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RAINER MARIA KOEPPL–ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND JOHN WAYNE
Alicia decides to work for the FBI. She has fallen in love with Devlin and wants to start a
new life and fight for a good cause. Yet this is the beginning of a new chain of deception
and betrayal. Alicia contacts a Nazi friend of her father’s named Alex Sebastian. He had
fallen in love with her years ago, but Alicia had turned him down. Now she pretends to be
in love with him in order to obtain information from him.
Sebastian, the Nazi who is being deceived, really does love her. He wants to marry
her. However Alicia is truly in love with the FBI agent, Devlin. Yet she marries the Nazi
Sebastian in order to be able to deceive and betray him better.
She discovers the secret of the conspiracy. The Nazis are trying to build the
atomic bomb in Brazil. She informs the FBI, thus betraying the man she has just married.
Soon her husband discovers that she has betrayed him, and now he betrays her. He
decides to murder her. But he has to be extremely careful, since he doesn’t want his Nazi
friends to know that he fell for a traitor. Otherwise they would immediately kill him. This
means that Alicia’s death must go unnoticed. Sebastian begins to slowly poison his wife.
She falls ill, and becomes weaker and weaker.
METAMORPHOSIS OF A MASTERPIECE, PART I (1951): WHERE HAVE ALL
THE NAZIS GONE?
The premiere of Notorious took place in 1946 in New York. It was a great hit, one
of the best and most successful movies of the year. Ben Hecht was nominated for an
Oscar for the best screenplay. The film critics and the moviegoers were very excited.
In 1951 Notorious was shown in the cinemas in Germany and Austria. The film had been
synchronized in the German language and was called Weisses Gift literally meaning “White
Poison” in English. In this German synchronized version of Notorious, everything was
eliminated that pointed towards the political background of the plot.
In Notorious the family name of Alicia and her father John is Huberman, a typical
German name. “Mann” is the German word for “man.” John is the English version of the
German “Johann,” which is also very common in Germany. John Huberman, the German
immigrant who has Americanized his first name, is a spy, a “German worker” as the
reporters call him.
In the German synchronized version of Notorious, John becomes José! This
translation is obviously incorrect, John should be Juan, but that is not the point. John
becomes José, and Huberman is transformed into the strange name Sombrapal, which is
supposedly Latin American. In Weisses Gift (White Poison) the German bad guys have
become South American bad guys. And the atomic bomb, which the Nazis are building,
mutates into illegal drugs. In other words, “the translator as traitor” has transformed the
Nazi and political conspirator John Huberman, “having been found guilty of the crime of treason
against the United States” (Notorious, USA 1946) into a drug dealer named José Sombrapal,
“guilty of importing drugs into the USA.”
German dialogue: “für schuldig befunden, die Einfuhr von Rauschgift in die USA vorgenommen zu
haben, respektive Vorbereitungen dazu getroffen zu haben.” (Weisses Gift / White Poison, West
Germany, 1951, German synchronization of Notorious).
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