NOTORIOUS (1946)

Terrific Alfred Hitchcock/Ben Hecht suspenser about Ingrid Bergman, wanton daughter of a convicted Nazi War Criminal, picked up by Cary Grant’s C.I.A. man who offers a kind of redemption in a secret mission to Brazil. A ring of Nazi ex-pats are up to . . . well, what are they up to? That’s the mission, and Bergman’s past relationship with one of them, Claude Rains, gives her an ‘in’ with the group. Trouble is, Rains falls in love with her and wants to get married while her controller, Grant, can’t admit that he’s also fallen hard. Pimping her as part of his assignment, he turns bitter and she turns to drink. At least, the info comes in hard & fast, until the facades start to crumble. Hecht outdoes himself in dialogue (on point or suggestive) and perfect story structure. Though unusually for Hitchcock, no comic relief at all in here, all passion, romance, missed connections and the nearest of escapes. While Hitch runs a masterclass on Subjective/Objective/Mixed POV, with every showy shot closely tied to narrative purpose. You can really feel a post-WWII climate shift in this one; Hollywood suddenly grown up. And the cast is something of a miracle. (Where did Hitchcock find Leopoldine Konstantin, Rains’ devious, challenging mother? Off screen for a decade, it’s her only English-language feature.) In the classic HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT interview book, Truffaut picks NOTORIOUS as his favorite of the b&w films. Hitch’s choice is SHADOW OF A DOUBT/’43. Today’s digital viewers are lucky, they don’t have to choose.

DOUBLE-BILL: Hecht’s other film with Hitchcock, the one producer David O. Selzncik kept under his own banner while selling NOTORIOUS as a package to R.K.O., was SPELLBOUND/’45. Both hits, but where SPELLBOUND got three times the Oscar noms. and far more coin, time has wisely corrected the respective reps of the two films.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Book 5 in Philip Kerr’s addictive series about Nazi Era Berlin private detective Bernie Gunther (A QUIET FLAME) lands in 1950 Peron Argentina rather than Brazil, but its cast of immigrant Nazi War Criminals might be straight out of NOTORIOUS.