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00:00Hello there.
00:03Good evening.
00:05Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film Notorious is not only one of his greatest films, but one of the great films to come out of Hollywood.
00:14Because it asks great questions of us.
00:19It asks when does patriotism border on exploitation?
00:24When does espionage border on poisonous fidelities to one's beliefs?
00:35When does flirtation border on sexual blackmail?
00:41These are the motifs and themes with which Notorious deals.
00:46As far as I know, you've made no new conquests.
00:49Well, that's something.
00:51Eight days.
00:52He's practically whitewashed.
00:55I'm very happy there.
00:58Why won't you let me be happy?
01:00Nobody's stopping you.
01:02In 1945, when Notorious went into production, Hitchcock was still working under the terms of a seven-year contract for the producer David Selznick, who brought him over from England.
01:18Selznick wanted to control every one of his films.
01:20You don't do that with Alfred Hitchcock, because Alfred Hitchcock wanted to exert complete control over every aspect.
01:29Each of them was too much a gentleman to cause a public uproar.
01:33But, for example, the first film was Rebecca.
01:37Selznick had the habit of coming down to the set and wanted to approve what Hitch was doing.
01:42And as soon as Selznick appeared, the camera broke down.
01:49And as soon as he was gone, miraculously, the camera was running perfectly.
01:55Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year, the Oscar, of course, going to the producer, David Selznick.
02:01Notorious wasn't a Selznick studio production and was done at RKO for a very simple reason.
02:09David O. Selznick was infatuated with Jennifer Jones, whom he eventually married, and he prepared for her a picture called Duel in the Sun, which took two years in script and two years in shooting.
02:24And when Notorious was ready for the cameras, Selznick was still shooting.
02:32He needed money for Duel in the Sun also.
02:35And sold it to RKO for $800,000.
02:38Hitchcock was totally on his own, producing, directing, writing, and in control of Notorious.
02:44Now he could go much further and deeper and personalize it, which he did.
02:50Hitchcock was not at all shy about saying that he never turned to first-rate literature on which to base a film, for the simple reason that first-rate literature is complete in itself.
03:03You turn to something popular.
03:06You turn to something that you feel you can make better in strictly visual terms.
03:12And generally, he turns preexistent material, or stories that he spins with the writer, and turns it into something Hitchcockian.
03:22In the case of Notorious, there was a story in the 1920s by John Tainter Foote, published serially in the Saturday Evening Post called The Song of the Dragon.
03:33That contains the germ of something like Notorious.
03:40A woman is forced by political expediency to be a character like Mata Hari.
03:47What Hitchcock did was to take a very, shall we say, unremarkable story and turn it into this great, great work.
03:57And it's Hitchcock and Ben Hecht's script.
04:00Ben Hecht was a journalist.
04:03He was one of the great writers in American history.
04:07He could take a storyline with a director or a piece of preexistent material and turn it into something completely visual and brilliant and true to the characters and sparkling dialogue in a week to ten days.
04:22Very few writers could do that.
04:25I mean, when we look at some of Hecht's credits, Hecht got the Academy Award first year it was given for screenplay, 1927, Underworld.
04:35That was followed by 400 scripts, including Queen Christina, The Prisoner of Zenda, Gone with the Wind.
04:46He had a lot to do with Rebecca, with which he has no credit.
04:50He didn't care about the credit.
04:51And the Hitchcock films, of course, Spellbound Notorious.
04:55The Paradine Case, no credit.
04:57Strangers on a Train is mostly Ben Hecht.
05:00Notorious is a dark film, and that darkness comes from the refusal on the part of both Hitchcock and Ben Hecht
05:25to glamorize intelligence agencies in government.
05:29And that came out of Hitchcock's lifelong suspicion that governments in and of themselves were rarely working for the good of their people.
05:43Now, cast the net of memory back, I can, to 1946.
05:48People didn't expect this kind of attitude about the American government.
05:53This at the end of World War II, when there was justifiable pride and celebration for the Allied victory over the Nazi menace.
06:08The MacGuffin, the excuse for plot development, was uranium ore.
06:15Which didn't interest Hitchcock at all.
06:19Hitchcock never wanted to make a film that was topical.
06:22He never wanted a film that was about something so timely that it would be dated by the time it was released.
06:30Oh, you never believed in me anyways. What's the difference?
06:33Lucky for both of us, I didn't.
06:34It wouldn't have been pretty if I believed in you.
06:36If I'd figured she'd never be able to go through with it, she'd been made over by love.
06:41If you only once have said that you love me.
06:44What will happen to this poor, benighted woman?
06:47Will she be saved by the truth of her love and the bravery of a man who seems incapable of expressing any love, much less acting upon it?
06:56Is that all you have to say to me?
06:58That's what interests him, and that is never restricted to its time.
07:04Notorious takes all the elements of a typical romance and turns them upside down.
