Delayed Reaction: Notorious

Premise: The daughter of a Nazi spy is recruited by a government agent to go under deep cover to learn about a Nazi organization running out of Brazil.

 

The movie is more than 50 years old, so you probably know my stance on it. I'll say something about how I liked it but I'm missing the context to go into more detail. I'll mention I liked it but since movies have had decades to learn from it, the story now seems a little derivative. I’ll also apologize that I don't have more to say, then blame my compulsion to write about every movie I see.

 

Now that we've got that covered...

 

I like that it seems like Alfred Hitchcock never made a bad movie. They are all very watchable. There's a clear game to them. At a certain point, the casts got reliably star-studded. So, yeah, Notorious is really good. I'm a fan of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman steaming up the camera. I really like how much agency Bergman gets in this. She's not completely dependent of Grant. Film noir looks good on Alfred Hitchcock. He does that genre well. I also just really like the post-WWII South American settings. It's such an odd historical note that all these German Nazis went to hide in Argentina and Brazil, where they ended up having a significant political influence. And this was filmed in 1945, right as the war was ending. I'm so used to thinking about WWII as this historical thing that was always in the past. It's cool to see stuff like The Best Years of Our Lives or Notorious that were contemporary accounts of the fallout.

 

I don't need to belabor this. Notorious is one of Hitchcock's best. As long as you like Hitchcock, you'll find something to like about this.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend