About Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS

This is another classic film that my mother coaxed me to watch when I was a kid. She adored Ingrid Bergman and this film has Bergman at her best -- which was always something to see. The film is NOTORIOUS, a 1946 thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It's one of my Top 5 favorite Hitchcock films. The other Hitchcock thriller that fascinated Mom was 1964's MARNIE starring Tippi Hedren. We watched it one night on NBC. Mom talked about MARNIE on the phone to a friend and told her how good it was. I recall Mom saying Marnie "didn't want to participate in the rites of marriage in the bedroom." I'm sure she used that phrase because I was a child and in the room while she was on the phone. I remember the phrase but, at that time, I didn't know what it meant. Maybe MARNIE is not the acclaimed classic that NOTORIOUS is, but my mother responded to the story's bold exploration of a woman's sexuality in the narrative. It was a bold look for the 1960s. NOTORIOUS takes a strong, sophisticated look at an independent, intelligent single woman's sexuality. We see society's sexual inequality in this espionage love story starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. Like Bergman, Grant was also at his best in this movie as "a fat-headed guy, full of pain" who falls for the complicated party girl whose convicted Nazi father, whom she hates, has made her a notorious character in front page Miami news. The U.S. government will recruit her to be a "Mata Hari. She makes love for the papers."

She knows that, even though she accepts the risky spy assignment, Uncle Sam considers her to be a second class citizen because she likes cocktails, she's unmarried and she's not a virgin.

The NOTORIOUS screenplay was written by Ben Hecht. Here are some other films that bear his name in the screenplay credits: THE FRONT PAGE (1931), SCARFACE (1932), DESIGN FOR LIVING (1933), NOTHING SACRED (1937), WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1939), Hitchcock's SPELLBOUND (1945) and KISS OF DEATH (1947). In addition to those solid screenplays, Hecht wrote two of my all-time favorite "guilty pleasure" movies -- movies that are so brilliantly bad that I've watched them several times. They are SPECTRE OF THE ROSE (1946), the story of a psychotic killer male ballet star, and QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958) with Zsa Zsa Gabor in the title role.

Hecht's THE FRONT PAGE was famously and fabulously remake as the gender-bender HIS GIRL FRIDAY starring Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. NOTHING SACRED was redone as the Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin comedy LIVING IT UP (1954). Although his original screenplay was not credited, Ben Hecht's NOTORIOUS was remade too. But I don't recall many critics noting that when a highly-publicized action thriller with a top star was released in 2000.

Key scenes from the Hitchcock original were recreated.

Everyone in this cast is excellent. Claude Rains is marvelous as the lovestruck villain in Rio who is the target of the U.S. espionage plot.

If you have a couple of minutes, I talk about the feminist sexuality in Hitchcock's elegant and intoxicating thriller. Just click onto this link:

www.podomatic.com/podcasts/bobbyrivers/episodes/2011-02-02T08_46_41-08_00.

Ben Hecht definitely should've received an on-screen credit in that Tom Cruise movie. Don't you agree?