THE CONCOCTION OF MYSTERY AND ROMANCE:"NOTORIOUS"(1946)
English film director and producer Alfred Hitchcock's "Notorious" remains one of the most mysterious and elegant expression of his visual style.Francois Truffaut called Alfred Hitchcock's "Notorious" as "the quintessential Hitchcock film" because the master of suspense created actually a complicated romance with political elements.
Sometime in August 1944, while Alfred Hitchcock was having lunch with David O. Selznick’s story editor Margaret McDonnell, the idea for Notorious was born. Hitchcock wanted to make a film about “confidence tricks on a grand scale,” and the ongoing bloody war enabled him to create a convincing and suitable background for the parallel tension on both the personal and political plain. The central plot was inspired by John Taintor Foote’s story called “The Song of the Dragon”, published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1921.
In this film a curtain of espionage covered by Nazi plots,undercover spies and a post-war nuclear threat merged with the twisted triangle lovestory between Alicia Huberman (played by Ingrid Bergman), T.R.Devlin (played by Cary Grant) and Alexander Sebastian (played by Claude Rains).
Here Hitchcock tells the subtle tale of a beautiful woman Alicia whose "notorious" reputation (as she is the American-born daughter of a convicted Nazi spy)and frank behaviour encourages American agents to recruit her to spy on Nazis.The American agent Deviln, with whom she falls in love, convinces her to go undercover in post-war Rio.Taking advantage of her past relationship with his father's friend Sebastian, who is an undercover Nazi, the American agent captain Paul Prescott instructs Alicia to get into relationship with him and to accept Sebastian's marriage proposal for gathering the information about the Nazi. Staying at Sebastian's home Alicia collect information about Nazi activities and comes to know about the MacGuffin is a wine bottle, specifically a 1934 Pommard filled with uranium, and through the search for this MacGuffin, Hitchcock’s romance drama blossoms.
Court scene
Introducing Alicia
Devlin convinces her to go Rio
Devolpoing relationship between Devlin & Alicia
The espionage assignment
Key scene
Celler scene
Sebastian explores the true motive of Alicia
Decide to poison Alicia
In the party night, Alicia steals Sebastian’s Unica-brand wine cellar key, slips Devilin into the cellar, where they uncover what the Nazis are planning. When Sebastian discovers his wife is a spy after the key incident, he goes to his mother (played by actress Leopoldine Konstantin) who doubts Alicia from the very first.
They develop a plan to slowly poison Alicia. Killing her quickly would draw attention from Sebastian’s Nazi cohorts, and to confess that he has married an American agent would mean his own death. When Alicia and Devlin meet for one of their intermittent reporting sessions, she pretends to be hungover, hiding that she is sick. But before Sebastian and his mother can finish the job Devlin rescues Alicia leaving the helpless Alex to explain the situation to his Nazi cohorts by leading to the final perfect shot, in which another Nazi says to Sebastian, “Alex, will you come in, please? I wish to talk to you.” And Alex goes in, knowing he will never come out alive.
Devlin rescues Alicia from Sebastian's house
Helpless Sebastian in the last scene
But spy details are not the most interesting aspect about Notorious; rather, the games and suspense and romance denoted by it.Here,in the complicated love triangle Devlin is tall, physically imposing, rude at times and can't express his feelings properly for seeking Nazi secrets. Otherside, Sebastian is shorter,more elegant, more vulnerable and dominated by his forbidding mother.Alicia loves Devlin who doesn't trust her but suspicious Sebastian is trusting her. No other single Hitchcock film tells us so much about how his cinema functions, and no other Hitchcock film functions in such a thrilling, romantic way.
Generally the motive of Hitchcockian narrative to shift the narrational point of view(POV) throughout the film and favouring one character then another.As the master of suspense in "Notorious" often the audience is made share the suspense with the characters, rather than on the character's behalf. Shared suspense involves both the character and the audience being aware of a threat to the character.
The narrative of "Notorious" is structured around shared suspense where the key stealing scene and the wine celler scene at the party night. The last scene where Devlin rescues Alicia is also a shared suspense sequence.
In the last meeting where Alicia keeps her sickness as a secret also treats as a vicarious suspense sequence.
"Mystery is an intellectual process, like in a 'whodunnit'. But suspense is essentially an emotional process. You can only get suspense going by giving the audience information."-Alfred Hitchcock(Spoto,1983).
Here I discuss the vicarious suspense scene where Alicia realizes that Alex and his mother are poisoning her.The scene starts with the conversation about Alicia's sickness and planning for a vacation with the Nazi scientist Dr.Anderson whose actual name is Prof.Wilhem Renzeler (he doesn't know that Alicia is an American agent).
Paul Prescott instructs Alicia to gather information about the source of the uranium
Alicia tries to know about the source of the uranium from him. Alex repeatedly interupts to stop him. In the shot, where Dr.Anderson mistakenly takes the Alicia's coffee cup, Alex and his mother react and stop him to drink it. Then Alicia understand that she is trapped and poisoned by them. She feels hopeless and dizzy but tries to behave normal by getting out from the room and then fall unconscious.
For giving more importance,the camera is panning to follow the coffee cup and then zoom in.
Discuss vacation plan
The poisoned coffee cup is in the foreground while Alicia and Dr.Anderson are in the background
With this mise-en-scene,she presents as the mastermind of the plan
Reaction shot
When Alicia drinks the poisoned coffee,reaction shot of Sebastian and his mother
When Dr.Anderson mistakenly takes the Alicia's coffee cup,the reaction shot
POV shot of Alicia after realizing that she is poisoned by them
Using optical distortion
In the first shot of this scene, This scene from Alfred Hitchcock's "Notorious" provides an example of how a director can create a moment of perceptual subjectivity. These moments are rare in classical narrative, and in this clip only a few shots--those using optical distortion--actually qualify as perceptually subjective (although the tracking shots in the first half of the clip certainly express Alicia's realization that she has been poisoned). The use of reverberation in the soundtrack is another indicator of the character's altered state.
"Notorious" is considered by critics and scholars to mark a watershed for Hitchcock artistically, and to represent a heightened thematic maturity. His biographer, Donald Spoto, writes that "Notorious is in fact Alfred Hitchcock's first attempt—at the age of forty-six—to bring his talents to the creation of a serious love story, and its story of two men in love with Ingrid Bergman could only have been made at this stage of his life."
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