How did Alfred Hitchcock get the longest kiss in movie history past the censors?
Alfred Hitchcock spent a fair amount of his precious time arguing with censors. Thanks to Hollywood’s strict Production Code that covered everything from sex to toilets, he was forced to alter his scripts, cut footage, and downright beg. He clashed with censors over the homosexual undertones in 1948’s Rope, a topless scene in 1954’s Rear Window in which one of the protagonist’s neighbours appears topless, and the infamous shower scene in 1960’s Psycho in which a prominent female character is both nude and murdered.
The trouble for Hitchcock was that he had a naughty sensibility by mid-century standards. Fortunately, he also happened to have a talent for craftiness, which meant that he could find sneaky ways to avoid censorship while still getting what he wanted on the screen. To avoid having to remove or reshoot the shower scene, for example, he used quick cuts to minimise the nudity and violence. It wasn’t the first time he tried this tactic. In 1946, he used short takes to get around one of the Code’s most absurd stipulations – that kisses last no more than the incredibly erotic, borderline pornographic length of three seconds.
Hitchcock didn’t just want a normal-length kiss. He didn’t even want a passionate kiss. He wanted a ridiculously long, even by today’s standards, kiss. Whether he was deliberately trying to incense the censors is unclear, though it’s hard to imagine why he’d want a makeout sesh that lasts a full three minutes otherwise.
Notorious stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman as a duo who team up to capture a Nazi war criminal who is hiding out in Rio de Janeiro. Grant is a secret agent, and Bergman is the daughter of an imprisoned Nazi, so their alliance is fraught for much of the film. But they are drawn to each other through electric chemistry, and in one scene, they kiss. And kiss. And kiss.
To get the scene past the eagle-eyed censors, the director interrupted the actors every three seconds, at which point they either gazed into each other’s eyes or peppered in dialogue without leaving each other’s arms. According to Hitchcock’s biographer, Patrick McGilligan, Grant and Bergman weren’t thrilled with the scene, feeling that it was awkward and unnatural. In response, the director reassured them that it would look right on screen, and he was spot-on.
There were many reasons for deploring the Production Code. Chief among them was its horrifically racist and homophobic rules that kept Black actors out of mainstream films for decades and same-sex relationships thickly veiled for even longer. However, in some instances, the rules about sex and intimacy led to some of Hollywood’s most creative moments. Whether it was double-entendres so cleverly dirty that the buttoned-up censors missed the subtext or a scene full of eroticism in which not a single piece of clothing is removed, those rules forced filmmakers like Hitchcock to get innovative.
As a result, the scene between Grant and Bergman is full of eroticism. Their chemistry leaps off the screen, and that lack of passionate tearing off of clothing merely adds another layer of tension to an already tense thriller. It might not have been Hitchcock’s first choice, but considering his salaciousness off-screen, it was a creative blessing in disguise that he had parameters.
