Notorious

Set and made in the months following the end of the Second World War, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious is an espionage thriller set mainly in Brazil. The film features a more romantic plot than many of the director’s previous films and includes a couple of great performances from its leads Carey Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Alicia Huberman (Bergman) is the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy and is enlisted by her adopted United States to counter spy on Nazi activities in South America. Her handler and government agent T. R. Devlin (Grant) falls for his charge and jealousy ensues when Huberman goes to romantic lengths to infiltrate the Nazi group.

At its best, Notorious matches the tension and drama of any Hitchcock movie but there are large swathes which I found uninteresting. Unlike some of Hitchcock’s best which are tense and exciting from start to finish, Notorious ebbs and flows from extreme brilliance to mere average but overall is a very well made and intriguing film.

It took me quite a while to get into the movie and a long time to get on board with its characters. I also wasn’t really interested in what the Brazilian based Germans were up to. What was great though was the half romance between the two leads and the jealousy, mistrust and deception which this created. There was great chemistry between Bergman and Grant and you get a real sense of the lust and occasional love the two share. The film’s best scenes are those in which the two leads are on their own, either in secret or in early scenes out in the open. There are some great romantic scenes and others in which the pair are nervous about being seen together. The sequences in which the pair are snooping around Alexander Sebastian’s (Claude Rains) house are also excellent.

Hitchcock shows off his mastery of camera movement throughout Notorious with some beautifully executed direction. The camera swoops gracefully around the house, often following seemingly innocuous objects which later become more meaningful. On a number of occasions Hitchcock’s camera tightly follows a coffee cup which I initially just thought was an interesting way of moving the camera from character to character but later it held more significance. In one scene the camera follows the contours of a curved banister rail and one of the highlights was a shot which swoops from a high balcony, zooming tighter and tighter onto the clasped hand of a central character which opens slightly to show a key is being held secretly. It’s a fantastic image.

The movie is over sixty years old but like much of Hitchcock’s work it still feels fresh. One scene which is incredibly dated caused me to laugh out loud and rewind the DVD for fear that I’d miss-seen something. Early on, Bergman’s Huberman is drunk driving with Grant’s Devlin as her passenger. After being stopped by the police and given a telling off, Devlin suggests he drives. Huberman is having none of it and a tussle for the wheel of the now stationary car ensues. To end the fight, Devlin smacks Huberman around the face, knocking her unconscious. I couldn’t believe I’d seen this. A scene such as this would never be filmed today and I had to laugh at the brash nature of it. 

The film presents some steamy and passionate scenes which cleverly get around the strict censorship of the day. Hitchcock was astute when it came to blind siding censors as he showed most famously in Psycho but here he creates a passionate and romantic kissing scene which lasts for several moments but breaks off or cuts every three seconds in line with the censorship rules of the time. Throughout, the film is incredibly well made but it is sometimes let down by the weak storyline. This itself is countered by strong leads and a good central relationship which puts Notorious somewhere towards the middle of Hitchcock’s filmography for me. 

7/10 

Titbits

• The Director's cameo occurs around an hour in at a party, ordering champagne as the stars come into view.
• Once filming ended, Cary Grant kept the famous prop key which he then gave to Ingrid Bergman years later as a present. She in turn gave the prop to Hitchcock decades later.
• Nobel Prize winning scientist Dr. Robert Millikan was consulted on how to make an atomic bomb.
• Hitchcock claimed to have been followed by the FBI for three months due to the films plot.