The Notorious Spy

Filled with tales of sex and secrecy, just reading about these famous spies will make your life seem more intriguing.
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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. With Hitchcock and Selznick both busy, Barbara Keon would be his only contact. Odets's script tried to bring more atmosphere to the story than had previously been present. She quotes French poetry from memory and sings Schubert.

Hitchcock apparently used none of it. What he did have in his hand, though, was the script for " Principal photography for Notorious began on October 22, [25] and wrapped in February 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.

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. 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 , [1] in one of her many collaborations with Hitchcock.

One of the signature scenes in Notorious is the two-and-a-half-minute kiss that Hitchcock interrupted every three seconds to slip the scene through the three-second-rule crack in the Production Code. Although the production proceeded smoothly it was not without some unusual aspects. The first was the helpfulness of Cary Grant toward Ingrid Bergman, in a way that "was remarkably calm and pointedly unusual for him". The often moody, sometimes withdrawn [27] Grant, though, "came to Notorious full of bounce" [27] and coached her through her initial period of adjustment, rehearsing her the way Devlin rehearses Alicia.

There were two passionate turmoils going on on-set, and both served to inform the final product: I think she would do it this way. There was not a sound on the set, for Hitchcock did not suffer actors' ideas gladly: Well before filming began, every eventuality of every scene had been planned—every camera angle, every set, costume, prop, even the sound cues had been foreseen and were in the shooting script. But in this case, an actress had a good idea, and to everyone's astonishment, he said, "I think you're right, Ingrid.

Of all your pictures, this is the one in which one feels the most perfect correlation between what you are aiming at and what appears on the screen To the eye, the ensemble is as perfect as an animated cartoon The music for Notorious is the least celebrated of the major Hitchcock scores, writes film scholar Jack Sullivan , one that few writers or fans talk about. It weaves a unique spell, one Hitchcock had not conjured before, and the hip, swingy source music is novel as well. The composer was Roy Webb , a staff composer at RKO, who had most recently scored the dark films of director Val Lewton for that studio.

He wrote the fight song for Columbia University while he was there in the s, then served as assistant to film composer Max Steiner until ; his reputation was "reliable, but unglamorous". Before the sale of the property to RKO, Selznick attempted, with typical Selznick gusto, to steer the course of the music. However, the sale removed Selznick as the decision-maker.

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Hitchcock was glad to be out from under Selznick's thumb. There would be "no sudsy violins in big love scenes, no more recycling of Selznick's favorite cues from past movies. He made sure there were no south-of-the-border cliches. But Webb didn't mind jigsaw cutting at all. It complemented his fragmented musical architecture, just as the blocked passions of the film's characters reflect his unresolved harmonies.

Like Hitchcock, Webb favored atmosphere and tonal nuance over broad gestures. Both men were classicists dealing in darkness and chaos. Alicia and Devlin fall quickly in love once they arrive in Rio, and Webb uses tambourines, guitars, drums and Brazilian trumpets swinging into Brazilian dance music to provide "sensuous foreplay for the tumultuous love affair".

Yet understatement and atypical use are everywhere:. Sexy and full of danger, [the love music] is a typical Hitchcock romantic theme, though it is rarely used romantically. For the most part, it appears at unpredictable times, in increasingly troubled harmonies, to capture the couple's shifting sexual subcurrents: Alicia's hurt and suppressed longing, Devlin's fear jealousy, and hesitation. Often, Webb and Hitchcock use no music at all to undergird a romantic scene.

The two-and-a-half minute kiss begins with distant music when it commences out on the balcony, but goes silent when the couple move inside.

Aspects of Hitchcockian humor are present: When Alicia first enters the Sebastian mansion, loaded with sinister Nazis, Schumann and Chopin are playing. Roger Ebert described Notorious as having "some of the most effective camera shots in his—or anyone's—work". The excess of her drinking is reinforced the next morning with a close-up and zoom out from a glass of fizzing aspirin beside her bed.

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The camera switches to her point of view and the viewer sees Grant as Devlin, backlit and upside down. The predominant theme in Notorious is trust—trust withheld, or given too freely.


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Devlin is a long time finding his trust, while Alexander Sebastian offers his up easily—and ultimately pays a big price for it. Likewise, the film addresses a woman's need to be trusted, and a man's need to open himself to love. Hitchcock the raconteur positioned it in terms of classic conflict. He told Truffaut that. The story of Notorious is the old conflict between love and duty. Cary Grant's job—and it's rather an ironic situation—is to push Ingrid Bergman into Claude Rains's bed.

