Notorious (1946)

Though producer David O. Selznick reunited the winning team of director Alfred Hitchcock, star Ingrid Bergman, and writer Ben Hecht from Hitchcock's psychoanalytical drama Spellbound (1945), and oversaw (with his customary blizzard of memos) the development of this classy, romantic spy story, he eventually sold the whole package to RKO and let Hitchcock produce it himself. Even David Thomson, Selznick's biographer, admits that the film is as good as it is because Selznick wasn't there to ruin it.

Toward the end of World War II, suave spymaster T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) recruits loose-living Alicia Huberman (Bergman), the estranged daughter of a convicted traitor, to infiltrate a group of Nazi exiles in Argentina. Having fallen for the man who has rescued her from a life of trampy uselessness, Alicia is agonized when she feels Devlin is pimping her for the cause, and she is driven to taking her mission to extremes by marrying the almost-fatherly fascist Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains). Inside Sebastian's chilly, luxurious mansion, Alicia earns the hatred of the true power among the evil exiles, Sebastian's smothering monster mother (Leopoldine Konstamtin), who is the sort of creature Mrs. Bates might have been if left alive. At a party, with the classic suspense mechanism in the dwindling supply of champagne that will eventually lead a servant venturing into the wine cellar where the angelic Alicia and the devilish Devlin are snooping. Hitchcock produces his most elegant and yet topical detail: wine bottles full of uranium being used by the Nazis to create a Nazi A-bomb. The payoff is an agonizing moment of discovery when Sebastian is duped into believing that his wife is only unfaithful as opposed to a spy.

Notorious's intense triangle drama constantly forces you to change your feelings about the three leads, with Rains showing bizarre heroism in the finale. The film is also a sumptuous romance, with Grant and Bergman sharing what was, at that point, the screen's longest close-up kiss. Gorgeously shot by Ted Tetzlaff in luminous monochrome, with the stars looking (and acting) their best, this last reel was extremely unnerving as the monstrous mother supervises Alicia's slow poisoning.

Quote of the day (and last line of the movie) - Eric Mathis - "Alex, will you come in, please? I wish to talk to you..."

Tomorrow: Strangers on a Train (1951)