Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Notorious
1946 · Alfred Hitchcock · Notorious on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 2 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the room tilt and right itself as Devlin enters. (camera)
In the morning-after scene, a hungover Alicia sees Devlin upside-down in her doorway, and the camera physically rotates until he rights himself as he advances.
Payoff: The reading calls this a dicisign: the camera showing you a person perceiving, so you inhabit her disorientation directly. In the reading: dicisign. You do not just watch her hangover. For a moment, you share it.
Listen to the lovers murmur about dinner while embracing. (sound)
The famous extended embrace plays over a low, continuous murmur of ordinary dialogue, phone calls and dinner plans, rather than swelling music.
Payoff: Intimacy here is carried by proximity and tone of voice, not by anything the score is doing for you.
Watch how large ordinary objects loom in close-up. (setting)
Tetzlaff repeatedly isolates glasses and cups in big foreground close-ups, giving domestic objects the visual weight of faces.
Payoff: The reading calls an ordinary object like this a mark, a thing that means by habit. In the reading: mark. Hitchcock gives plain household things the weight of faces, which the reading calls marks.
Watch Grant play warmth as something withheld, not given. (performance)
Grant is cast against his usual charm, playing Devlin cold and guarded even in his tenderest scenes with Bergman.
Payoff: His restraint is what makes the romance feel uneasy rather than comfortable, right from the start.
Watch Rains play Sebastian as genuinely, vulnerably in love. (performance)
Rains gives Sebastian real warmth and vulnerability rather than villainous menace, so your sympathies end up uncomfortably divided between him and the couple working against him.
Payoff: A spy thriller usually hands you an easy villain. This one refuses to let you feel simply about anyone.
The 2 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how big ordinary objects get in close-up. Hitchcock gives them the weight of faces.