Pre-production Notorious started life as a
David O. Selznick production, but by the time it hit American screens in August 1946, it bore the
RKO studio's logo. Alfred Hitchcock became the producer, but as on all his subsequent films, he limited his screen credits to "Directed by" and his possessive credit above the title. Its first glimmer occurred some two years previously, in August 1944, over lunch between Hitchcock and Selznick's story editor, Margaret McDonell. Her memo to Selznick said that Hitchcock was "very anxious to do a story about confidence tricks on a grand scale [with] Ingrid Bergman [as] the woman ... Her training would be as elaborate as the training of a Mata Hari." Hitchcock continued his conversation a few weeks later, this time dining at Chasen's with
William Dozier, an RKO studio executive, and pitching it as "the story of a woman sold for political purposes into sexual enslavement". By this time, he had one of the single-word titles he preferred:
Notorious. The pitch was convincing: Dozier quickly entered into talks with Selznick, offering to buy the property and its personnel for production at RKO. Dozier's interest rekindled Selznick's, which up to that point had only been tepid. Perhaps what started Hitchcock's mind rolling was "The Song of the Dragon", a short story by
John Taintor Foote which had appeared as a two-part serial in the
Saturday Evening Post in November 1921; Selznick, who owned the rights to it, had passed it on to Hitchcock from his unproduced story file during the filming of
Spellbound. Set during
World War I in New York, "The Song of the Dragon" told the tale of a theatrical producer approached by
federal agents, who want his assistance in recruiting an actress he once had a relationship with to seduce the leader of a gang of enemy saboteurs. Although the story was a nominal starting point that "offered some inspiration, the final narrative was pure Hitchcock". Hitchcock travelled to England for Christmas 1944, and when he returned, he had an outline for Selznick's perusal. The producer approved development of a script, and Hitchcock decamped for
Nyack, New York, for three weeks of collaboration with
Ben Hecht, whom he had just worked with on
Spellbound. The two would work at Hecht's house, with Hitchcock repairing at night to the
St. Regis New York. The two had an extraordinarily smooth and fruitful working partnership, partly because Hecht did not really care how much Hitchcock rewrote his work: Hitchcock delivered his and Hecht's screenplay to Selznick in late March, but the producer was getting drawn deeper into the roiling problems of his western epic
Duel in the Sun. At first he ordered story conferences at his home, typically with start times of 11 p.m., to both Hecht's and Hitchcock's profound annoyance. The two would dine at
Romanoff's and "pool their defenses about what Hitchcock thought was a first class script". Shortly, though,
Duels problems won out and Selznick relegated
Notorious to his mental back burner. Among the many changes to the original story was the introduction of a
MacGuffin: a cache of
uranium being held in Sebastian's wine cellar by the Nazis. At the time, it was not common knowledge that uranium was being used in the development of the
atomic bomb, and Selznick had trouble understanding its use as a plot device. Indeed, Hitchcock later claimed he was followed by the
FBI for several months after he and Hecht discussed uranium with
Robert Millikan at the
California Institute of Technology in mid-1945. In any event, the dropping of the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the release of details of the
Manhattan Project, removed any doubts about its use. By June 1945,
Notorious reached its turning point. Selznick "was losing faith in a film that never really interested him"; the MacGuffin still bothered him, as did the Devlin character, and he worried that audiences would dislike the Alicia character. More worrisome, though, was the drain on his cash reserves imposed by the voracious
Duel in the Sun. Finally, he agreed to sell the
Notorious package to RKO: script, Bergman and Hitchcock. The deal was a win–win–win situation: Selznick got $800,000 cash, plus 50% of the profits, RKO obtained a prestige production with an ascendant star and an emerging director, and Hitchcock, though he received no money, was freed from Selznick's influence. He also got to be his own producer for the first time, an important step for him: "supervising everything from the polishing of the script to the negotiation of myriad post-production details, the director could demonstrate to the industry at large his skill as an executive." RKO assumed the project in mid-July 1945, and furnished office space, studio space, distribution—and freedom. There was no getting away from Selznick completely, though. He contended that his 50% stake in the profits still entitled him to input into the project. He still dictated sheaves of memos about the script, and tried to oust Cary Grant from the cast in favor of his contractee,
Joseph Cotten. When the United States detonated two atomic bombs over Japan in August, the memos commenced anew and centered mainly on Selznick's continuing dissatisfaction with the script. Hitchcock was abroad, so Dozier called on playwright
Clifford Odets, who previously wrote
None but the Lonely Heart for RKO and Grant, to do a rewrite. With Hitchcock and Selznick both busy, Selznick's script assistant Barbara Keon would be his only contact. Odets's script tried to bring more atmosphere to the story than had previously been present. "Extending the characters' emotional range, he heightened the passion of Devlin and Alicia and the aristocratic ennui of Alex Sebastian. He also added a soupçon of high culture to soften Alicia: She quotes French poetry from memory and sings
Schubert." However, his draft did nothing for Selznick, who still thought the characters lacked dimension, that Devlin still lacked charm, and that the couple's sleeping together "may cheapen her in the eyes of the audience". Ben Hecht's appraisal, handwritten in the margin, was straightforward: "This is really loose crap." In the end, the Odets script was a blind alley: Hitchcock apparently used none of it. What he
did have in his hand, though, was the script for "... a consummate Hitchcock film, in every sense filled with passion and textures and levels of meaning".
Production Principal photography for
Notorious began on October 22, 1945, and wrapped in February 1946. Production was structured the way Hitchcock preferred it: with almost all shooting done indoors, on RKO sound stages, even seeming "exterior" scenes achieved with rear projection
process shots. This gave him maximum control of his filmmaking through the day; in the evenings he exercised similar control over the nightly soirées at his
Bellagio Road home. The only scene requiring outdoor filming was the one at the riding club where Devlin and Alicia contrive to meet Alexander Sebastian on horseback; this scene was shot at the
Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden in
Arcadia, California.
Second unit crews shot establishing exteriors and rear-projection footage in Miami, Rio de Janeiro and at the
Santa Anita Park racetrack. With everything stage-bound, production was smooth and problems were few, and small—for instance, Claude Rains, who stood three or four inches shorter than Ingrid Bergman. "[There's] this business of you being a midget with a wife, Miss Bergman, who is very tall", the director kidded with Rains, a good friend. For the scenes where Rains and Bergman were to walk hand-in-hand, Hitchcock devised a system of ramps that boosted Rains's height yet were unseen by the camera. He also suggested Rains try
elevator shoes: "Walk in them, sleep in them, be comfortable in them." Rains did, and used them thereafter. Hitchcock gave Rains the choice of playing Sebastian with a German or his English accent; Rains chose the latter. Ingrid Bergman's gowns were by
Edith Head,
Production credits The production credits on the film were as follows: • Director –
Alfred Hitchcock • Screenplay –
Ben Hecht • Director of photography –
Ted Tetzlaff • Art direction –
Albert S. D'Agostino and
Carroll Clark (art directors);
Darrell Silvera and
Claude E. Carpenter (set decorations) • Special effects –
Vernon L. Walker and
Paul Eagler • Music –
Roy Webb (music),
Constantin Bakaleinikoff (musical director), Gil Grau (orchestral arrangements) • Editor – Theron Warth • Sound –
John E. Tribby and Terry Kellum • Costumes –
Edith Head (design of Ingrid Bergman's gowns) • Assistant director – William Dorfman • Production assistant – Barbara Keon == Themes and motifs ==