Notorious

Notorious (1946) 

Notable cast/crew: Cary Grant as Devlin.  This is his second of four films for Hitchcock.  Ingrid Bergman as Alicia Huberman.  This marks the second of three movies she made with Hitchcock.  Claude Rains as Alexander Sebastian.

Running time: 101 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Plot: Alicia Huberman's father is convicted of treason against the US government.  She meets Devlin at a party.  She flies into a drunken rage when she finds he works for the government claiming they are hounding her to try to get her, too.  He recruits her to help infiltrate a group of Nazis who are working out of Brazil following WWII.  They need to find out what is being done using Alexander Sebastian's house as a cover.  Sebastian used to be in love with Alicia which complicates things as she and Devlin have fallen in love while preparing her for this mission.  They want to use Sebastian's attraction to Alicia as their way into his operation.

It's going to take three more cups to keep me awake
through this movie

She does her job so well, Alex asks her to marry him.  Alex' mother doesn't trust her, though, and she's suspicious about the coincidence of Alicia turning up in Brazil.  They wed, and she is assigned to find a way to get into the wine cellar.  There is something about the wine cellar that has the Nazis edgy so the secret must be there.

She steals the key and smuggles it to Devlin at a party thrown by Alex.  Devlin goes to the cellar while Alicia watches the door.  While searching through the room, he accidentally breaks a bottle and finds not wine but a powdered metallic ore.  He slips out with a sample.  Alex heads to the cellar to get more wine for the party and notices his key is missing.  Having caught Devlin and Alicia outside the door earlier, he suspects what they were up to.

He gets up in the middle of the night and finds the key back on the ring.  He goes down to the cellar to check on things and discovers evidence of that they found the fake wine bottle.  Alex tells his mother that he has married an American agent.  His mother ruthlessly decides Alicia must die, and that they will poison her slowly to make it appear she has simply fallen ill.

The ore is uranium.  Now that they have this information, Devlin is transferring to Spain.  He sees Alicia and knows something is up.  He's still her handler until his transfer, and when she misses a meeting, he drops by to see how she is.  Alicia is slowly being poisoned, and she suspects it.  Devlin escorts her from the house, telling Alex if he tries to stop him he will tell his Nazi friends that Alex is married to a spy.  Alex knows this will get him killed so he begs to go with them.  Devlin leaves him to his fate instead.

MacGuffin: The uranium ore

Hitchcock cameo: Drinking champagne at the party

Hitchcock themes: 

• Stairs
• Suspense
• Spies

Verdict: This is the most wildly overrated film in Hitchcock's canon.  When you read about this film, you'll find breathless praise and talk about perfect films and best movies.  I find this inexplicable as the first half to two-thirds of the movie drags on interminably.  It's overly talky, none of the relationships are remotely believable, and it is slow-paced to the point of tedium.  That said, the last part of the movie, from the party with the cellar scene on shows that there was a decent germ of a movie buried in there.  Unfortunately, that last 40 minutes is not good enough to make up for the first 60.  Cary Grant gives a one note performance, Ingrid Bergman is passable although not pretty enough to be the femme fatale men fall in love with at first sight, and Claude Rains is too old to play a romantic rival to Grant.  Rains was made to stand on a box for several of his scenes with Ingrid Bergman. This causes his height to vary wildly throughout the film.

Hitchcock claimed that the FBI had him under surveillance for three months because the film dealt with uranium.  Hitchcock consulted Nobel Prize winner Dr. Robert Millikan on how to make an atomic bomb. He refused to answer, but confirmed that the principal ingredient, uranium, could fit in a wine bottle.

The overhyped on-again, off-again kiss between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman was designed to skirt the Hayes Code that restricted kisses to no more than three seconds each.

There are several shots looking down from above the stairs which are well done with the most well-known being the one that follows down the stairs across the room and zooms in slowly on Bergman's hand holding the wine cellar key.

Out of five bananas, I give it:

Next review: The Paradine Case