Alfred Hitchcock's post-war spy thriller. Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, the longest screen kiss the Production Code would allow, and the most-discussed key in cinema.
1946. Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a convicted American Nazi collaborator, is recruited by U.S. intelligence agent T.R. Devlin to infiltrate a Nazi cell operating in Rio de Janeiro. Devlin sends her to seduce and marry Alex Sebastian, the cell's wealthy German aristocrat leader. The film tracks Alicia and Devlin's relationship across roughly several months as their genuine attraction to each other is progressively damaged by the mission requirements — Devlin must encourage Alicia to commit fully to her marriage to Sebastian, and his own jealousy is the obstacle to honest communication between them.
The film's third act centres on Alicia's discovery of uranium ore hidden in wine bottles in Sebastian's wine cellar (an early dramatic use of uranium in mainstream cinema, made before most American audiences understood what it was). Sebastian and his mother discover Alicia's espionage. They begin slowly poisoning her. The film closes on Devlin entering the Sebastian mansion, walking Alicia past the assembled Nazi cell, and leaving with her in a sequence whose suspense is the structural climax of the film.
Notorious is the film in which Alfred Hitchcock's mature post-war style consolidated. The film combines his earlier suspense vocabulary (the dread-building set pieces, the surveillance-and-paranoia dramatic engine) with a romantic depth that his pre-war work had not always achieved. The Alicia-Devlin relationship is, structurally, one of the most-emotionally-complex romances in classical Hollywood — both partners damaged, both fundamentally untrusting, both nonetheless committed to each other through misdirection and miscommunication.
Hitchcock would continue to develop this register in his subsequent work. Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Marnie (1964) all extend the post-war Hitchcock approach to relationships as suspense material. Notorious is, in some sense, the structural origin of the late-Hitchcock romantic-thriller register.
Notorious includes the longest screen kiss the Hays Code would permit. The Production Code prohibited kisses of more than three seconds; Hitchcock worked around the restriction by having Bergman and Grant kiss, separate briefly to speak dialogue, kiss again, separate again — across approximately two and a half minutes of continuous take. The sequence is a kind of structural argument with the Code's restrictions: the film delivers the emotional content of an extended kiss while technically not violating the three-second rule on any individual kiss.
The sequence is also blocked unusually — Bergman and Grant remain in close-up throughout, with the camera moving in tighter as the sequence progresses. The blocking required both actors to stay in physical contact for two minutes of continuous take while delivering increasingly intimate dialogue. The result is one of the most-erotic sequences in 1940s Hollywood cinema, achieved through structural inventiveness rather than through explicit content.
Notorious's most-discussed suspense set piece is the wine-cellar key sequence. Alicia must obtain the key to the wine cellar (where the uranium is hidden) without Sebastian noticing it is missing. She takes the key from his keyring while he is asleep. She gives it to Devlin at a party in the Sebastian house. They open the wine cellar together. Devlin accidentally breaks a wine bottle, revealing the uranium. They must escape the cellar before Sebastian discovers them.
The sequence is constructed entirely around a small physical object — the key — whose location the audience must track throughout. Hitchcock's editing of the sequence is, by general critical consensus, among the most-studied examples of physical-object suspense in cinema history. The key changes hands multiple times. The audience knows exactly where it is at all times. The suspense is built entirely on whether Sebastian will notice the key is missing before Alicia can return it. The technique has been studied at film schools for seventy years.