Of all the films made by Alfred Hitchcock, the one that most closely aligns with the feel of Hollywood\u2019s Golden Era is Notorious.\u00a0 The action of the characters and the look and feel of the scenes adheres to the conventions and formulas of that period\u2019s filmmaking.\u00a0 And I mean this in a positive sense.\u00a0 The production values are excellent.\u00a0 The actors are the finest.\u00a0 The dialog and plot are very well done.\u00a0 A good case can be made that this is the best movie made in Hitchcock\u2019s long and successful career as a filmmaker.\u00a0 The movie takes place in 1946.\u00a0 World War II had just ended and Nazis were still topical.\u00a0 Ingrid Bergman\u2019s character, Alicia Huberman, is the daughter of a German spy recently convicted of espionage in the United States.\u00a0 She is a loyal American and agrees to help the U.S. government in the person of T. R. \u201cDev\u201d Devlin played in his typically winning way by Cary Grant.\u00a0 Naturally they fall in love but the problem is the government wants Alicia to become romantically entangled with a German industrialist living in Rio de Janeiro named Alex Sebastian (played by the inimitable Claude Rains in his remarkably idiosyncratic way).\u00a0 She is supposed to find out what dastardly plots these escaped Nazis are planning.\u00a0 This of course leads to jealousy and spite in Devlin and pain and anger in Alicia.\u00a0 When circumstances force her to marry Sebastian to maintain the espionage this further poisons the relationship between our two star crossed lovers (are there any other kind?).\u00a0 The plot has twists and turns and uranium salts (which got Hitchcock in trouble with the real US Government) but throughout we root for the love story and hiss at the bad guys (in this case Nazis and the US Secret Service).\u00a0 The remarkable thing in this movie is that although Claude Rains is the evil Nazi you kind of sympathize with his character at certain turns.\u00a0 He is the unfortunate man in a house with two women, his new wife and his domineering mother.\u00a0 And he is haunted by the ubiquitous Cary Grant popping up everywhere and presumably a rival for his wife\u2019s affections.\u00a0 Who wouldn\u2019t want an atom bomb available under those difficult circumstances?<\/p>\n
Hitchcock\u2019s cinematic work began well before Hollywood\u2019s Golden Era and in England.\u00a0 He continued to create popular and original thrillers well into the 1960s, long after the studio system had disappeared.\u00a0 Thus, Hitchcock is not defined by or limited to the Golden Era sensibilities.\u00a0 But Notorious without a doubt possesses the \u201cclassic\u201d look of that era and definitely deserves its reputation as a masterpiece.\u00a0 Anyone interested in Hitchcock or the movies of the \u201830s and \u201840s should consider viewing this film.<\/p>\n
Now put all that aside.\u00a0 Notorious is a great story.\u00a0 Hitchcock provides all kinds of suspense and intrigue.\u00a0 Everyone on both sides is hiding something from everyone, including themselves.\u00a0 So much deception even starts to trip up the deceivers and eventually it all starts to crumble.\u00a0 The ending is a collapse all around and a fitting finale.\u00a0 I highly recommend this movie and hope you\u2019ll enjoy the performances not only by the three main characters but also from all those bit part Nazis doing their best to be wonderfully evil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Of all the films made by Alfred Hitchcock, the one that most closely aligns with the feel of Hollywood\u2019s Golden Era is Notorious.\u00a0 The action<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,238,237],"tags":[494,716,433,335,1238,1237,43,1213,38,1239],"class_list":["post-3753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-classic-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-alfred-hitchcock","tag-cary-grant","tag-claude-rains","tag-hollywood","tag-hollywood-golden-era","tag-ingrid-bergman","tag-movie-review","tag-notorious","tag-review","tag-uranium"],"yoast_head":"\n