romantic handler

Film Truffaut says that Notorious is his favourite of Hitchcock’s black and white films suggesting that it’s quintessential Hitchcock; he doesn’t elaborate on what he thinks that is, but it is another example of a lead character hemmed in by duty and circumstances. Ingrid Bergman is the daughter of a Nazi agent who’s forced to go undercover in Rio de Genero to flush out a nest of Nazi refugees, ultimately marrying one of them. Carry Grant is her romantic handler, Claude Rains her quarry. It’s Rebecca remade as a spy film, with Rains playing a version of the Oskar Homolka from Sabotage.

In a reaction to screen violence, Hitch makes the threat as low key as possible; though Rains is in love with Bergman you’re constantly concerned about what he’d be capable of if he ever found out he’s been betrayed by her, especially with his hectoring mother constantly in the frame. And it’s true that watching Bergman being poisoned slowly always on the edge of salvation is excruciating, a domesticated version of the man on the edge of a cliff, his fingers slowly losing their grip.

As ever there’s an excellent sense of place in the film; set in Rio de Genero, something of an alternative to Hitch’s usual stomping grounds, it’s rather like watching those episodes of Doctor Who in which the film elements have been shot abroad. I’m constantly amazed at how often Hitch gets away with having the actors working in the studio against plates filmed in locale or stock footage. He’s able to connect us to the story and characters so successfully that more often than not we don’t realise the artifice until after he’s moved on.