So, aside from his silent film work and maybe some of his other pre-American film career, I was under the impression I had seen all of Alfred Hitchcock’s work. I have a large Hitchcock box set which has most of his films in it, and while I may not remember everything about all of them, I do know that there don’t seem to be many missing from it. The only real exception seems to be Lifeboat. So, why don’t I remember if I saw Notorious before or not? I kept thinking I should have seen it, but for the life of me, I have no recollection of it. Have I seen this one before? I don’t know.
The fact I found it on the free streaming service Tubi is also a little weird. That’s usually where I go to find stuff that isn’t anywhere else unless something weird happens. Oh well, regardless, I have seen the film now for sure.
It occurs to me as I type this that it wasn’t that long ago that I was comparing an actress in the film Children of Paradise that had, inexplicably as far as I could tell, four different men fall in love with her while I didn’t think she was some great beauty. To be clear, I could buy one or two, but four seemed a bit much. In that entry in the Stacker Challenge, I chalked it up to being used to what American films told me is beautiful, and the actress in Children of Paradise was actually in her mid-40s at the time the film was made while my example of a beautiful woman was Ingrid Bergman around the time she made Casablanca. Bergman, as I noted before, was in her mid-20s. Well, funny thing: here’s another film about a woman with multiple men falling in love with her, and this time, it’s Bergman.
Bergman plays Alicia Huberman. Alicia traveled with her father to America and became naturalized citizens from the looks of things, but Hitchcock opens his film with Alicia’s father’s conviction of treason in a Federal Court in the Southern District of Florida, getting a sentence of 20 years.
OK, a federal case in South Florida for a man many consider a traitor to the nation? That sounds like something some people would find timely right about now, but that’s all I will say about that. However, I will add that I was under the impression treason was a capital offense, so I would think Alicia’s Nazi father should be getting something far worse than 20 years in prison. However, that is also all I am going to say about that right now.
Instead, what I have here is ostensible a spy film, but, well, it feels more like a romance. Yeah, there are these expatriate Nazis who managed to escape justice after the world, agents trying to do something with uranium, and Alicia is sent to infiltrate them in part because an executive for a real-world German pharmaceutical company, Alexander Sebastian (a very non-German Claude Rains), is both a suspect and a man deeply smitten with Alicia. However, her handler/recruiter T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) is also in love with Alicia, but he’s a little put off by her former party girl ways. As such, yes, Alicia infiltrates the Nazi circle by actually marrying Sebastian, but her heart belongs to the apparently prudish Devlin.
I’d say it seems a bit weird that Cary Grant, dashing romantic lead, is the guy with a problem over a woman’s promiscuous past, but this was 1946. I don’t think the Hays Code would have been all that pleased to see a film character having any sort of sex outside of wedlock. And for what it’s worth, the film generally shows Alicia’s bigger problem is less her sleeping around and more her drinking. During his recruitment of Alicia, a woman Devlin already knows thanks to surveillance and recordings of her father, is a genuine patriot and loyal to the United States, he watches her get incredibly drunk and take him driving. And though she is pulled over, he gets her out of trouble by pulling out an ID card, and all this before the audience is told he’s a member of the American intelligence community since the card is hidden from view. If Devlin is a heroic role, he can’t exactly be someone who doesn’t uphold good Christian values.
On reflection, Grant’s most promiscuous character for a Hitchcock film is probably North by Northwest‘s Roger Thornhill, but even then, it comes from multiple marriages and divorces. He might be pulling Eva Marie Saint into bed with him on a train entering a tunnel by that film’s end, but he does so after marrying her.
Regardless, for all that this film is a spy story, the real issues for the characters come from the love triangle between Alicia, Devlin, and the suspicious Sebastian. The Nazis mean business–they will kill people they believe are a security risk somewhere off-screen–but the thing that almost costs Alicia her life isn’t that she discovered uranium hidden in a wine bottle but that she is reluctant to tell Devlin how she feels when he finds out he’s taking another assignment and she’ll be getting a new handler soon. And even then, the bigger issue seems to be she had to find out from their mutual superior than from him.
Additionally, Hitchcock shows off his chops of showing characters learning things without saying anything. A few looks around a shelf in a basement gives away that Alicia was down there while her silent looks at various bottles show she’s struggling to stay sober. I don’t know if alcoholism was something much acknowledged in 1946, but the way Hitchcock and Bergman play moments when Alicia is tempted to take a drink are well-played, and her general interest in drink means when Sebastian and his murderous mother, having learned what Alicia is really up to, start feeding the young woman poison that Devlin assumes that her sickly appearance when he sees her at a standard meeting is due to a hangover before he thinks better of it.
Hitchcock, apparently, felt this was his first attempt to tell a serious love story. He felt, according to his biographer, that he was finally mature enough as a man and a filmmaker to do so. Quite frankly, as good as the spy material is here, I think the love story works a bit better. Devlin will learn to see past Alicia’s past in time to save her, Sebastian will curse himself that the woman he loves could get him killed if he doesn’t take her out first, and Alicia is hurt that a man she has feelings for, someone she knows has something for her as well, would just leave without telling her. For all the Nazi uranium, this is really a film that works the way it does because of three people and their complicated feelings for each other.
NEXT: From one master director to another, I’m going from Hitchcock to Orson Welles. Be back soon for 1958’s Touch of Evil.
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