Drive-in Saturday Tuesday Movie Review: Notorious (1946)

The Drive-in Saturday Tuesday movie review is a seasonal feature in which I review movies I see at drive-in theaters. The name of the segment is taken from the Bowie song, though often the movies have no direct Bowie connection. Part of the fun is finding indirect Bowie connections, and a perhaps surprising number of these movies actually use a Bowie song in the soundtrack or are otherwise related to Bowie. But at the end of the day, this segment is a movie review!

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Movie: Notorious (1946)

Bowie Connections: Notorious was released the year before Bowie was born, so no, he had no direct connection to this movie. As far as I can tell, he had no interactions with anyone involved with the movie, nor did he refer to it in his lyrics (although, of course, Duran Duran, which was influenced by Bowie, has a song titled “Notorious”). I can stretch it and establish some faint thematic connections, but instead of that, I’ll make an observation about Bowie and the male lead of Notorious, Cary Grant.

Cary Grant and Bowie repeatedly appear together among history’s great male style icons, including GQ’s “50 Most Stylish Men of the Past 50 Years,” ShortList’s “100 Most Stylish Men Ever,” Esquire’s “75 Best Dressed Men of All Time,” The Modest Man’s “18 Male Fashion Icons,” and the Costume Society’s discussion of British style icons. Robb Report makes the connection especially explicit, naming both men in its headline, “Classic Style Icons: How legendary personalities like David Bowie, Cary Grant and Yves Saint-Laurent redefined fashion.” I got all those from a cursory internet search, but if you know of Cary Grant and you know of David Bowie, especially post-1974, you’d probably put both of them on some sort of top 10 list in your own head.

Experience: As I was writing this, a news story broke that seemed to explain the unusually large police presence at this free movie, which was part of a free-movie series organized by the State of New York in Capitol Park, a park next to the State Capitol. About 50 people were in attendance and the average age was probably 60. This was not a boisterous crowd, but we counted at least seven police officers, mostly from the State Police. The next day, a woman who had pledged allegiance to ISIS was arrested for plotting a terrorist attack on the Capitol. This development was eerily relevant to the movie itself, and stranger still for this very blog … her last name is Bowie. What are the chances of that?

Anyway, that story broke when I had already drafted this much more benign and less exciting observation about the experience: OK, so we went to see this movie outside, but neither at an actual drive-in nor on a Saturday. The evening was lovely for sitting on lawn chairs on a warm-enough summer night. The screen was smaller than that of a genuine drive-in, but the sound was great. Actually, since at a regular drive-in we listen to the movie through a radio, and in this case we were listening via speakers, the sound was actually much better. Also, I realized one of the reasons I like drive-ins so much is the ability to get lost in the movie. I realized this when some fire trucks went by, reminding me that I’m not in a sensory-deprivation chamber (like a movie theater), but literally outside in a park. The fire trucks broke the spell for long enough for me to realize what kind of hold the movie actually had on me.

Movie review: Notorious is 80 years old this year. It was being shown on a free movie night because it is a classic movie and is really good, so its quality as such is not really worth discussing. The basic plot is pretty simple— T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) is a government agent who recruits Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), whose father was working for the Nazis in the US during the war, to travel to Brazil and infiltrate a cabal of Nazi dead-enders up to no good. To do this, she has to seduce the main antagonist, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) and report on the cabal’s activities to Devlin and his colleagues from the unnamed agency. It’s a spy movie. But, of course, Devlin and Alicia (in the movie, he tends to be called by his last name and her by her first), fall in love.

That’s the premise, but what is the movie about? On the one hand, Notorious struck me as more of a spy movie than most James Bond movies (I’ll come back to James Bond), because Bond movies are less about spying and more about action. This is not an action movie. On the other hand, Notorious is really a love story. The intrigue is great for suspense and to set up challenges for love to conquer, but love-conquers all is really the point.

