Notorious

Released just months after V-E day and the end of World War II, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious is fixed clearly on the post-Hitler Nazi threat, among the earliest manifestations of a pop culture meme that continued for decades in movies like the Dustin Hoffman/Lawrence Olivier thriller Marathon Man and Robert Harris’s classic ‘what if England lost’ novel Fatherland.

John Huberman is convicted of treason for being a German spy in early 1946 and his daughter Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) attempts to drown her sorrow in liquor and men in Miami. One night T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) shows up at one of those parties at her bungalow and, in the morning when she wakes with a nasty hangover, suggests that a better way to get past her dad’s disgrace is to work for him to infiltrate a Nazi gang in Rio de Janeiro; Devlin wants her because one of the conspiracy’s leaders has held a crush on Alicia for years and is himself getting old enough to feel real pressure to marry and settle down.

The two fly to Brazil where a chance encounter with Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) is arranged; a few lunches and dinner later, after Momma Sebastian (played with a delightfully nasty edge by Leopoldine Konstantin) can meet and give her blessing, he pops the question. Neither Alicia nor Devlin are happy about this since by now they are in love but the bosses don’t know that, nor would they care even so, and instruct her to accept.

While the conspiracy is disposed of by the end–could you imagine some other outcome?–the survival of the two lovebirds and their romance is far less certain. Hitchcock is the master of suspense and Notorious is considered one of his best films, Ben Hecht wrote a very strong script (he won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar) and Grant, Bergman and Rains all give terrific performances (Rains was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, losing to Harrold Russell’s outstanding effort in The Best Years of Our Lives) so this is a movie you really ought to see when the chance comes around again on DVD or cable.

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