Film review: Notorious (1946)

This is a Hitchcock film that I was late to – I only saw it for the first time a few years ago, and I didn’t remember much about that viewing as I watched it this time, which was odd, because it’s indubitably a classic.  How could it fail to be when it has two of the most beautiful people who ever lived who also happen to be amazing actors?  It’s funny: we’ve watched a lot of Cary Grant films recently, mostly screwball comedies, and I find his mugging in those occasionally a bit grating.  But he’s absolutely mesmerizing in this one.  (It’s like Jim Carrey, only he takes it almost too far in Sunshine, appearing downright mopey, but Grant can do inner seething torment with a single glance.)  And the plot is dark: essentially the US government pimps out Ingrid Bergman so that she can “atone” for the sins of her Nazi-loving father.  And Grant’s character Devlin goes along with it, despite loving Bergman’s Alicia and knowing that she loves him in return.  She goes so far as to marry the closet Nazi Claude Rains.  The background to the film is that Hitchcock had just come from filming the liberation of the Nazi deathcamps as patriotic duty, only to have the footage suppressed until after he died because the British Government decided it would be too dispiriting for the West Germans, and the enemy was suddenly the Soviet Union.  Notorious also namechecks the real German company that used Auschwitz prisoners as slave labor (Claude Rains is working for it) – only this was censored for years because the US government cozied up to it after the war too.  The film is remarkably ambivalent: the least sympathetic characters in the film are probably Devlin’s immediate superiors, who look down on Alicia as they exploit her to their own ends.  Meanwhile Claude Rains is remarkably sympathetic (while also being a sinister villain – it’s his usual excellent performance).  And there’s a great role for an actress I was unfamiliar with, Leopoldine Konstantin, as Rain’s mother, who has the real spine in their family.  The rest of the film is pure cinema: pacing, lighting and ratcheting up the tension.  Not that much happens, nobody dies on camera, and yet there are scenes of almost unbearable tension, and great depths of feeling conveyed in glances.  Oh, and the “the longest screen kiss in history” up to that point, that Hitchock gets away with (despite rules against lips locking for more than seconds at a time) because it is actually interspersed with a conversation that is essential to the plot and thus cannot be cut.  Now THIS is a Cary Grant I can get behind.  (And, of course, in Suspicion.  And he actually does some serious stuff in Mr. Lucky, interspersed with scenes of him learning to knit.)  And why wasn’t Bergman in every Hitchcock?  Apart from anything, apparently he never tried anything abusive or pervy with her because she maintained a genuine affection for him ever after.  I was surprised to see at the end that it was not a short film, because it had whizzed by, which as far as I’m concerned is as high praise as you can give a film.  And the ending scene is cold as Devlin consigns Rain’s Sebastian to his death at the hands of his fellow Nazis and he walks inside and the door closes.  Hardly the romantic happy ending that we expect the film to culminate in.
So where does it rank among the Hitchcocks?  It's sort of an outlier.  It's not a packed-with-incident chase film (a la 39 Steps, Young And Innocent, Foreign Correspondent or North By Northwest, which is probably my favorite of his genres) - it's more of a mood piece, like Vertigo, perhaps, or Shadow of a Doubt, or (of course) Suspicion.  It's also a love story, and in a more convincing way than most Hitchocks, although, as one commentator points out, with definite sadomasochistic overtones, given what they both go through.  Of all American Hitchcocks, though, I'd say it has the best cast.  It would make a great double-bill with Casablanca.