Top 5 moments in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious:
1. The kiss between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman – it was the longest kiss in screen history at the time. Because of the morality production codes, no kiss could last longer than 3 seconds. Hitchcock got around this by having them break up the kiss, pulling back, talking, nuzzling each other, nibbling … as they moved from the balcony into the apartment, over to the phone, and then over to the door. All in one long unbroken shot.
2. When Claude Rains looks up slowly at his evil Nazi mother (played spectacularly by Leopoldine Konstantin) and says, “I am married to an American agent.”
3. The frenzied sequence in the wine cellar during the party. Ingrid Bergman standing guard, Cary Grant snooping around. Hugely suspenseful.
4. The scene where Ingrid Bergman realizes her husband and his mother have been slowly poisoning her.
5. The entire last scene: Cary Grant finally coming to rescue her … the long long descent down the stairway. Apparently, Hitchcock wanted the descent to be longer and more drawn out – and the stairway, although quite long, wasn’t long enough – so he had them back up a couple steps in between takes … and continue the scene – so that the stairway seemed much longer.
