Alfred Hitchcock (72 page)

The two stars worried about how strange it felt. Walking along, nuzzling each other with the camera trailing behind them, seemed “very awkward” to the actors during filming, according to Bergman. “Don’t worry,” Hitchcock assured her. “It’ll look right on the screen.”

It looked so right that it sneaked past censorship. “We kept moving and talking, so that the seconds were always interrupted,” recalled Bergman.

It wasn’t just the kissing that should have troubled the censors. What about the portrait of Alicia as a heavy drinker, hungover in the morning (plucking a hair out of her mouth), sleeping around on behalf of the government? “You can add Sebastian’s name to my list of playmates,” she bitterly informs Devlin after dutifully “mating” with Sebastian. But somehow Hitchcock slipped it all by the Code.

Hitchcock rarely managed to pull together a dream cast for any of his 1940s films, but
Notorious
was a glorious exception. Neither cool nor a pure blonde, Ingrid Bergman was by this time a close friend, a fellow intriguer in the great conspiracy against Selznick and Hollywood. Knowing her as well as he did, he could write her feelings and personality into the character of Alicia. Bergman was tired of playing saints, and in
Notorious
she got her chance to play a shame-ridden boozer, willing to sleep with the devil in order to wash away the stain on her conscience.

Just as Alicia was written to accommodate a humanized Bergman, the part of Devlin, a “fatheaded guy full of pain,” was tailored for Cary Grant—not the sleek, witty Grant of screwball comedies and manly adventures, but the slick, tortured Grant who intrigued Hitchcock. In
Suspicion
Hitchcock had tried to turn him into a wife killer, and failed; but Devlin was even closer to Grant’s own deep ambivalence. The triumph of the script was its love story, which took a boozy tramp and made her doubly
appealing by the fatheaded cad struggling to uphold his defenses against her.

For
Saboteur
, Hitchcock had tried unsuccessfully to get a prototypical American hero as his fifth columnist. For
Notorious
he needed a sophisticated actor with a foreign accent, and he landed Claude Rains, who had made a specialty of fatally flawed characters in a series of Oscar-nominated parts—
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Casablanca, Mr. Skeffington.
Rains had been established in American film since 1935, after acting in repertory with the Theater Guild in New York, but before that Hitchcock had admired him on the London stage in the 1920s. (The first Mrs. Rains, Isabel Jeans, had acted in
Downhill, Easy Virtue
, and
Suspicion.
) Now a short, middle-aged man, Rains was, like Alex Sebastian, vulnerable about his age and appearance in a sympathetic way.

Louis Calhern was cast as Cary Grant’s boss, the dapper intelligence chief. Hitchcock, who targeted German Nazis in film after film during the war, also gave real-life German antifascists some of their best Hollywood roles. That was certainly true of Reinhold Schünzel, cast as a mild-mannered doctor among the fascist circle. Schünzel had been a reputable actor and director in Berlin; the transvestite comedy
Viktor und Viktoria
was the high-water mark of his directing career, before his flight from Hitler. Among the other uncommon faces were ex-ballet dancer Ivan Triesault as the killer Eric, and stage actor-director Eberhard Krumschmidt as Emil, who dooms himself by panicking over a wine label.

Undoubtedly it was Hitchcock’s private joke that British diplomat Charles Mendl—the husband of ex-Broadway star Elsie De Wolfe—graced the film’s first party scene as a playboy yachtsman sailing to Cuba. (He invites Alicia along with him, but instead she chooses South America with Devlin.) Mendl was active in Hollywood intelligence circles, and Hitchcock must have enjoyed watching him play a fascist on the run.

The character of Alex Sebastian’s mother called for a combination of Nazi and dragon lady—a she-devil to rival Judith Anderson in
Rebecca.
Hitchcock had the inspiration of casting Czechoslovakian-born Leopoldine Konstantin, a charmer on the Berlin stage in the 1920s, now an older, more intimidating actress. Though she had appeared in German pictures before her flight from Hitler, this was Konstantin’s only appearance in an American film.