07:11When we see in the ads and in the posters that it's Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, we think, ah, a love story.
07:20Well, not really.
07:22This is the story of a hard-drinking woman of easy virtue, not characteristics that audiences associated with Ingrid Bergman in 1946.
07:35It's the story of a man who says that he's frightened of women and is terrified of even holding the hand of a woman.
07:45These are not elements we associate with Cary Grant.
07:47So the romance becomes something that both of these characters are redeemed by circumstances and rising to the moment when they're so close to catastrophe
08:04that they must emerge out of their pasts together.
08:11No. Hangover.
08:14The romance isn't a romance until the end.
08:20Alicia, what's wrong with you?
08:21I'm so glad you came.
08:24Hitchcock, he often said, he never wanted to do things the way they do them in the movies.
08:30The cliché.
08:32Romantic intrigue from the start, followed by complications, followed by the resolution of complications.
08:39He always wanted different levels with the character, different use of the actors within the development of the narrative.
08:47And Hitchcock frequently quoted the French 19th century playwright Victorien Sardou, who said,
08:58torture the women.
09:00That's the key in a drama that everybody will be gripped by.
09:04That became the basis of Hitchcock's meticulous and painstaking search for the right actress
09:11and his molding them to precisely what he wanted.
09:15Why?
09:16Because everyone in the audience can identify with, associate with, a woman in trouble.
09:25It's as old as the Greek classics and Shakespeare.
09:29Ingrid Bergman discussed how she was cast in the first of the three Hitchcock films.
09:36And according to her, she remembered walking across the Selznick lot in 1942 or 3, and Hitchcock
09:46passed by.
09:48And they nodded hello to each other.
09:50They were with other people.
09:51And Hitchcock turned to his writer or production designer and said, she'll do.
09:57As he saw something in her glance, the angle of her head, her smile, he saw not only how
10:06she might be photographed, but how she could be used for his purposes.
10:12And that was the most important thing to him.
10:15Ingrid Bergman told me she was delighted.
10:18She always wanted to do something different.
10:20That's why she left the comfort and convenience and glamour, so to speak, of Hollywood, and went
10:25off to do neorealism with Rossellini in Italy, because she wanted something different.
10:30She always wanted to stretch her talents.
10:33Cary Grant is who Hitchcock wanted to be, the debonair ladies' man, sailing through life, everything
10:41at his command.
10:43Wait a minute.
10:44Let me put this on you.
10:45You might catch cold.
10:46He had, after all, worked with Cary Grant five years earlier in suspicion.
10:50And they got on well.
10:52And Grant was terrific in that picture.
10:54And Grant needed work in 1945.
10:57He was not the superstar we think of later on.
11:01And Hitchcock was delighted to take Grant's popularity, his image, and use it in Notorious.
11:10Claude Rains, of course, had worked with Ingrid before in Casablanca.
11:14And Hitchcock preferred to make the villains British in his films, because Hitchcock, remember,
11:23came from a minority in England.
11:26He was Catholic at a time when Catholics had very few civil rights.
11:32He was physically unattractive, or so society considered him.
11:37He came not from the upper class, but from the working class.
11:42His father was, the British phrase, in trade.
11:45He was a grocer.
11:47He's not in polite society.
11:49And he took with him through life this feeling of being unacceptable by his appearance, by his
11:57background, both religious and social and commercial.
12:01So I think Hitchcock frequently made villains Englishmen.
12:05And that's Hitchcock pulling the nose and the ears of people in his background.
12:14However, I think Hitchcock frequently made villains sympathetic, never more powerfully than with Claude Rains in Notorious.
12:22I think he made him sympathetic as a foil to the awful things that the so-called heroes are visiting upon poor Avisia.
12:32I see, Captain Prescott, your method is the best way.
12:35Well, she's good at making friends with gentlemen, and we want somebody inside his house, in his confidence.
12:41You have faith in...
12:42The confidence trick on a grand scale was something Hitchcock mentioned as being at the core of Notorious, and the confidence tricks are the gestures of love.
12:50The character of Avisia uses the gesture of love to pass the key from one of her hands to the other, drop it to the floor, and kick it under a table.
13:00Moments later, Avisia and Devlin meet outside the wine cellar, and there's a passionate kiss.
13:07It's the way they feel, but it's not used for that.
13:11It's used to throw Alex off the track, that they've just been into the wine cellar to find out what's really stored in the wine bottles, the uranium ore.
13:20Sorry to intrude on this tender scene.
13:22I couldn't help what happened. He's been drinking.
13:25Oh. So he carried you down here.
13:28Oh, please, Alex.
13:29From Alex's viewpoint at the big party scene, we see Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant laughing and giggling and that, but then we cut to the close-up in which they're talking, and they're talking about betraying him.
13:42No, Joseph might have to ask Alex for more wine.
13:45Uh-huh.
