Spring of Cary: Notorious

The film studios may not have wanted Cary Grant to make movies that would destroy his image, especially in the early days, but there certainly were ways to build his character and a movie around that! Again, the movie is “film noir”, though with Alfred Hitchcock as the director, it would be a bigger surprise if the movie wasn’t a psychological thriller.

Notorious begins with Alicia Hubermann’s father being sentenced to prison for being a German spy. Alicia, played by Ingrid Bergman, has recently received her US citizenship, but the road ahead is not rosy. Besides the small issue with her father, she’s an alcoholic and reportedly a woman of ill repute. She is quite beautiful, but as prickly as a porcupine.

Into her life walks Cary Gr…, I mean Devlin, a man with no first name who apparently is fine riding in a car with a drunk woman driving 80mph on an unpaved road in Florida! I mean, if she doesn’t manage to kill someone, she could always drive off the road into a swamp and get eaten by a crocodile trying to exit the car! When she gets pulled over, he hands the officer his ID, the officer doesn’t write a ticket, and Devlin is saluted by the officer. Once the officer leaves, there’s a struggle for the wheel of the car, and Devlin does something to incapacitate Miss Huberman.

When she comes to, she’s in her apartment and Devlin is there. She’s not fond of “cops”, but he’s offering her a job, using the fact that although she is German, he knows she’s loyal to the US because the agency he works for had a months-long tap on her phone. (I don’t remember it being explicit in the movie, but apparently Devlin belonged to the Secret Service.) The thing is, this job is in Rio de Janeiro, infiltrating colleagues of Alicia’s father who want to support the Nazis.

Alicia reluctantly agrees, but two issues arise here: the first is that she’s not trained in espionage, and the second is that she and Devlin start to fall in love.

As soon as Devlin and his US spook agency colleagues start talking about using Alicia as an intelligence asset, a sense of foreboding starts overshadowing the film. For me, it immediately brought to mind the story of Rachel Morningstar Hoffman, who was killed working as an informant for the Tallahassee police department due to asking a civilian to do undercover work for which he or she is not prepared.

Then there is the love story, which gets complicated by the work they both are doing. I must be weird, but when the attraction started becoming obvious, I couldn’t help but think that he needed to be reassigned. Indeed, their stubbornness in the face of their growing feelings for each other end up putting Alicia in a position much more dangerous than was initially envisioned, and I think, in real life, would not have been sanctioned (at least I hope so!)

In any case, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. Hitchcock does well with having the story progress through the characters, and the actors are all up to the task. As the movie gets toward the end , the viewer gets caught up in whether a “good” resolution can come. Lots of suspense!

From here, I’ve just got a few random obserations: Bergman’s accent works well for the most part here but she never sounded convincingly German to me. Thinking back on it, I think I know why. English has “th” – and we actually more than one sound for this blend, “th” like in “this” and “th” as in “thing”. Most Germans, even at a highly fluent level, will never get those sounds quite right. The words “this thing” become “zis ting”. Depending on the word, those “th” blends morph differently – “brother” becomes “bruhzer”, “tooth” becomes “toof”, etc. It will be the last thing a German will lose before not sounding German anymore. However, here she is with her accent, and yet she’s nailing 95% the “th” sounds because… Swedish also has them! (What is so bizarre to me is that her Swedish accent sounds nothing like a Swedish accent in English now, but there’s a reason for that, and the explanation would probably get boring here, but I’ll show examples, at the very least.)

It’s pretty jarring to see the attitude toward drunk driving. Yes, it’s considered a bad thing, but not something that Devlin felt a responsibility to stop.

The clothing! Yes, it’s the 1940s, and yes, people dressed better, but seriously, the movie is supposed to take place in Florida and Rio de Janeiro, and everybody is wearing suits and fancy clothes everywhere! There’s at least one point when they’re still in Florida where Alicia says she’s cold, and I couldn’t help but think – “You’re supposed to be from Germany – the Germans live for the cold!”

I just about laughed out loud near the beginning of the movie when Alicia is waking up from her bad night, kind of sits up, and pulls a hair rat out of her hair! (I wouldn’t have noticed that without Morgan Donner’s hair videos!)

I think this was the first movie that I’ve watched with Ingrid Bergman. She’s definitely interesting to watch!

Update: I was going to mention this, but I forgot, and then I saw it in Erin’s write-up, and figured it was a big enough thing to mention here. The man whom Alicia is supposed to ensnare is a friend of her father’s, and there’s no reference to him being a younger partner or anything, so the assumption is that he’s probably around the same age as her dad. I’m not sure, but that detail may be in there just to put a little bias against the character of Alex Sebastian before we even meet him, since it comes off, at best, a little “off”, at worst, extremely creepy. And the second thing – the woman who played Alex Sebastian’s mother! What a performance!

This is the end of the Spring of Cary! Thank you to Lisa, who had the idea and who nudged me a little to participate. Her review can be found here: https://lisahoweler.com/2023/06/08/spring-of-cary-notorious/. Erin is also fantastic with these, and her review can be found here: https://crackercrumblife.com/2023/06/08/the-spring-of-cary-grant-notorious/

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