Reception
The film was the official selection of the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. Notorious had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on July 22, 1946 with Hitchcock, Bergman and Grant in attendance. The movie made $4.8 million in theatrical rentals on its first American domestic release, making it one of the biggest hits of the year. It earned RKO a profit of $1,010,000.
Critics liked the film. 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." Leslie Halliwell, usually terse, almost glowed about Notorious: "Superb romantic suspenser containing some of Hitchcock's best work." 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." On the website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an overall positive rating of 97%, based on 29 reviews.
The review that would have pleased Hitchcock the most came from perhaps his favorite critic, his daughter, Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell. Notorious is her 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."
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. In 2006, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Time magazine listed Notorious as one of the All-Time 100 best films as chosen by Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel. Entertainment Weekly ranked it #66 in their book 100 Greatest Movies of All Time.
Read more about this topic: Notorious (1946 film)
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“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
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