Notorious

One of the few noirs that could just as easily be categorized as a love story, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious stars Ingrid Bergman as Alicia Huberman, a hired agent — and borderline prostitute — who agrees to marry Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) to spy on his post-war Nazi dealings for the US government. Cary Grant plays T.R. Devlin, Alicia’s contact at the Secret Service who escorts her to Rio de Janeiro and with whom she falls in love, a courtship that Hitchcock captures so gently and sensually that we momentarily forget the film’s dark subject matter. The primary suspense sequences revolve around a wine cellar key (stealing it, sharing it, using it) which ultimately leads to the discovery that Sebastian and his goons are harvesting uranium ore. Visually, Notorious is a perfect Hitchcock specimen: rear projection screens, disorienting camera lenses, inserts on suspicious inanimate objects, the famous crane shot from the second floor down to Bergman’s fingers. It’s a beautifully crafted film that maximizes the romance and glamor quotients while reminding us that the psychosis of Nazism didn’t end with the war.