Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
In order to help bring Nazis to justice, U.S. government agent T.R. Devlin recruits Alicia Huberman, the American daughter of a convicted German war criminal, as a spy. As they begin to fall for one another, Alicia is instructed to win the affections of Alexander Sebastian, a Nazi hiding out in Brazil. When Sebastian becomes serious about his relationship with Alicia, the stakes get higher, and Devlin must watch her slip further undercover.
Notorious is a masterwork of Hitchcock's career — a spy thriller fused with a genuinely anguished love story. The plot is tightly constructed, using the espionage framework to generate real emotional and moral tension rather than mere action mechanics. Grant and Bergman deliver career-highlight performances, their chemistry electric and their emotional restraint devastatingly effective; Claude Rains is equally superb, making Sebastian sympathetic even as a villain. Ted Tetzlaff's cinematography is stunning — the famous crane shot descending to the key in Bergman's hand is one of cinema's great technical achievements, and the use of shadow and close-up throughout is exceptional. The ending — Sebastian's fate on the staircase, Devlin's rescue, the ambiguity of what awaits — is among Hitchcock's finest. Novelty is the one area that keeps this from a perfect sweep: while the film is distinctively Hitchcockian and executed with singular mastery, the spy-romance genre was already well-trodden, and the film's innovation lies more in its emotional depth and craft than in a wholly original conception.