In the spring of 1945, filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock and
screenwriter Ben Hecht were hard at work on their latest
project—Notorious, a story of expatriate Nazis hiding out in
South America. Hitchcock and Hecht had pulled together the plot
from parts of a Saturday Evening Post serial and real-life spy
tales from Hitchcock’s friends in the Ministry of Information.
On its face, the film was a love triangle, with an undercurrent
of espionage. It is as famous today for a then-daring love scene
between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, which skirted the
strict production codes of the day, as for its masterful
suspense elements. Less well-known is a meeting between
Hitchcock and Caltech scientist Robert A. Millikan that took
place during preproduction and got Hitchcock placed on an FBI
watch list. Hitchcock was fond of having a “MacGuffin”—an
intriguing object or device that carries the plot forward—in his
films. In the story he and Hecht had come up with, the film’s
female protagonist is recruited by an American go