Saturday Night Cinema: Notorious

What a film. What a film! Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema is a masterpiece. It is as much a romance as it is a spy thriller. Under the sublime direction of Alfred Hitchcock, it features exquisite performances by Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant and Claude Rains in a romantic espionage story. The chemistry between Bergman and Grant is electrifying. The love scenes are so intense. Love, morality and evil are given equal time in this Hitchcock thriller.

It is a brilliant screenplay by the supreme Ben Hecht, whom I adore not just for his talent but for his fierce, articulate and passionate defense of the Jews and Israel. Singular hero.

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New York Times review by Bosley Crowther,  August 16, 1946

It is obvious that Alfred Hitchcock, Ben Hecht and Ingrid Bergman form a team of motion-picture makers that should be publicly and heavily endowed. For they were the ones most responsible for “Spellbound,” as director, writer and star, and now they have teamed together on another taut, superior film. It goes by the name of “Notorious” and it opened yesterday at the Music Hall. With Cary Grant as an additional asset, it is one of the most absorbing pictures of the year.

For Mr. Hecht has written and Mr. Hitchcock has directed in brilliant style a romantic melodrama which is just about as thrilling as they come—velvet smooth in dramatic action, sharp and sure in its characters
and heavily charged with the intensity of warm emotional appeal. As a matter of fact, the distinction of “Notorious” as a film is the remarkable blend of love story with expert “thriller” that it represents.

Actually, the “thriller” elements are familiar and commonplace, except in so far as Mr. Hitchcock has galvanized them into life. They comprise the routine ingredients of a South American Nazi-exile gang, an
American girl set to spy upon it and a behind-the-scenes American intelligence man. And the crux of the melodramatic action is the peril
of the girl when the nature of her assignment is discovered by one of the Nazis whom she has wed.

But the rare quality of the picture is in the uncommon character of the girl and in the drama of her relations with the American intelligence man. For here Mr. Hecht and Mr. Hitchcock have done a forthright and daring thing; they have made the girl, played by Miss
Bergman, a lady of notably loose morals. She is the logically cynical daughter of a convicted American traitor when she is pressed into this job of high-echelon spying by the confident espionage man. The
complication is that she and the latter fall passionately and genuinely in love before the demands of her assignment upon her seductive charms are revealed. And thus the unpleasant suspicions and the lacerated
feelings of the two as they deal with this dangerous major problem form the emotional drama of the film.

Obviously, that situation might seem slightly old-fashioned, too. But Mr. Hecht and Mr. Hitchcock have here treated it with sophistication and irony. There is nothing unreal or puritanical in their exposure of a
frank, grown-up amour. And Miss Bergman and Mr. Grant have played it with surprising and disturbing clarity. We do not recall a more conspicuous—yet emotionally delicate—love scene on the screen than one stretch of billing and cooing that the principals play in this film.
Yet, withal, there is rich and real emotion expressed by Miss Bergman in her role, and the integrity of her nature as she portrays it is the prop that holds the show.

Mr. Grant, who is exceptionally solid, is matched for acting honors in the cast by Claude Rains as the Nazi big-wig, to whom Miss Bergman becomes attached. Mr. Rains’ shrewd and tense performance of this
invidious character is responsible for much of the anguish that the situation creates. Reinhold Schunzel and Ivan Triesault are good, too, as Nazi worms, and a splendid touch of chilling arrogance as a German
mother is added by Madame Konstantin. Louis Calhern and Moroni Olsen are fine in minor American roles.

Check up another smash hit for a fine and experienced team.
NOTORIOUS; screen play by Ben Hecht; directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock for RKO-Radio Pictures. At the Radio City Music Hall.

Devlin . . . . . Cary Grant

Alicia Huberman . . . . . Ingrid Bergman

Alexander Sebastian . . . . . Claude Rains

Paul Prescott . . . . . Louis Calhern

Mme. Sebastian . . . . . Madame Konstantin

“Dr. Anderson” . . . . . Reinhold Schunzel

Walter Beardsley . . . . . Moroni Olsen

Eric Mathis . . . . . Ivan Triesault

Joseph . . . . . Alex Minotis

Mr. Hopkins . . . . . Wally Brown

Commodore . . . . . Sir Charles Mendl

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Thanks for sharing!