Notorious is an almost flawless movie that holds up in 2011 and seems completely fresh more than sixty years on. The characters are complex, due to a note perfect script by the great Ben Hecht, one of the great film writers, surprisingly naturalistic and intense performances from film icons Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman
and Claude Rains, and of course, Hitchcock's visual mastery.It's the story of a 'party girl' (Bergman), the daughter of a Nazi who is recruited by Cary Grant as a mole into a Nazi ring in Brazil. She is impelled by allied intelligence to marry Rains and infiltrate the inner circle. The love story is touching and deep and all subtext. When Grant rescues a poisoned Bergman and tells her his actual feelings, there's wasn't a dry eye in my house. Well, I was watching alone, but you get the idea. The only aspects of this film that are dated for me, oddly, are the Hitchcockian trick shots, which must have seemed at the time like the future of film. In fact, the 'auteur style' have been superseded by the need to draw attention away from the director. Today most films (well, not the Marvel superhero movies, but you get the idea) try to convey hyper realism, especially for this type of movie - the espionage thriller (case in point: see 2011's Tinker, Tailor... a similar film in subject matter, but a completely diverging type of film making, striving for a flat, documentary style.). What Hitchcock called 'pure cinema' does not really exist today.Rent or order this film on demand and you will not be disappointed. Other Hitchcock films have better set piece scenes and memorable single visual sequences, but this film, literally has it all for its entire duration: emotion, humor, stunning B & W cinematography and complex characters (with megawatt charisma) that we care about.
December 30, 2011
Top Critic
