'Notorious' - WFS Film Fest screening - members only booking

BOOKING DETAILS

To book, you must have a valid full year membership to the Wellington Film Society. You can book up to two seats per film - but all attendees must be valid full year members. We are making half the seats in the theatre bookable. The rest of the seats will be available on the day on a 'first come, first served' basis.

If you have a three film sampler membership, you cannot book in advance. You can attend screenings on the ‘first come, first served’ basis for the remaining seats. We will clip your card for each screening you attend. Bring a buddies are not valid.

Your membership must be valid at the time of booking, and also at the time of the screening in June. If you need to renew during this time, make sure you do so via our website - https://wellingtonfilms.nz

You must book through Humanitix using the same name and email as your Wellington Film Society membership, in order to enable cross-referencing.

Places are bookable per film rather than for the whole festival – so you can pick what you want to see.  We’ll be clearing and cleaning the theatre between films so you’ll need to leave, just like between our usual Monday 6 and 8:30 screenings. Seating will be unallocated for all screenings, as normal.

On the day of the screening, we will check both your Humanitix booking via a QR code, and your Film Society membership.

Please be on time, If you are not, we may give your booking away to members who are waiting. Please be seated in the cinema five minutes before the screening time. After that point we do not guarantee your booking is valid.

FILM DETAILS

One of the great Hitchcock classics, and one of the first to feature a superstar Hollywood cast, Notorious is set and shot immediately after the Second World War – coincidentally in the same year as a group of enterprising individuals established (or re-established) a film society in Wellington, Aotearoa’s first.

Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman trade palm-fringed Miami for Rio de Janiero, after suave CIA agent TR Devlin (Grant) persuades Bergman’s Alicia Huberman – daughter of a convicted Nazi, who hits the bottle and the boys as a coping mechanism – to ingratiate herself into a circle of Nazis in Brazil. Her job is, of course, to seduce one of the ringleaders, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains, who comes with another trope of the genre in the form of a terrifying Nazi mother, played by Madame Konstantin).  Unsurprisingly, Alicia and TR are in love with each other as well, which cues all kinds of conflicting loyalties, jealousies and double-crosses in the triangle with Sebastian. Devlin’s simultaneous pride and hurt at Alicia’s willingness to undertake the mission (or play her part if you will) blind him to the danger he pushes her toward, and she numbs the pain she feels in the only way she knows how.  

The Nazi coterie have another type of pain in mind for the world, however, and Hitch ramps up the suspense in the multi-layered game of cat and mouse. There’s something for everyone in Notorious – a stunningly adept cast, a classic Hitchcock cameo, wonderful costumes by Edith Head, and Hitchcock battling the censors for one of the greatest kisses ever captured on celluloid.

“Notorious was one of the last movies in [Bergman’s] glorious Hollywood studio era. She is magnificent in this lethally elegant, stylish and grippingly well-told thriller.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian