The film was the official selection of the 1946 Cannes Film Festival.[48] Notorious had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on August 15, 1946, with Hitchcock, Bergman, and Grant in attendance.
Box office
The film made $4.85 million in theatrical rentals in the United States and Canada on its first release, making it one of the highest-grossing films of the year.[49][50][51] Overseas, it earned $2.3 million, for worldwide rentals of $7.15 million, generating RKO a profit of $1.01 million.[52][49]
Reviews
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of 51 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.9/10. The website's consensus reads: "Sublime direction from Hitchcock, and terrific central performances from Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant make this a bona-fide classic worthy of a re-visit."[53] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 100 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[54] As of April 2024, Notorious is one of 14 films with a score of 100 (perfect) on the website (two other Hitchcock films, Vertigo and Rear Window, are also on the list).[55]
Writing in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther praised the film, writing, "Mr. Hecht has written, and Mr. Hitchcock has directed in brilliant style, a romantic melodrama which is just about as thrilling as they come—velvet smooth in dramatic action, sharp and sure in its characters, and heavily charged with the intensity of warm emotional appeal."[56] Leslie Halliwell, usually terse, almost glowed about Notorious: "Superb romantic suspenser containing some of Hitchcock's best work."[57] Decades later, Roger Ebert also praised the film, adding it to his "Great Movies" list and calling it "the most elegant expression of the master's visual style".[38] Notorious was Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell's favorite of her father's pictures. "What a perfect film!", she told her father's biographer, Charlotte Chandler. "The more I see Notorious, the more I like it."[58]
Claude Rains was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and Ben Hecht was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay.
Legacy
Film critic Roger Ebert included Notorious in his Ten Greatest Films of All Time list in 1991, citing it as his favorite of Hitchcock's films.[59] Entertainment Weekly voted it at No. 66 on their list of The Greatest Films of All Time in 1999.[60] The Village Voice ranked Notorious at No. 77 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.[61] In 2005, Hecht's screenplay was voted by the Writers Guild of America as one of the 101 best ever written.[62] The following year, Notorious was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". American Film Institute included the film as No. 38 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills and as No. 86 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions. Time magazine listed it among the All-TIME 100 films (a list of the greatest films since the magazine's inception) as chosen by Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel.[63] The film was voted at No. 38 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008.[64] Notorious was ranked 68th in BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest American films.[65] In 2022, Time Out magazine ranked the film at No. 34 on their list of "The 100 best thriller films of all time".[66]
Adaptations
- The silent film Convoy (1927), co-produced by Victor Halperin, was based on the same Saturday Evening Post story.[67]
- A Lux Radio Theater adaptation was broadcast on January 26, 1948, with Ingrid Bergman reprising her role as Alicia Huberman and Joseph Cotten taking Cary Grant's role of T. R. Devlin. Another radio adaptation was produced for The Screen Guild Theater, again starring Ingrid Bergman, although this time with John Hodiak, and was broadcast on January 6, 1949.
- The film was remade in 1992 as the TV film Notorious directed by Colin Bucksey, with John Shea as Devlin, Jenny Robertson as Alicia Velorus, Jean-Pierre Cassel as Sebastian, and Marisa Berenson as Katarina.
- In the animated television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars the season two episode "Senate Spy" is a "compressed" adaptation of Notorious, even going so far as to frame the final shot of the episode the same way as the movie.[68]
- Mission: Impossible 2 paid strong homage to Notorious, but the plot is about a deadly virus instead of uranium, with the core story, many of the scenes, and some of the dialogue from Notorious being used.[69]
- The operatic adaption Notorious by Hans Gefors was premiered in Gothenburg in September 2015, starring Nina Stemme as Alicia Huberman.[70]
Tribute to Hitchcock
On March 7, 1979, the American Film Institute honored Hitchcock with its Life Achievement Award. At the tribute dinner, Ingrid Bergman presented him with the original ÚNICA key to the wine cellar - the single most notable prop in Notorious. After filming had ended, Cary Grant had kept it. A few years later he gave the key to Bergman, saying that it had given him luck and hoped it would do the same for her. When presenting it to Hitchcock, to his surprise and delight, she expressed the hope that it would be lucky for him as well.[71][72]