I got to that conclusion in part by realizing how different 1946 was from 2026. The differences are less apparent from the look of the movie than you might think. Other than that more men wore hats, there’s little about the way the people in the movie looked that would strike anyone walking down the street as odd today. Formal parties looked like formal parties. Cars looked like old cars, but the way people traveled down the street then was basically the same way we do now, which would not have been the case for 80 years before the movie. But while much looked the same, there were some basic assumptions about human character that appear to be very different. This point was driven home by the 80-year old trailer, which I’ve embedded in this post.

As far as I recall, nobody utters the word, “notorious” in Notorious. Why, then, is the movie called that? I assumed it was for the notorious Nazi plot, or perhaps for the notorious (though oddly sympathetic) villain, Alexander Sebastian. The trailer applies the word to someone very different— Alicia! Alicia is the notorious one!

Alicia is depicted as a “fast” woman— she drinks, she’s sexually active outside of marriage, and she likes to party. Plus, we are introduced to her rat of a father before we meet her, so director Alfred Hitchcock is playing on the audience’s inclination to assign guilt by association. She is a woman of questionable character. Except, I don’t think the same character in a contemporary movie would carry with her the same type of baggage. Actually, this year’s Supergirl has a lot in common with Alicia.

Both Devlin and Sebastian fall hard for Alicia, and both are very jealous lovers. Devlin is so jealous that he is clearly disappointed when he learns from his boss that Alicia has been selected for this assignment because she already knew Sebastian, and Sebastian had previously had a crush on her. Not that they were involved— Cary Grant is a good enough actor to convey through facial expression that he thought less of Alicia because this other guy liked her. Later, he reveals that he was hoping that she would turn down the assignment. The implication being that on some level, Devlin would have rather Alicia uphold her personal “virtue” than sacrifice for her country (there’s a scene involving a surreptitious recording of Alicia establishing that her patriotism is true).

I think part of what we’re supposed to take away, which I’m guessing would have been more evident in 1946 than today, is that Alicia has all the external signs of being a lowlife, yet the external indicators are shown to be misleading, obscuring her true character. Alicia puts herself in danger and we get the sense that she does not enjoy going under cover and going so far as to marry Sebastian in order to maintain the ruse. Maybe she’s doing all this to atone for the sins of her father, but she’s the real hero of the movie. Devlin’s petty jealousy turns out to be unwarranted, and he comes to realize that when, at the end, he rescues Alicia from certain peril.

Sebastian, in a way, is the opposite of Alicia. On the surface he seems respectable, polite and successful. He’s a more complex character than I think of when I think of movies from the 40s because we kinda feel for the guy. He seems to have the exact same feelings for Alicia as Devlin. We empathize with him when he feels love, jealousy and even fear. The movie ends with Devlin leaving Sebastian to his fellow Nazis at the moment they realize that Sebastian had failed them (meaning, they’re gonna kill him). Despite this guy being a vile Nazi who was plotting to build an atomic bomb, I myself felt sorry for him at the end. That’s some good storytelling, but it also subtly underscored the point that despite outward signs of virtue (including his apparently sincere love for Alicia), Sebastian was evil at his core.

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OK, so, James Bond. Dr. No was released 16 years after Notorious. I don’t specifically know this, but it seems like the earlier movie had an influence on Sean Connery’s depiction of Bond and on the people who made those early Bond movies. There are specific similarities to Thunderball (1965), such as a scene in which Alicia is recklessly driving with Devlin as a passenger (similar to a scene in which the villainous Fiona Volpe, another unvirtuous woman, is driving Bond). Alicia’s relationship with Sebastian seems to be, at least partially, the model for Domino’s relationship with Largo. Even the way Devlin is introduced— we see the back of his head for a while, while he’s surrounded by people at a party before we see his face— is similar to how Bond is introduced in Dr. No—we see the back of his head, while he’s surrounded by people in a casino. Bond seems to have taken fashion tips from Devlin, too.

Rating: These classic movies are classic for a reason and it sort of is pointless to rate them— yes, this is a four our of four. Four wine bottles of uranium, ok???
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