There's a reason Alfred Hitchcock's become known as "The Master of Suspense" but it'd be disingenuous to believe that he only worked on horror fare like Psycho and The Birds in his career. Just as John Ford didn't just do Westerns or Martin Scorsese hasn't done solely gangster movies, Hitchcock also had more variety in terms of the genres he explored than one might expect. For instance, he was very well-versed in the world of spy thrillers, most notably in his movies like North By Northwest and the subject of this review, Notorious, a 1946 feature film that paired the director with a trio of legendary 1940's actors; Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains!
Notorious concerns the escapades of Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), a woman whose father has just been convicted for treason against the U.S. thanks to his deep ties to Nazi's. She's taken to excessive drinking to cope with the woe she's experiencing in the wake of this revelation about her father but T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) wishes for her to do more with her life. Specifically, he wants her to accompany him on a mission he's working on down in Rio De Janiero, Brazil where he and his cohorts are attempting to break up a local group of Nazi's. Alicia, since she's inadvertently got some familial connections to the Nazi's, could be their key to getting a foot in the door here.
Huberman reluctantly agrees to go and while she's down here, she manages to get off the bottle and find herself thrust into a passionate relationship with T.R. Devlin. It's a lovely romance that makes the two of them feel fulfilled but it's one that gets a wrench thrown into it once their superiors reveal the master plan of their mission; Alicia is to strike up a romantic relationship with Nazi Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) and use her time spent with Sebastian as a way to figure out information about the local Nazi circuit. Devlin and Huberman's love affair is put into chaos by these new orders and plenty of suspenseful espionage is bound to ensue.
While Notorious is more of a spy thriller than Hitchcock's more outright horror-centered outings, that doesn't mean he abandons his stylish penchant for glorious suspense here. On the contrary, there are some wonderfully edge-of-your-seat scenes in here that feel like classic Hitchcock. There's this great scene where Alicia is at a big splashy party Alexander Sebastian is throwing and she's gotta put off the appearance of being a normal participant in the party while also clutching in the palm of her hand the key to a wine cellar that may hold crucial information as to what kind of illicit activities Alexander Sebastian and his Nazo cohorts are up to. The way this scene is filmed and written, you really get a sense of how what kind of duplicitous juggling act Alicia has to pull off here.
There actually seems to be quite a bit of elaborate camerawork throughout the entire movie and not just in this scene. Most of it (including a point-of-view shot from the perspective of an intoxicated Huberman) is done to reinforce what kind of struggles Alicia Huberman is going through and it's that grandeur-infused approach that makes her own internal struggles feel as real as they do. I wish a similar sense of care and depth had been given to her relationship with Devlin, which gets off to an abrupt start but the two leading actors share enough chemistry to compensate for a more precipitous start to their romantic endeavors.
Yes, as shocking as it may sound, the likes of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman turn in strong performances in a motion picture. Someone fetch the fainting salts! In all seriousness, Cary Grant uses his trademark charm and riveting screen presence to make for an entertaining and composed spy protagonist that one gets invested in even after it's implied his character weirdly punches Huberman in an early scene. Ingrid Bergman, for her part, plays the role of tortured soul well and can convey her characters sense of terror once she's being gradually poisoned by Alexander Sebastian and his mom in the third act in a dramatically potent manner. These two are great and they lend a real sense of gravitas to the suspenseful spy thrills of Notorious.
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