NOTORIOUS (1946)

I am sure that I have seen this Hitchcock/Selznick production starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman before but it was sufficiently long ago that I did not recall much of the plot.

It was showing on the excellent Talking Picture channel.

Ingrid Bergman plays the daughter of a Nazi convicted in a Miami Court. She is is a party girl and at one of hers Devlin (Cary Grant), an American intelligence officer, gate crashes.

He successfully persuades her to got to Rio to penetrate a gang of Nazis working on uranium.

They meet at the sinister house of Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains).

She marries Alex. The triangular love affair of Rains/Bergman/Grant is at the heart of the film and generates much sexual  and other tension.

Recently I have been discussing the Hays Code with fellow critics.

Hitchcock had a kissing scene here which exceeded the Code’s three seconds so he broke it up with conversation about a chicken being cooked and nibbling which might not be described as kissing.

Hard to imagine now where we would see a full sex scene though the female screen star will often these days insists on a double.

Hitchcock was obsessed with Bergman and he may well have fallen foul of current trends.

Like most Hitchcock films it maintains its suspense level well.

Filmed in black and white, the house itself and the faces of the Nazis are truly sinister whilst Claude Rains is incapable of anything less than a first rate performance.

Cary Grant shows there is more to him than rom-com as he is showed in North by North West whilst Ingrid Bergman interpreted a difficult role with sex appeal, glamour, nuance and conviction.