Thoughts from the committee
One of the great Hitchcock classics, and one of the first to feature a superstar Hollywood cast, Notorious is set and shot immediately after the Second World War – coincidentally in the same year as a group of enterprising individuals established (or re-established) a film society in Wellington, Aotearoa’s first.
Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman trade palm-fringed Miami for Rio de Janiero, after suave CIA agent TR Devlin (Grant) persuades Bergman’s Alicia Huberman – daughter of a convicted Nazi, who hits the bottle and the boys as a coping mechanism – to ingratiate herself into a circle of Nazis in Brazil. Her job is, of course, to seduce one of the ringleaders, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains, who comes with another trope of the genre in the form of a terrifying Nazi mother, played by Madame Konstantin). Unsurprisingly, Alicia and TR are in love with each other as well, which cues all kinds of conflicting loyalties, jealousies and double-crosses in the triangle with Sebastian. Devlin’s simultaneous pride and hurt at Alicia’s willingness to undertake the mission (or play her part if you will) blind him to the danger he pushes her toward, and she numbs the pain she feels in the only way she knows how.
The Nazi coterie have another type of pain in mind for the world, however, and Hitch ramps up the suspense in the multi-layered game of cat and mouse. There’s something for everyone in Notorious – a stunningly adept cast, a classic Hitchcock cameo, wonderful costumes by Edith Head, and Hitchcock battling the censors for one of the greatest kisses ever captured on celluloid.
“Notorious was one of the last movies in [Bergman’s] glorious Hollywood studio era. She is magnificent in this lethally elegant, stylish and grippingly well-told thriller.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian