Notorious
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Notorious German original title: Weißes Poison |
| Original title | Notorious |
 | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1946 |
| length | 98 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Alfred Hitchcock |
| script |
Ben Hecht , Alfred Hitchcock, Clifford Odets |
| production | Alfred Hitchcock for RKO Radio Pictures |
| music | Roy Webb |
| camera | Ted Tetzlaff |
| cut | Theron Warth |
| occupation | |
| |
The title of an American crime film by Alfred Hitchcock from 1946 based on an original screenplay by Ben Hecht is notorious . The film was produced by RKO . In Germany it was performed in 1951 under the title White Poison .
action
One year after the end of World War II, the father of German-born American Alicia Huberman is sentenced to prison in a US prison for treason. Government agent TR Devlin is assigned to her . The US secret service knows from wiretapping that she is loyal to the US, but knew about her father's collaboration with the National Socialists. Alicia, who has a drinking problem, and Devlin fall in love. As a result of the love affair, Alicia even stops drinking. They travel to Rio de Janeiro , where the American secret service is already waiting for them.
Devlin's superiors want Alicia to get back in touch with a former confidante of her father, Alexander Sebastian, who works with numerous Nazis in Brazil and who was once in love with Alicia. It is hoped that their rapprochement with Sebastian will shed light on the plans of the Nazi organization. Devlin has scruples and doesn't want to see Alicia in the arms of another man, but out of a sense of duty and doubts about the mutual feelings of each other, she gets Alicia to take on the task. Sebastian falls into the trap and after a short time makes Alicia a marriage proposal, against the will of his dominant and jealous mother Anna, who harbors mistrust of Alicia. After consulting with the secret service, Alicia accepts the application. The members of the organization, who meet regularly in Sebastian's villa, deal rigorously with unreliable members: those who fail will be liquidated by the others .
At a party in Sebastian's house, Alicia and Devlin discover that there is some kind of dark ore hidden in some bottles in Sebastian's wine cellar, which later turns out to be uranium ore . Sebastian and his mother find out about the two of them and in order not to compromise themselves in front of the co-conspirators, they begin to slowly and inconspicuously poison Alicia. Devlin, however, misinterprets Alicia's emerging weakness; he assumes that she has started drinking again. However, when she fails to show up several times at scheduled meetings, he becomes suspicious. In Sebastian's house, he finds Alicia completely exhausted. At the bedside he confesses his love to her and frees her under the eyes of Sebastian and his Nazi partners. Devlin threatens Sebastian to reveal to the gang that he has married an American secret agent. Sebastian, who cannot intervene to prevent the worst for himself and his mother and leads the two out of the house, is left to his fate. A member of the gang suspects what really happened - Sebastian's fate seems sealed.
History of origin
template
The original screenplay by Ben Hecht , for which he was nominated for an Oscar in 1947 , was based on an idea by Hitchcock, as well as motifs from a short story "unearthed" by David O. Selznick by journalist John Taintor Foote entitled The Song Of The Dragon from the Year 1912, a kind of Mata-Hari story. Hitchcock was only interested in the fact that a man compels a woman he loves to enter into a relationship with another man out of a sense of duty . Selznick, with whom Alfred Hitchcock was under contract at the time, sold the rights to the film as a package with screenwriter Ben Hecht, director Alfred Hitchcock and actors Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman for $ 800,000 and 50% of the profit shortly before shooting began to RKO to finance his part in the film Duel in der Sonne (1946), which was already over budget and behind schedule.
The story of uranium
One of Hitchcock's best-known anecdotes, which he loved to tell again and again until his death, is about notorious . As early as 1944 he had the idea of using uranium as a reason for the Germans' presence in Brazil, which, according to Hitchcock at the time, could perhaps be used to make bombs. Co-screenwriter Ben Hecht and producer Selznick are said to have had concerns, and so Hitchcock and Hecht consulted Nobel Prize winner Robert Millikan in May or June 1945 about whether a bomb could be built with uranium. This is said to have refused an answer, but confirmed that the amount of uranium could fit in a wine bottle. According to Hitchcock, this encounter was also the trigger for the FBI to shadow him during the entire filming .
Apart from Hitchcock's own account, there is no evidence of this. Donald Spoto credibly suggested in his book that uranium was only included in the script after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945. For Hitchcock, the political aspect was irrelevant anyway, since for him the relationship between Devlin / Grant and Huberman / Bergman was in the foreground when developing the script. In July 1945, Hitchcock had role-casting discussions with German emigrants in New York, from whom he probably learned about Nazi who had fled in South America.
At the beginning of August 1945 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and work on the script was not completed until almost two months later, at the end of September 1945. As early as May 1945, Selznick received a letter from the FBI, according to which every film that showed a US secret service official had to be submitted to the State Department for review - a routine matter at the time during wartime. Of course, Hitchcock was aware of this letter, which may have inspired the surveillance story. According to Spoto, there was no evidence in the FBI files of any surveillance of Hitchcock at the time, and the other circumstances (USA at war, Hitchcock himself and various actors were foreigners, Hitchcock's notorious fear of the police) also speak against Hitchcock's self-spread story, which incidentally has not been confirmed by any of the other parties involved.
