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| That nightly cup of coffee isn't doing Alicia any good! |
A 1946 classic from director Alfred Hitchcock, Notorious is so much more suspenseful than No Country for Old Men which I had seen the night before. And thankfully there was no in-your-face violence, although plenty of violence was implied and took place off-screen (like the offing of a Fredo-like simpleton who made a mistake in The Godfather.)
In sharp contrast to today's wild and often wacky action films notable for blinding color and ear-piercing sound effects, Notorious tells a small, quiet story, shot in black and white, about U. S. government agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant), who implores Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the beautiful daughter of a convicted German war criminal, to help uncover a group of treasonous Nazis planning something "very big" against America. She agrees, in part because she is immediately smitten with the agent. And so the spy story and the love story intertwine.
Hitchcock's directorial magic keeps you guessing throughout. You never know who to trust and so mistrust everyone. One minute Devlin seems sweet and loving, the next he appears dark and sinister. As part of her job, Alicia is instructed to win the affections of Alexander Sebastian (Claude Raines), a wealthy Nazi hiding out in Brazil and one of the masterminds of the plot against America. She does this easily, and eventually marries him. But when he suspects her true motives, things turn deadly.
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