13:47He's running out faster than he thought.
13:49All these things are inverted, and that's part of the genius of what Hitchcock always used.
13:57I said to him, you like counterpoint, and he said, exactly, that the glances and the words are different from what the feelings inside are.
14:07And Hitchcock had a fantastic long discussion with me, specifically about Notorious in this regard.
14:14When Ingrid Bergman goes to the intelligence agents in Rio, and Cary Grant is there, and she comes with the dreadful news.
14:24He wants me to marry him right away, and I have to give him my answer at lunch.
14:28The editor, Theron Worth, and Bill Dozier, a man I knew who was the line producer at RKO, said,
14:34Well, if you'd like to do takes on the other actors in the room, no, said Hitchcock.
14:40I want to keep the camera only on Grant and Bergman.
14:44While everybody's talking about the political expediency and the secrets and how far they'll go,
14:52what we see is Bergman looking at Grant, and her eyes say,
14:58Surely you won't let me go this far?
15:00You know that we've fallen in love with each other.
15:03Her eyes say that.
15:05His eyes say, I can't do anything about this, and he turns away.
15:11I invite every viewer of this film to watch it again and see that the story and the feelings are communicated in terms of where and how the characters gaze.
15:25Because that's how we, the viewers, get the depth of adult feelings in this movie, by gazing.
15:31Well, Mr. Sebastian is a very romantic fellow, isn't he, Alicia?
15:37Yes.
15:38Then he'll probably want to take his bride away for a long honeymoon.
15:42Won't that hold us up?
15:43Alfred Hitchcock wanted to push the possibilities of what the camera could reveal that had to do with our feelings.
15:52That's all he was interested in, manipulating and directing the feelings of the audience by what the camera did and how it moved.
16:02He devised a shot that was immensely difficult for the studio, for the set designers, for the cinematographer.
16:10When Hitchcock first said he wanted to do it, everybody at the studio said, can't be done.
16:15Can't be done.
16:16And Hitch said, I'll show you how we do it.
16:19And they devised this vast, Ingrid called it a basket.
16:23It was like a scaffold in which the cameraman and his focus puller constantly kept in focus right up to the key in her hand.
16:33What Hitchcock is telling us, that in this huge party of elegance and refinery is the key to the underground place where the uranium ore, the ingredients of the bomb, are kept.
16:53So within the same shot are two levels of reality.
16:57As a motif in films or in any form, people understand that people drinking together is a sign of unity among people and of celebrating an occasion or a person.
17:14All the drinking in Notorious is either alcoholic poisoning or finally lethal poisoning.
17:21It's pushed to its extreme.
17:22The people in the beginning who are drinking are drinking far too much and they're drunk and some of them pass out.
17:29There's a logical development from that to the poisoning with arsenic.
17:35And Hitchcock doesn't have to use the words and he doesn't have to show us the villains pouring arsenic out of a bottle into coffee cups.
17:46Overstatement infuriated him.
17:48He presumed that adults were watching the picture.
17:51And we knew what was going on until the final scene.
17:57Hitchcock's use of counterpoint and revealing something that has another meaning, another significance, can be found from the very opening shot of Notorious.
18:07And let's look at it for just a moment.
18:09The film begins with a close-up of a half a dozen cameras.
18:14Now through the door we see three men standing before one judge.
18:18Then Bergman, as Alicia, exits the courtroom alone.
18:23Now what Hitch and Ben Heck did at the end for counterpoint is, there's whispers and finally talk of love.
18:33Don't ever leave me.
18:36You'll never get rid of me again.
18:37And Cary Grant, he leads her out to the car and he drives her away to safety and the last shot, instead of three men standing before one judge in the opening, now we see one man, Alex, standing before three judges who are about to destroy him.
18:56This structure, when I noticed this after seeing the film, probably 10, 12, 15 times, and I sat down with Hitchcock and I said, I don't think, you know, a lot of people see that.
19:11And he said, we hope they don't.
19:13Because if they do, the thing looks artificial and too directly structured.
19:19But I said to him, am I on the right track?
19:21And he smiled.
19:22Of course.
19:23It's structure that makes a story visually brilliantly told and accessible.
19:31These characters at the end are redeemed from what they were at the beginning.
19:38And this is why I think one can watch this film endlessly and see more each time and feel more each time.
19:47The art seems to remain static, but the act of understanding it enables us to understand ourselves even more deeply.
19:58I think that's how we grow.
20:08The art seems to remain static, but the act of understanding it is that we can't do it.
20:38The art says, I don't think so long.
20:40But I can't do it.
20:42The art is Paniccat.
20:42The art seems to be at the beginning of my life until you hanged with anything.
20:46This is a new paper.
20:48The art seems to be waiting for us.
20:50The art seems to remain static, but the art seems to remain sounding every snowfall.
20:56And there is no way.
21:03The art seems to be patient.
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