I Watch Films: Notorious

 

Notorious

Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy; T R Devlin (Cary Grant) recruits her to infiltrate a Nazi organisation in Brazil, where many of them have ended up after WW2. Initially she tries to turn him down but he plays recordings from surveillance on her father where she refuses to work with him because she’s a loyal American. Also he’s the very charming Cary Grant.

In Rio De Janeiro there’s a delay and Devlin and Huberman fall for each other though Devlin has doubts about her (she’s been a bit promiscuous). Then the word comes and her mission is to get close to Alex Sebastian (Claude Raines), a friend of her father and an executive in Farben Industrial. They’re confident she will be able to seduce him as he was previously in love with her before the war got in the way. Devlin tries to dissuade his bosses but they insist.

Sebastian’s mum disapproves as Huberman broke his heart before, but he insists and they have a romance. Huberman reports that at a dinner party one guest seemed shocked at a wine bottle; he’s later killed. Sebastien proposes to Huberman and Devlin coldly tells her to do what she wants. Returning from honeymoon Sebastien gives her the keys to the house, but the set does not include the wine cellar.

Reporting this Devlin suggests a grand party at which he (posing as a friend of Huberman, an airline representative) will be able to break into the wine cellar and find out what’s going. This succeeds except that Sebastien finds them; Devlin pretends to be drunk. Later Sebastien notices that his key is off the ring that night but back on in the morning and finds clues they’ve been there. He can’t tell the other Nazis, they would kill him for being unreliable. His mother tells him what to do; poison Huberman slowly and he might get away with it.

A sharp and twisty thriller plot married to a difficult romance, this is a classic Hitchcock film with some fine actors. If it fails to take much advantage of the setting, there’s still plenty to enjoy, even with the slightly dated pacing and style of the period.

Watch This: Classic thriller of the 1940s
Don’t Watch This: Slow, Devlin’s a prig, the villains are all a bit wet