Notorious
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. 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:
- 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.
- 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.