#135: Notorious
Part of the Top 150 Films series
Notorious elegantly combines three of Hitchcock’s most potent tropes into one perfect package: a torrid and high-stakes love triangle, a taut, globetrotting thriller, and a MacGuffin to end all MacGuffins. Ingrid Bergman was never better as the American daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, recruited by Cary Grant to infiltrate an organisation of Nazis who have moved to Brazil after World War II. The film manages to work in Hollywood’s longest ‘kiss’ to that point (deliciously bypassing the Production Code in the process), one of the most beautiful tracking shots ever filmed, and Claude Rains’ best performance in a career littered with them. It’s a testament to every actor and craftsman that everything that shouldn’t work (uranium ore in wine bottles! Nazi-romances!) does so beautifully, and with clockwork timing and precision. Titillating, tense, and transformative, Notorious is one of many pièces de résistance in the career of an outstanding filmmaker.
