77. Notorious

Last weekend I was idly channel surfing, looking for something to watch when I noticed this was just starting. Unfortunately I'd missed Spellbound, the first part of the Hitchcock double, but I stayed and watched Notorious to the end. I saw this film back in my University days one afternoon when I probably should have been revising but as I watched I realised I could remember almost nothing about it — it obviously made an impression on me!


The plot is fairly simple for a Hitchcock thriller. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman fall in love in post-war Rio while waiting for Bergman to start an assignment to infiltrate a group of Nazis. One of them — the always superb, and always seemingly slightly drunk, Claude Rains — is in love with her, a situation she uses to her advantage.

There are some great tense moments — vintage Hitchcock — but the film is really just a love story. The espionage stuff is practically a side-bar which barely bothers concluding itself and there are some interesting psychological issues (Rains' relationship with his mother exemplifying a typical Hitchcock theme). But it's the love triangle at the centre that's most compelling.

This is one of many similarities with Casablanca that really struck me. Along with Rains and Bergman, of course, we have Nazis, McGuffins, foreign locations, stoic leading men hiding their feelings, questions of love vs duty and so on. I think that's why Notorious made little impression on me the first time I saw it. For sure it's a classy and very well polished romantic thriller. The characters are interesting, deep and well portrayed. But it ain't no Casablanca, which has a lot of the good things that Notorious has, but with a superior script, better music and Peter Lorre.

They remade it in 2009 but while I'm all in favour of changing things in remakes — otherwise why bother? — I think they probably took it a bit far.