Famous scenes
The film contains the longest continuous tracking shot that has ever been seen in a feature film. At the party at Alexander Sebastian's, the camera moves from a high, wide-angle view of the hall to an extreme close-up of the cellar key in Alicia's hand. In addition, the longest kissing scene in film history can be seen in Infamous . According to the guidelines of the censors of the Production Code , a film kiss could not last longer than three seconds. Hitchcock circumvented this rule by a nearly three-minute sequence Devlin and Alicia, interrupted by brief dialogue sets up left over and over again kissing while they were moving in the apartment. He left the two of them to design the text. In the final version, they talk about eating during the kiss and who does the washing up afterwards.
Others
- Leopoldine Konstantin , who played Claude Rains' mother in Notorious , was just three and a half years older than him in real life - she was 59 at the time of shooting, he was 56 years old. A comparably curious mother-son cast was used by Hitchcock in The Invisible Third with the "mother" Jessie Royce Landis , who was only a good seven years older than her "son" Cary Grant , in his film Marnie was Marnie's mother ( Louise Latham ) eight years older than Marnie ( Tippi Hedren ).
- Cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff first worked with Hitchcock. During the drive at the beginning of the film, Hitchcock gave him lighting instructions. Tetzlaff, who was used to making decisions on his own - as is customary in Hollywood - commented on this with “Well, dad, we are probably interested in technology?” Tetzlaff's last film was notorious as a cameraman, and afterwards he became a director himself.
Awards
Claude Rains was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and Ben Hecht for Best Original Screenplay .
In 2006 the film was entered into the National Film Registry .
German synchronization
The film was first shown in Germany on September 21, 1951 under the title White Poison . So shortly after the Second World War, the distributor did not want to expose German viewers to a Nazi story, and in the synchronization , the uranium story became a drug story . In order to conceal the fact that the drug dealers are Germans, a number of role names have been modified or changed (see table below). It was not until the re-release on August 11, 1969 (the film was re-dubbed on behalf of ZDF as a birthday present for Hitchcock and broadcast under the title Notorious ), too, were German viewers able to see and hear the original story.
Even in this version, however, there is no trace of IG Farben , the real mastermind behind the villains. They even went so far as to cut a shot in which this is mentioned by name from the dialogue between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. While this cut was still visually noticeable in the TV version of that time, there is no trace of this take in today's versions (e.g. on the DVD version) (while the entire dialogue can be heard unadulterated in the French version). At one point, however, the word “German paint industry” is used.
So far there is no German version of the film true to the original.
| role | Role names (theatrical version 1951) | actor | Voice actor (theatrical version 1951) | Voice actor (TV version ZDF 1969) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TR Devlin | Cary Grant | Wolfgang Lukschy | Niels Clausnitzer | |
| Alicia Huberman | Elisa Sombrapal | Ingrid Bergman | Tilly Lauenstein | Marianne Wischmann |
| Alexander Sebastian | Aldro Sebastini | Claude Rains | Alfred Balthoff | Ernst Kuhr |
| Capt. Paul Prescott | Commissioner Paul Prescott | Louis Calhern | Siegfried Schürenberg | Wolf Ackva |
| Anna Sebastian | Mrs. Sebastini | Leopoldine Konstantin | Friedel Schuster | ??? |
| Dr. Anderson | Reinhold Schünzel | Arthur Schröder | ??? | |
| Walter Beardsley | Moroni Olsen | Hans Emons | Hans Cossy | |
| Eric Mathis | Enrico | Ivan Triesault | Werner Peters | Wolfgang Hess |
| Butler Joseph | Alexis Minotis | Erich Fiedler | Paul Bürks | |
| Dr. Julio Barbosa | Ricardo Costa | Hans Hessling | Erik Jelde | |
| Emil Hupka | Ramon Hupka | Eberhard Krumschmidt | Walter Bluhm | ??? |
Cameo
As in most of his films, Hitchcock made a cameo in this one ; he drinks champagne at the party in Alexander Sebastian's house.
criticism
"Hitchcock's exciting psychological crime thriller, at the center of which is the conflict between duty and love, is brought to the greatest possible effect with the utmost simplicity of the formal means."
"The contrast, typical for Hitchcock, of peaceful everyday milieu and unexpected threats testifies to the required tension here as well and makes the stripes, which are a bit out of date, worth seeing."
literature
- Donald Spoto: Alfred Hitchcock - The dark side of genius . Heyne, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-453-55146-X (German translation by Bodo Fründt).
- Rainer Maria Köppl: Hitchcock and IG Farben: Film synchronization as dance in chains. In: Lew. N. Zybatow: Language contact - multilingualism - translation . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2007, pp. 107–141.