The director had the pick of the RKO lot for his production team. He chose as his cameraman Ted Tetzlaff, who had photographed early Frank Capra pictures at Columbia and Gregory La Cava and René Clair comedies for Paramount. (Tetzlaff resisted Hitchcock a little during filming, but the Englishman stared him down.) The editor was Theron Warth, a journeyman who turned in his finest work under Hitchcock. Although Hitchcock was famous for his electrifying montages, his editing—especially of
love scenes—could be delicate. Scene after scene of
Notorious
is cut in a subtle, unobtrusive style that looks modern even today. When Alicia slides over in her airplane seat for a first glimpse of Rio de Janeiro, for example, she unconsciously leans into Devlin, and Hitchcock catches his eyes as they widen—as though, for the first time, he has caught her scent. This charged shot quietly dissolves into the next scene.

The production design was by Carroll Clark and Albert S. D’Agostino, two consummate art directors who later reigned at the Walt Disney studio in the 1960s. The special effects were by Vernon L. Walker and Paul Eagler, including a Rio de Janeiro evoked entirely through back projection. One of Selznick’s last contributions was to insist on sending
Citizen Kane
cameraman Gregg Toland to Brazil to capture authentic scenery to blend in with Hitchcock’s studio footage—a feat every bit as convincing as
Lifeboat.
Toland filmed an entire horse race, which the director used as a reflection in Bergman’s binoculars; for another scene, where Grant and Bergman appear to be seated at a sidewalk café, Hitchcock simply filmed the actors on a soundstage in front of Toland’s authentic footage—perfecting an illusion that he had first practiced as far back as the restaurant scene cobbled together from two versions for the talkie
Blackmail.

Notorious
also marked the beginning of Hitchcock’s long collaboration with Hollywood’s premiere costume designer. David O. Selznick had been fussy about the look of his leading ladies, but Hitchcock had his own longstanding ideas in that department; now, with RKO’s permission, he made a point of borrowing Edith Head from Paramount, where she had supervised wardrobe for Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder films.

Head always said that of all the directors she worked with, Hitchcock was the most precise. “Every costume is indicated when he sends me the script,” Head wrote in her memoir. “There is always a story reason behind his thinking, an effort to characterize.” On another occasion, Head said, “He spoke a designer’s language, even though he didn’t know the first thing about clothes. He specified colors in the script if they were important. If he wanted a skirt that brushed a desk as a woman walked by, he spelled that out too.”

When Devlin meets Alicia for the first time, in the scene where she is partying to excess, Ingrid Bergman would be dressed in stark contrast to everyone else in the room—“a zebra-skin print blouse with her midriff exposed,” in Head’s words. Later on, Alicia had to wear more demure clothing; as an infiltrator, Hitchcock cautioned, she needed to blend in, not stand out. He did away with any ornate jewelry, furs and feathers, silly hats—the kind of showoff accoutrements Bergman had worn at Selznick’s behest in
Spellbound.
Costuming Bergman for Hitchcock was “an education in restraint” for her, said Head.

Although Selznick had written associate producer Barbara Keon into the RKO contract to watch over his interests, by now she was basically in Hitchcock’s camp. And William Goetz was as deferential as Jack Skirball. After twenty-five years in the business, it was Hitchcock’s first official film as his own producer, with nearly the power that came with the title. With the
Notorious
script finally finished, and the cast and crew finalized, the filming was ready to start on October 22—after more than a full year’s preparation.

From beginning to end, the filming of the dark-spirited
Notorious
was suffused with a positive glow. In November, champagne was popped on the set to celebrate the release of
Spellbound
, which had been launched by one of Selznick’s all-out publicity campaigns (ranging from fashion layouts to airplane skywriting). From the majority of critics—
Newsweek
hailed it as “a superior and suspenseful melodrama”—to the lines of moviegoers who spent upward of $7 million on the picture at the box office, the new Hitchcock film exceeded all expectations. Its success was later crowned by six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Hitchcock’s third as Best Director.
Spellbound
was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Michael Chekhov), Black-and-White Cinematography (George Barnes), Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Miklós Rózsa), and Special Effects (Jack Cosgrove).

The only nominee to collect an Oscar, however, was Rózsa. In his autobiography Rózsa complained that Hitchcock never even called to congratulate him—but Hitchcock had left
Spellbound
behind in postproduction, and one of its stupidities, in his opinion, was the otherwise stirring theme music that Selznick poured like syrup over too many scenes. In his sessions with François Truffaut, Hitchcock complained vigorously about the scene where Ingrid Bergman meets Gregory Peck for the first time. “Unfortunately, the violins begin to play just then,” said Hitchcock. “That was terrible!”

