Actress Ingrid Bergman once said, “A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.” And boy would she know—her shared kiss with Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 thriller Notorious is breathtaking. The pair’s on-screen embrace has been vastly cited as a fantastic example of sidestepping the Motion Picture Production Code’s limitations on excessive necking. In order to circumvent the iron-fisted and eponymously named Hays Code, Hitchcock had the actors start and stop kissing over and over again for two and a half minutes. ’Twas a very strange love affair (and time in history for filmmakers to accurately portray lust and passion).
In an effort to compile the best smooching directed by Hitchcock, Jorge Luengo Ruiz has crafted a sensual supercut featuring scenes from Psycho, The Birds, North By Northwest, and Dial M For Murder, among others. It’s interesting to see the affectionate sequences in one collection, and much more titillating than Hitchcock’s cameos.