"Notorious" spy film noir 1946 directed by Alfred Hitchcock Starring Grary Grant Ingrid Bergman Claude Rains Photoplay magazine Modern Screen magazine 1946 Κινηματογραφικά

 

Notorious

spy film noir (1946)

directed by Alfred Hitchcock

   Starring

Gary Grant

Ingrid Bergman

Claude Rains

Photoplay magazine October 1946

Modern Screen magazine November 1946

Κινηματογραφικά

 

 

 

 

( προωθητική αφίσσα της ταινίας – 1946 )

 

 

Photoplay magazine October 1946

 

 

 

Notorious (RKO)  

 

  Wrapped up by Hitchcock and delivered by competents Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant and Claude Rains, this story of intrigue south of the border comes through as something to talk about.

   It gets off to a slow start: Miss Bergman is the daughter of a traitor but is a patriot at heart; she is reformed from a drink-and-be-merry life by secret agent Cary Grant and sets off with him to Rio to be a government agent. Love comes flying in the plane window and in a week’s time is there to stay. This haste is necessary, since romance is but a prelude to the real plot, a humdinger that keeps you edging forward on your seat until the last episode, a classic in suspense.

   There is no attempt at too much window dressing; thanks to good direction and good acting, the picture is played quietly without too many heroics on the part of Grant or too much melodrama from the villains. As a result, the film gains in authenticity.

   The Bergman technique is tops; Grant does his more or less routine job well. Claude Rains turns into a bad man with complete ease, but we will admit it is somewhat of a shock to see that gentleman, usually the noble square-shooter, perpetrating such a horrible deed as he does in this one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Modern Screen magazine November 1946

 

 

   In “Notorious,” Alfred Hitchcock has created a shattering—but welcome—novelty in female spies.

  He has flung the kohl-eyed Mata Hari type of adventuress into the cinematic dustbin and craftily built his melodrama around an apple-cheeked, soft-voiced, broadshouldered clinging vine who looks as if she would far rather play hockey than cops and robbers.

   The script calls this new brand of secret agent “Alicia Huberman,” and infers strongly that she is no better than she should be. But though she is shown reeling across the crest of the drunkenest party since the flapper age, stubbornly speeding through the Miami night to the great peril of a handsome government agent, awakening with a vertiginous hangover and pursuing the hero through a hotel suite with a series of the most relentless kisses ever recorded on celluloid, she is still Ingrid Bergman—as robust as the 4-H champion of Minnesota, as wholesome as the text on a package of Wheaties.

   “Suspense,” however, does not depend on veils and incense, and Mr. Hitchcock demonstrates in this instance that he can concoct as many goose-bumps and refrigerated spines with a spy in a schoolgirl frock as his old-fashioned predecessors achieved with black satin, pounds of mascara, and pallor that suggested tuberculosis, if not opium.

   Indeed, it is quite possible that he derives a good deal of the tension in “Notorious” out of the fact that his heroine is an amateur spy on a professional mission, brave but unsure, beautiful but clumsy, and so emotionally beffundled that the chief mystery in-the picture is why she didn’t drive the entire staff of the U. S. intelligence department into a collective nervous breakdown.

   I belong to the school of whodunit, whogetsit fans that considers it shocking, if not boring, to reveal the plot of a film that deals in intrigue and breath-holding, so you will get none here. But it is not spilling any top secret Hitchcock beans to mention that Cary Grant is Ingrid’s boss and partner in the job of uncovering an atomic German plot in Rio de Janeiro, and that Claude Rains impersonates the quiet, murderous Nazi exile through whom she Learns All.

   But why this talk of Nazis and undercover agents? Let’s face it. Long after the story line is forgotten, “Notorious” will be remembered as the picture in which Ingrid Bergman gnawed at Cary Grant as if he were a pound of fresh caviar.

    Small boys at Saturday matinees in small towns will jeer themselves hoarse at this point in the movie, fresh young stags will whistle, Hokinson ladies will blush and a few Cary Grant fans may go out and kill themselves, but whatever happens the scene will be talked about, and any audience that sits through it without murmuring, at least, is either darned sophisticated or dead.

   Possibly the most interesting performance in the film is given by an actress named Madame Konstantin in the role of the Nazi's mother. She worries you the minute you see her on the screen, the way Judith Anderson worried you on sight in “Rebecca.” She is small and plain and taut, and manages by a sort of drained pallor to suggest the most sinister quality, as if layers of psychopathic complications lurked beneath the tight quiet surface.

   Here is a gilt-edged piece of acting in a bit of Hitchcockiana not to be missed.

 

 

 

 

 

Claude Rains, Gary Grant, Ingrid Bergman

 

 

 

NOTORIOUS — RKO:

Cast:

Devlin: Cary Grant;

Alicia Huberman: Ingrid Bergman;

Alexander Sebastian: Claude Rains;

Paul Prescott: Louis Calhern;

Mme. Anna Sebastian: Leopoldine Konstantin;

Dr. Anderson: Reinhold Schunzel;

Walter Beardsley: Moroni Olsen;

Eric Mathis: Ivan Triesault;

Joseph, butler: Alex Minotis (Αλέξης Μινωτής)  

Mr. Hopkins: Wally Brown;

Commodore: Sir Charles Mendl;

Dr. Julio Barbosa: Ricardo Costa;

Emil Hupka: Eberbard Krumschmidt;

Ethel: Fay Baker.

 

  

 

 

 

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[ ανάρτηση 9 Μαρτίου 2024 :  

Notorious

spy film noir (1946)

directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Starring

Gary Grant

Ingrid Bergman

Claude Rains

Photoplay magazine October 1946

Modern Screen magazine November 1946

Κινηματογραφικά ]