NOTORIOUS - 1946

Hitch rehearses the key crane shot with Ingrid Bergman

There are two famous scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 romantic spy melodrama, “Notorious,” that have been written about extensively.  One is that great crane down from an upstairs landing in Alexander Sebastian’s (Claude Rains) house at the beginning of a lavish party, to an extreme close-up of Ingrid Bergman’s hand holding a fateful key to the wine cellar.  It is a straightforward but bravura move that gives the scope of the setting along with the narrow and highly dangerous margin of error that she will be up against before the night is over. 

The second is an extended kiss at the beginning of Bergman’s and Cary Grant’s troubled love affair.  It is always referred to as Hitchcock’s way of thumbing his nose at the censors who, supposedly, would not allow kissing lips to hold on each other for more than three seconds.  For about two and a half minutes the lovers smooch, their faces never but an inch apart.  They whisper and smile suggestively as they glide from one room to another.  The camera is positioned a few inches from their faces as they weave this steamy passion dance.  Their lips remain chaste according to the three second rule, but repeatedly push the outside of that envelope.  It is a very sexy scene and a great tale to tell; this thwarting of the guardians of taste and family values.  But there is more to this interlude than a cinematic game of tag played by Hitchcock with the Production Code. 

Take a look at the posters for this film, foreign and domestic.  Grant and Bergman are always in this close romantic proximity.  This initial kissing scene sets up two others during the picture which reflect the dramatic spine of the story and provide the emotional payoffs.

The first comes at the end of the tense wine cellar scene when Grant, knowing that they have been spotted by her husband, tells Bergman to kiss him.  She says, “But he’ll think…“.  He replies, “That’s what I want him to think.”  After the kiss, she collapses in his arms, breathlessly and longingly whispering his name.  It is a fleeting moment that reflects, but does not completely allow, release of the repressed emotional pain that has been steadily building over the course of the film.

 

The final clinch comes at the end when Grant rescues her from the poisonous clutches of her husband, her deadly mother-in-law, and a gang of Nazis in the drawing room.  In a scene that mirrors the first, stylistically and thematically, the true essence of “Notorious” (that of a love story hung on the framework of a spy thriller) is revealed.   It is here that Grant finally utters the words of love that he never declared during their initial embrace.  All of the dramatic tension of a troubled (and more than a little twisted) romance is relieved in this moment of emotional honesty and release.  The reunited lovers still have a tension-filled journey to final freedom at the bottom of the stairs, but the dilemmas of a woman burdened with guilt and a man bound by chains of his own repression, disguised as duty, have been resolved.