Notorious

A Government agent (Cary Grant) recruits a traitor’s daughter (Ingrid Bergman) to spy on a Nazi (Claude Rains) in Rio de Janeiro.

Notorious can be something of a let down, if you go in expecting a typical Hitchcock mystery-thriller. There’s no big third act plot twist, no labyrinthine plot to decipher, instead Hitchcock delivers a dark, but fairly straight, story about love, deception, and loyalty. Taken on those terms, however, Notorious delivers in spades.

This is a character driven piece, and Hitchcock’s cast is more than up to the challenge. Cary Grant is perfect as the suave but icy agent Devlin, and Ingrid Bergman is absolutely charming and believable opposite him. Equally well chosen is the supporting cast, especially Claude Rains and Leopoldine Konstantin.

Rains plays his character as an imperfect mirror of Grant’s, both suave operators dedicated to their causes and both with a weakness for Bergman’s character. Only Rains’ character has an additional weakness, namely his mother, played by Leopoldine Konstantin, and her incessant smothering. Konstantin gives a chilling performance that foreshadows another overbearing mother in one of Hitchcock’s later works…

Visually, Notorious is all shadows. Cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff turns in a crisp smog of grays and blacks, as light and shadow serve to reflect the characters themselves. In doing so Tetzlaff co-opts the traditional film-noir look to great effect.

Notorious is a film that gets better with each viewing, as each run reveals a new layer of depth and nuance, and Hitchcock’s deliberate direction invites to viewer to scrutinize each frame.