One can hardly blame him for seeming bitter throughout the story, whereas Claude Rains is a rather appealing figure, both because his confidence is being betrayed and because his love for Ingrid Bergman is probably deeper than Cary Grant's. All of these elements of psychological drama have been woven into the spy story. Sullivan writes that Devlin sets up Alicia as sexual bait, refuses to take any responsibility for his role, then feels devastated when she does a superb job. Alex is Hitchcock's most painfully sympathetic villain, driven by his profound jealousy and rage—not to mention his enthrallment to an emasculating mother—culminating in an abrupt, absolute imperative to kill the love of his life.

Hitchcock's own mother had died in September , and Notorious is the first time he addresses his mother issues head-on. No longer relegated to mere conversation, she appears here as a major character in a Hitchcock picture, and all at once—as later, through Psycho, The Birds and Marnie —Hitchcock began to make the mother figure a personal repository of his anger, guilt, resentment, and a sad yearning. The theme of drinking weaves its way through the film from beginning to end: Even the MacGuffin comes packaged in a wine bottle.

Coming as it did on the heels of World War II, the theme of patriotism—and the limits thereof—make it "astonishing that the movie was produced at all and that it was such an immediate success , since it contains such blunt dialogue about government-sponsored prostitution: The sexual blackmail is the idea of American intelligence agents, who are blithely willing to exploit a woman and even to let her die to serve their own ends.

Soon, however, Hallowes and her supervisor Peter Churchill were captured by the Germans. She realized that if the Germans believed that Peter is the nephew of the British Prime Minister and she his wife, they would not kill them and instead, use them as a bargaining tool.

Indeed, both Hallowes and Churchill survived the war, largely because they had stick to the story that they were related to Winston Churchill. Hallowes who is the only woman to be awarded with the George Cross while alive died in , aged In , he began working in the British atomic bomb project and shortly thereafter, for the Soviet military intelligence agency GRU. Two years later, he went to the United States and joined the team of scientists working in the Manhattan Project.

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In , the Americans began suspecting him of espionage. Fuchs who returned to Britain after the end of the war initially denied passing information to the Soviets but in , he confessed that he was a spy. The British sentenced him to 14 years in prison. He was released in and deported to East Germany where he died in Richard Sorge was a German-born Soviet spy who is considered as one of the greatest intelligence agents of all time. While recovering from an injury sustained in the Western Front during World War I, he became a passionate communist. In the s, he went to the Soviet Union and soon began working as an intelligence agent.

Sorge even informed them about the date of the planned German attack. In , he was exposed by the Japanese and arrested.

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He was executed three years later. In , Sorge was posthumously awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union distinction, the highest honorary title in the Soviet Union. In , she was arrested, found guilty of espionage and executed by firing squad in Paris, aged However, her espionage activities and their extent remain a matter of debate because the evidence used against her was circumstantial and obscure.

According to many historians, Mata Hari was probably a double agent. Shortly thereafter, she was sent back to France to help organize the resistance. To keep up appearances, Shi Pei Pu pretended to birth Boursicot's son, a baby actually purchased from a hospital. The love affair spanned 20 years, during which Boursicot gave Shi Pei Pu gifts Shi Pei Pu was arrested for delivering those documents to the Chinese Secret Service and sentenced to six years in prison, of which the spy served 11 months.

The story was the inspiration for the play and film "M. Anna Chapman was part of a ring of spies living in the New York area in the early s. She was investigated by the FBI for years before the organization arrested her and 10 others in , and traded them for four Russians convicted of spying for the U. Back in Russia, the photogenic Chapman enjoyed celebrity status.

She modeled lingerie and joined a board associated with President Vladimir Putin's party. Benedict Arnold was known as a double-crosser, first fighting for the American Revolution, but then defecting to the British Army. But he didn't do it alone. Though he claimed to be a prisoner of war as a bid to escape prosecution, he was hanged in for his actions against the Continental Army.

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A federal judge sentenced him to 27 years in prison, a considerable increase to the prosecution's request. After the ruling, the judge said the following to Pitts: His wife persuaded him to stop spying when she caught him with classified documents, but that didn't last long. Hannssen was back to spying four years later. He moved on from the KGB to Russian Intelligence in , but was arrested in while making a drop.

He pled guilty, in order to avoid the death penalty, and was sentenced to 15 life terms in prison. James Armistead Lafayette was a slave granted permission by his master to join the American Revolutionary War in To aid the colonies, he approached the British pretending to be a runaway slave, and subsequently spied on Benedict Arnold and the British. His reports aided in the defeat of the British during the Battle of Yorktown. Walker's covert dealings made it possible for the Soviets to unscramble military communications and find U.