Notorious

It’s 1946, and the premise here is that the beautiful and cultured, if a little lush, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), offers the best way of infiltrating and bringing down from the inside an insidious group of Nazis who are plotting to re-activate “the Nazi war machine” from their putatively secure base in Rio de Janeiro. This plan is concocted by the American secret service, represented here by Dev (Cary Grant) and his boss, Paul Prescott (Louis Calhern).

Although it's understood that Dev and co. are the "good guys", from a global security perspective, their own value system is not impeccable, as illustrated by the way in which Alicia Huberman’s willingness to sacrifice herself for the good of the cause is taken for granted. Dev alone appreciates this nuance, and his attitude appears to change accordingly. He himself plays at deception to get Huberman on the team in the first instance. She, a more fractured character, in turn sets her sights on Dev. Her assignment, which entails her playing Mata Hari to one of the Nazi sympathisers, is thus set against the backdrop of the pair’s amorous coup de foudre.

Huberman’s complexity stems from her family background. At the movie’s beginning, she is attending her father’s sentencing for crimes of treason against the USA in his role as a Nazi activist. I believe that we are asked to understand her as strongly influenced by her intellectual uneasiness regarding her father’s beliefs, because they are diametrically opposed to hers. Over the course of the movie, a theme later revisited in Luc Besson's “Nikita”, Huberman apparently redeems herself and finds some kind of self-satisfaction through the obvious personal compromises she puts up with so as to carry out her mission.

Bergman has the central role in the movie. As for the rest of the cast, apart from Grant and Calhern, there is Claude Rains who turns in a great performance as the deluded German who is foolishly besotted by the femme fatale. More generally, the other stars of the piece are Hitchcock’s direction and technical innovations, and the story of deception and intrigue that plays out in the final acts, as Huberman and co. try to undermine the sinister syndicate and tension mounts. I really enjoyed the unexpected shift in dynamic that occurs when Rains and his creepy mother realise Huberman’s game. This is a WWII-era spy movie that incorporates a love-at-first sight storyline without apology, and goes to show that when Hitchcock (and writer Ben Hecht) are involved you always do well to expect the unexpected.

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