Notorious - 1946

<p>Marty Jencius and Cindy Rotz take on Hitchcock&#39;s Notorious, the spy romance in which a government man recruits the woman he loves, hands her to a Nazi, and watches.</p><p><br></p><p>ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS</p><p>- Episode: FTC045 | Hosts: Marty Jencius and Cindy Rotz</p><p>- Director/Producer: Alfred Hitchcock — his first credit as his own producer</p><p>- Screenplay: Ben Hecht, loosely from John Taintor Foote&#39;s &quot;The Song of the Dragon&quot;</p><p>- Stars: Cary Grant (Devlin), Ingrid Bergman (Alicia), Claude Rains (Sebastian), Leopoldine Konstantin (Madame Sebastian), Louis Calhern (Prescott)</p><p>- Camera: Ted Tetzlaff, his last as DP; Gregg Toland shot second unit uncredited</p><p>- Music: Roy Webb — Hitchcock wanted Bernard Herrmann, who was unavailable</p><p>- Gowns: Edith Head | Edited by: Theron Warth</p><p>- 101 minutes, black and white, RKO Radio Pictures</p><p>- Budget roughly $1M; $7.15M worldwide, about $1.01M profit for RKO</p><p>- Premiered at Radio City Music Hall, August 15, 1946</p><p>- Oscar nominations for Rains and Hecht; National Film Registry 2006; a perfect 100 on Metacritic</p><p><br></p><p>TRIVIA</p><p>- Selznick lost interest mid-Duel in the Sun and sold the whole package — script, Bergman, Hitchcock — to RKO for $800,000 and half the profits. Hitchcock saw none of the money, but got his producer credit.</p><p>- Selznick lobbied to swap Grant for Joseph Cotten, whose contract he owned. Hitchcock invoked a clause in the sale and killed it.</p><p>- Hitchcock wanted Clifton Webb for Sebastian. Selznick memo-bombed his way to Claude Rains. Ethel Barrymore turned down Madame Sebastian.</p><p>- Konstantin, in her only American film, played Rains&#39;s mother and was four years older than he was.</p><p>- Rains stood three or four inches shorter than Bergman. Hitchcock used hidden ramps and apple boxes, then told Rains to buy elevator shoes and live in them. He wore them the rest of his career.</p><p>- The Production Code capped a kiss at three seconds, so Hitchcock built a two-and-a-half-minute sequence that breaks contact every three seconds and never separates the couple. Hecht watched it shot and said he didn&#39;t understand all this talk about chicken.</p><p>- Hitchcock and Hecht asked Nobel laureate Robert Millikan how an atom bomb worked. He refused, but confirmed the uranium would fit in a wine bottle. Hitchcock claimed the FBI tailed him for three months.</p><p>- Shot almost entirely on RKO soundstages, exteriors incl