Notorious

2026/07/06

I think this might be the first Hitchcock that just didn't really work for me. The premise feels unlike so much of his output: dated and strained.

Asking Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman to both play against type is, I think, laudatory, but their work is half-baked at best. I don't care about their love for each other because it appears as if out of nowhere — a thing the script insists upon rather than something the performances themselves earn. The same can be said of Bergman's backstory as a lush and a "loose woman," neither of which she hints at with anything besides emphatic insistence that she's not that kind of girl anymore. 1 Obviously, it is safe to blame The Code for much of this, but Hitchcock does not exactly bend over backward to handle it gracefully.

Claude Rains and his mother — Leopoldine Konstantin in her sole American performance as the stern, vaguely comic Nazi — both acquit themselves as the stronger pair of performances ("You are protected by the enormity of your stupidity!") but even then their ultimate fate earns neither satisfaction nor sadness, because I simply do not know or care about them enough to justify it.

Two shots of this film will sit with me for a long time, though:

1. the introduction of Cary Grant's character, in which he is filmed bravely and eerily from behind, showing only a silhouette of the man and his dark haircut.
2. the scene in which Rains famously tells his mother that he has made a big mistake, and her long, slow procurement of a cigarette in response.