharine Hepburn.
It might surprise you to know that after 1934, Cary Grant was a freelancer, not under a long-term contract with any studio, free to make one-picture deals with the highest bidder. And oh, the bidding was high. He went from $750 a week to $2,500 a week virtually overnight. By 1937 he was earning $50,000 per picture plus 10% of the gross. By The Bishop's Wife (1947), he was earning $500,000 per picture.
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I'm incredulous that Ted Tetzlaff was given the title of Director of Photography on Notorious. It's incredible because most of Hitchcock's cinematographers got their credits as cinematographers, not DoPs. On most of his movies, Hitchcock was his own uncredited DoP. I don't know which of them was responsible for the camera positioning for that screenshot of Cary Grant up there.
Tetzlaff had been working his craft for twenty years, and, before Notorious, had gotten the more prestigious title only 15 times in 114 films. He was nominated for one Oscar in his 33-year career.
Tetzlaff and Hitch had a hitch of their own when Hitchcock told Tetzlaff to film Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant with a light aimed at the backs of their necks as the motorcycle cop is supposedly pulling them over. Irritated, Tetzlaff said, "Getting a bit technical, aren't you, Pop?" Perhaps it was only a coincidence: Tetzlaff retired from camerawork after Notorious and switched to directing.
[SPOILER ALERT!] Hitchcock was the first filmmaker to see the Nazi threat for what it was and to do something about it. His guerilla war against the Nazis via film was the mainstay of his work from 1935 through 1946. He went after them in The 39 Steps (1935), well before the start of World War II, although he took great pains not to identify the "enemy." His war continued with The Lady Vanishes (1938) and arguably Sabotage (1936). After Germany invaded Poland, and England entered the war, he continued his guerilla attacks with Foreign Correspondent (1940), Saboteur (1942), and Lifeboat (1944). And now, in 1946, with Hitler dead and Germany defeated and occupied by the allied countries, Hitchcock is chasing the fleeing Nazis to South America.
[SPOILER ALERT!] Ingrid Bergman's native country, Sweden, was famously neutral on the world stage and had been so since the 19th Century. This policy of neutrality continued through both World War I and World War II and is still its policy. Between the wars Sweden was a strong supporter of the League of Nations and devoted its energies to preserving the League rather than building its military. Throughout WWII it provided some assistance to both sides, although to my eyes Sweden seemed to favor the allies. And in 1942 it quickly began to rebuild its military and armaments to deter a possible Nazi invasion.
[SPOILER ALERT!] I think two things in the Notorious moviegoer's consciousness would have made Ingrid Bergman in the role of Alicia Huberman instantly credible: Bergman's Swedish background in light of her country's legendary neutrality; and the memory of her performance in Casablanca (1942) as Ilsa Lund, a Swede married to the world famous Nazi-fighter Victor Lazslo. [END OF SPOILER ALERT!]
Ingrid Bergman made her Hollywood film debut in 1939 with the remake of a 1936 Swedish film, Intermezzo. By the time she began work on Notorious, she had already worked with some of the greatest actors in the movies—Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Leslie Howard, Spencer Tracy, and Charles Boyer.
The verb "to gaslight" is a term used by psychiatrists and psychologists to describe the actions of a person or entity engaging in an elaborate, insidious, consistent, and relentless campaign of deception and psychological manipulation, usually against one victim, for the purpose of increasing the gaslighter's power over the victim by convincing the victim that his or her vision of reality is 180 degrees off. Ultimately, this campaign, if unchecked, renders the victim pathologically dependent on the gaslighter and on his thinking and feelings.
When "gaslighting" broke out of its professional moorings and came into vogue a few years ago, it retained its professional definition. But soon the verb morphed into a second definition which eliminates the pathological components and reduces it to a term that refers to repeated denials accompanied by plausible cover stories. And because of that, I assume most users have no idea where the term originated.
As most Ingrid Bergman fans would know, even when hearing "gaslighting" for the first time, the term comes from the 1944 gothic suspense classic, Gaslight. [SPOLIER ALERT!—FOR GASLIGHT (1944)] In it, Charles Boyer, playing the husband, slowly poisons the mind of his wife, Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman, so she can't tell what's real and what isn't. Throughout the movie he takes advantage of every opportunity to lie and manipulate reality to make Paula think she's going crazy.
He wants her to distrust her own eyes and ears and memory to prevent her from catching on to his longstanding criminal scheme—having murdered her Aunt Alice in her home many years earlier in a thwarted jewel robbery, having set up his encountering Paula for the first time, having maneuvered to marry her, and having maneuvered to move into her aunt's old house, he now rummages in the attic to find the precious jewels for which he had killed so long ago. Among many other shenanigans, he tells Paula she's imagining the gas lamp dim and re-illuminate by itself—am I crazy? or is the ghost of Aunt Alice doing it?—when in actuality it dims when he turns a gas lamp on in the attic and re-illuminates when he turns it off. Bergman won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in this film. [END OF GASLIGHT SPOILER ALERT!]
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David O. Selznick was a Hollywood legend, wunderkind, and ogre. As a wunderkind he produced dozens of films for M.G.M. from 1928 to 1932 and gained the notice and favor of the boss, Louis B. Mayer, as well as the hand in marriage of the boss's daughter, Irene, in 1930. As a wedding gift, Irene's father paid for the custom-building of a Beverly Hills mansion. The Selznicks divorced in 1948. Meanwhile, Selznick's star in the movie business continued to rise. He moved to Paramount and then R.K.O. where he became head of production and produced King Kong (1933) among many other films. He then returned to M.G.M. where his father-in-law gave him his own production unit. With it he produced Dinner at Eight (1933), Manhattan Melodrama (1934), David Copperfield (1935), Anna Karenina (1935), and Reckless (1935). Finally in 1936 he leased a corner of the Culver Studios backlot and formed Selznick International Pictures. His meteoric rise and his productions of A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Intermezzo (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Rebecca (1940) stand as testaments to his talent and his ambition.
The opening title says Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious is "[b]y arrangement with David O. Selznick." Selznick had contracted the key components of what would become Notorious—director Alfred Hitchcock, actors Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, and writer Ben Hecht. He sold the rights to the project to R.K.O. Studios for $800,000 and 50% of the profits so he could fund his own pet project, Duel in the Sun (1946), starring Gregory Peck and the next Mrs. Selznick, the ravishing Jennifer Jones.
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Notorious is part of The Criterion Collection (#137).
