In spy pictures Alfred Hitchcock had to have what he called a “McGuffin,” that is, something the spies were after (a secret formula, important papers, jewels, money), even though it played a peripheral role in the unfolding of the story. In Notorious (1946), which he started planning in 1944, Ingrid Bergman gets mixed up with German spies in Brazil, and it was necessary to get a McGuffin for them. “Let’s make it uranium samples,” Hitchcock told scriptwriter Ben Hecht, and the two of them called on Robert A. Milliken at the California Institute of Technology to learn something about the radioactive element.
But when Hitchcock mentioned atom bombs, the Cal Tech physicist almost dropped his teeth, Hitchcock said later, for he was heavily involved at the time in the top-secret Manhattan Project for making the bombs. Milliken said it was absolutely impossible to make atom bombs, according to Hitchcock’s tale afterward, and advised dropping the uranium McGuffin. But as they left Hitchcock told Hecht: “I’m going ahead with the uranium McGuffin anyway.”
Hitchcock’s story about Milliken, like his films, is very dramatic. The trouble with it is that by the time he got down to serious work on Notorious in the fall of 1945, the United States had dropped the atom bombs on Japan and there was no longer anything secret about uranium.
Source:
Boller, Paul F., and Ronald L. Davis. "Horror and Suspense." Hollywood Anecdotes. New York: Morrow, 1987. 322-23. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Pete Martin, “I Call on Alfred Hitchcock,” The Saturday Evening Post, CCXXX (July 27, 1957), p. 73.
Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), p. 300.
Further Reading:
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE
[Notorious]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notorious_(1946_film\))
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