Spring of Cary: Notorious
Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs, Katja from Breath of Hallelujah and I teamed up this spring to watch Cary Grant movies for fun and then write about them.
These were movies that I picked from a list of his movies I had never seen.
This week we are on the last movie for our feature – Notorious.
Now, I want to preface this by saying that it’s going to sound like, at first, I didn’t like this film, but that isn’t true. I didn’t like it at first because I didn’t like Ingrid Bergman’s character but I eventually got swept up in it all and recognized it for being a very brilliantly written and directed film.
The movie stars Cary, Ingrid, and Claude Rains.
This is another Alfred Hitchcock Grant movie (we watched Suspicion last week) and it again showcased Hitchcock’s brilliant cinematography and directing skills.
We start with a man being remanded to the U.S. Marshal for charges of treason and from there we will be thrown into a world of espionage and mystery as we try to find out who the man is, but most importantly, who is daughter is.
We also will be thrown into yet another world where Cary is sexy and suave and the woman is conniving, heartless, and slutty, even though she’s probably slept with the same amount of people Cary has over the years. But Cary is a man and he’s cool when he sleeps around. Women are sluts. You know how it goes.
Oh, how I hate those commentaries on movies that overthink and look way too deep into the theme of the movie. Yet here I am about to do just that.
First, a bit of a summary of the movie. Alicia Huberman is the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy in 1946. T.R. Devlin is the U.S. Marshal assigned to follow her and ask her to help break up a ring of escaped Nazis hiding in Brazil. This movie was released in August of 1946. It was filmed at the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1946. It was a very timely movie at the time and I was actually sort of surprised they made a movie so quickly about what was still a very raw subject at the time. It was easy, however, to make German Nazis the bad guys in the movie because, well, they were, but they definitely were in 1946.
After watching so many movies of Cary’s in a row, I do have to say that there is a definite theme in them and this one was no different. Cary is handsome, manly, dashing, charming, and irresistible and all the women know it and love him for it. He can get them to do anything for him. Leave their families, isolate from their friends, turn their backs on their ideals, and, in the case of this movie, spy for the United States and risk their life. Not that spying against the Germans after World War II is a bad thing, of course.
If you know the history of Alfred Hitchcock, you know that he had a particular view of women and that was that they were sort of stupid and had to be molded to the wishes of the men. He had obsessive issues with women in real life and though I hate to use the term misogynistic because it’s been abused in recent years, he truly was misogynistic.
In his movies, women are often indecisive and need to be rescued by a man, yet they are also strong and have their own minds – deceptive minds with cruel intent of course. It’s a complex dichotomy but in Notorious we see Hitchcock stick with Cary being handsome and charming and Ingrid doing what he wants because of it.
As a Guardian writer shared when commenting on Hitchcock’s history with women:
“Norman Bates is Hitchcock himself, kidding himself that women are scheming devils and men are just innocent folk, acting up because they got caught in a tricky situation.”
While I do like Hitchcock’s movies, I have to admit that there is some truth in that quote and part of it was because Hitchcock had very deep issues with his own mother.
That is why so many of his movies, including this one, feature an evil mother who is behind schemes to destroy someone, usually the woman, in the movie.
There were many obvious moments in this film where I felt like the characters were just plain stupid. Like seriously, Cary keeps showing up wherever Ingrid is, even though she only met him on the plane – or so her story goes. Why would the guy she met on the plane keep showing up at parties? And the man she’s pretending to be in love with (Raines, who is the former Nazi) clearly knows the guy is more than what she says he is. Cary and Ingrid act like the bad guy should believe all their lies too. So annoying.
Like many Hitchcock movies, the mother of the former Nazi is evil and helps him figure out how to do something very bad (I won’t give away what it is in case you watch the movie.) She is more terrifying than Claude Raines and he was a former Nazi. Seriously. She’s horribly creepy. Her deceptiveness with a smile reminds me of someone in my extended family but I’ll keep that to myself for now.
All this criticism I’m offering up, though, can’t take away from the amazing cinematography and angles and use of light and shadows that Hitchcock uses to draw the viewers’ attention to the characters and their faults or to an important moment or expression. For example, there is one poignant scene when he zooms in on the guilty parties in such a unique way that I was just like, “Oh! That is brilliant.”
Yes, he was a brilliant filmmaker. A misogynist and a brilliant filmmaker. Yes, it was possible for him to be both.
Even though I sometimes get annoyed at Hitchcock’s idea that women had to be rescued, I really wanted Ingrid to be rescued in this movie – by anyone, but Cary was fine because…again…he’s good looking.
1946: Cary Grant (1904 – 1986) and Ingrid Bergman (1915 – 1982) get very close in Alfred Hitchcock’s spy thriller ‘Notorious’. (Photo by John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images)
A little trivia about the film:
Hitchcock wanted to make this film two years before it was made and he wanted Ingrid from the beginning.
He pitched the idea for the film this way: “the story of a woman sold for political purposes into sexual enslavement.”
Some think that Hitchcock maybe have gotten the idea for the plot from a short story written in 1921 by John Taintor Foote and called The Song of the Dragon.” It had appeared as a two-part serial in the Saturday Evening Post and, according to Wikipedia, “Set during World War I in New York, “The Song of the Dragon” told the tale of a theatrical producer approached by federal agents, who want his assistance in recruiting an actress he once had a relationship with to seduce the leader of a gang of enemy saboteurs.”
Whatever his inspiration, Hitchcock wrote the plot of Notorious with Ben Hecht who he wrote Spellbound with in 1944. One plot device used in the rewrites caused the FBI to begin following Hitchock. It involved uranium ore, which it later turned out was being used to build the atomic bomb. Hitchcock didn’t know this, but the FBI was worried he did when he started asking a scientist at Caltech about uranium. By August of 1945, a year before the movie was released, everyone knew about what was being used to make the bomb anyhow.
The project was originally a David Selznick production but was later passed over to RKO when Selznick got bored with it. This allowed Hitchcock to produce as well as direct and write. Selznick had 50 percent stack in the movie as part of the deal with RKO, however, and continuously harassed Hitchcock about changes he wanted.
Hitchcock ignored almost all of those suggestions. Suggestions he didn’t ignore were those by Ingrid, who he apparently worked very well with.
In fact, he made Ingrid his closest collaborator on the project, which was very unusual since, as I mentioned above – he was a misogynist in many ways.
There were some other interesting tidbits on Wikipedia but they weren’t citing sources and that drove me crazy so I’m not going to share them here.
Les Enchaines Notorious de AlfredHitchcock avec Ingrid bergman et Cary Grant 1946One thing that is mentioned there and other sources is the very sexy two-and-a-half-minute kiss in the movie, which was filmed in a way to get it past the censors of the day, who determined that kisses in a movie could not be over a certain time limit. In the scene, Cary and Ingrid’s lips aren’t locked the entire time but they are extremely close physically and they are stealing kisses between words about what they’ll have for dinner, where they will go later, etc. The actors did find it a bit awkward to walk so close together and bump mouths off and on, but it turned out to be a classic scene.
For the trailer you can click here:
https://youtu.be/EhMyp8ZvjWs
To read what Erin thinks of the movie, check out her blog either today or at a later date (she’s been super busy all week so she may not have time to write her views this week).
Kajta has also been busy and if she writes her thoughts on it she will post it on her blog.
