Shortly after Spellbound, Hitchcock was investigated by the FBI, because his new movie, Notorious, used uranium as its MacGuffin—a substance the public had little reason to be aware of since the development of nuclear weapons had not yet been revealed when the movie was in production.
Hitchcock did not enjoy working according to Selznick’s specifications, and he seems to have lost some of his focus in the 1940s, moving away from his usual areas of focus to direct a courtroom thriller and a romantic comedy, as well as a documentary for the British Army about the Nazi concentration camps. But the decade also saw him direct his favorite movie Shadow of a Doubt, which was one of his movies influenced by his interest in psychoanalysis (the less successful Spellbound that followed was an explicitly Freudian work, which quickly became dated but is notable for its dream sequence created by surrealist artist Salvador Dali).  It revolves around a young woman’s suspicions that her uncle may be a serial killer. As intriguing as the movie is on a purely plot-driven level, there are a good many elements that have fascinated film theorists, from the fact that the young woman and her uncle have the same name to the serial killer’s targeting of widows—women already defined by death. Shortly after Spellbound, Hitchcock was investigated by the FBI, because his new movie, Notorious, used uranium as its MacGuffin—a substance the public had little reason to be aware of since the development of nuclear weapons had not yet been revealed when the movie was in production. Notorious was also Hitch’s first film with Cary Grant, who would star in several more of his films.