films

Notorious (1946)

Notorious has the best of everything: thrills, suspense and intrigue, an exotic setting, a “very strange love affair” between Hitchcock’s two favourite stars, a clever and complex plot of jealousy and deception, and some of Hitch’s giddiest direction.

Ingrid Bergman is at her most elegant and luminous as Alicia Huberman, daughter of a Nazi spy who is convicted and commits suicide at the beginning of the film. She meets and has a turbulent affair with suave, frighteningly handsome American agent, Devlin (Cary Grant), and travels to Rio with him to smoke out a group of desperate Nazi criminals there, headed by a former lover, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains). In another recurring favourite theme of Hitch’s, Sebastian is clinging in a love-hate relationship with his distrusting mother, who suspects Alicia and is horrified when her son asks Alicia to marry him. She agrees, partly it seems to spite Devlin and her strange, tempestuous relationship with him. Their plan, it transpires, involves uranium ore hidden in bottles in the wine cellar. Devlin discovers this after Alicia steals Sebastian’s cellar key, leading to one of the most brilliant shots of the film: It is a party at Sebastian’s house. The camera drifts from the top of a staircase way above from where Bergman is talking to Rains. Slowly and smoothly it closes in, down, down, until Bergman nervously holds her hand behind her back, and eventually the cellar key she holds there fills the screen. It’s similar to an equally effective shot in Hitchcock’s earlier Young and Innocent, where he sweeps over the heads of people at a dance to the band behind and into the twitching eyes of a murderer.