Any success was a dividend, but Hitchcock didn’t kid himself. He didn’t think much of
Spellbound.
“Just another whodunit,” he informed an interviewer in 1946. “The whole thing’s too complicated,” the director told François Truffaut—and all those eleventh-hour plot explanations were “very confusing.”

Notorious
, on the other hand, was a consummate Hitchcock film, in every sense filled with passion and texture and levels of meaning.

The director adored his cast. He and Claude Rains were extremely friendly; Rains was born on the wrong side of the Thames, and his sophistication concealed a Cockney boyhood—he knew the same vernacular, even the same jokes, as Hitchcock. The director let Rains decide whether
he would adopt a strong German accent (the decision was no); the actor even managed to retain his good humor when Hitchcock mentioned “this business of you being a midget with a wife, Miss Bergman, who is very tall.” Standing five feet seven—at least according to official publicity—Rains understood Hitchcock’s point. If Bergman (who stood roughly five nine, but looked taller) towered over him in their romantic scenes, the effect might be inadvertently comical.

So for the scenes where Alicia and Alex strolled together hand in hand, Hitchcock built ramps for Rains that were unseen by the audience. The rest of the time, he told Rains, the actor should try elevated shoes. Hitchcock asked Rains to buy a pair and get used to wearing them. “Walk in them, sleep in them, be comfortable in them,” the director urged Rains.

“In the close shots,” Hitchcock explained to Truffaut, “the difference between them was so marked that if I wanted them both in a frame, I had to stand Claude Rains on a box. On one occasion we wanted to show them both coming from a distance, with the camera panning from him to Bergman. Well, we couldn’t have any boxes out there on the floor, so what I did was to have a plank of wood gradually rising as he walked toward the camera.”

Rains liked the elevated shoes so much he adopted them for personal use. Cary Grant didn’t need extra height, but working with the enigmatic star was always a negotiation. The battle was half won once he was lured to the set; but even with a script he had approved, Grant was susceptible to mood swings, and always trying to rewrite his dialogue. Though Grant was open to direction, he didn’t really require it from anyone, including Hitchcock.

Grant came to
Notorious
full of bounce, though—enough that he was able to coach Bergman through her initial period of adjustment. It was Grant, as much as anyone, who helped the actress through her second Hitchcock film—rehearsing her the way Devlin rehearses Alicia. “One morning, when we were working on
Notorious
, she had difficulty with a line,” Grant recalled. “She had to say her lines a certain way so I could imitate her readings. We worked on the scene for a couple of hours. Hitch never said anything. He just sat next to the camera, puffing on his cigar. I took a break, and later, when I was making my way back to the set, I heard her say her lines perfectly. At which point Hitch said, ‘Cut!’, followed by ‘Good morning, Ingrid.’ ”

More in control on
Notorious
, Hitchcock also had more flexibility than he had enjoyed with
Spellbound.
He was more tolerant of Bergman the second time around, and allowed the actress to try her own ideas and moves.

Indeed, he had grown exceptionally fond of Bergman, and there is little reason to doubt biographer Donald Spoto’s assertion that the actress confided in the director—about her ongoing love affair with Robert Capa, for
example (who photographed the production for
Life
), or, later, about her crush on Italian neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, for whom she left her husband. The Hitchcocks were among the first to know about Rossellini, and although they liked Dr. Petter Lindstrom, they stayed loyal to Bergman.

Hitchcock liked to tell a story that Spoto scoffs at as the delusion of a repressed personality: one day the director arrived at home, according to Hitchcock, to find Bergman waiting for him, enticing him toward the bedroom, pleading for a tryst with her adored Svengali. Hitchcock told this tall tale to writer John Michael Hayes and other close associates, only slightly varying the details. (Sometimes it happened in his home, sometimes in hers.)

Or was it such a tall tale? It only happened “once,” he always maintained. Hitchcock never dated the anecdote, but it’s tempting to believe it occurred during
Notorious
, when Bergman was under a romantic spell and in the mood for sex, rather than on
Spellbound
(a trial run) or the later
Under Capricorn
(a fiasco). Although most people doubt Hitchcock’s anecdote, why wasn’t such a thing possible? Don’t actresses fall in love with their directors all the time? He was no longer so grossly overweight—and wasn’t he devilish and charming? Didn’t Bergman have affairs with her other directors, notably Victor Fleming? Was Rossellini, later, such a dashing physical type? Doesn’t the story Hitchcock told sound about right, for such a sly innocent?