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The Telegraph (10/Jan/2009) - Hitchcock's darkest love story

(c) The Daily Telegraph (10/Jan/2009)

Hitchcock's darkest love story 'Notorious' returns to the big screen next week - and, says Tim Robey, it is absolutely not to be missed

Cinema history is full of unforgettable collaborations: Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy; Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg; Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader, to name a handful. But Notorious, made in 1946 and reissued this month as part of the BFI's Ingrid Bergman season, is the rare film that offers at least four incredible partnerships, all off them working at their very peak.

This was the second and best of Bergman's three films with Alfred Hitchcock, following the hugely popular Spellbound (1944), and coming before the commercial failure of Under Capricorn (1949). The two never worked together again after her elopement to Europe with Roberto Rossellini in 1950 - it's a favourite speculation of Hitchcock biographies that he was deeply wounded by her departure. "His resentment wasn't just because he adored Bergman," said screenwriter Arthur Laurents, "[but] because she was leaving him for another director."

Notorious was Hitchcock's third film for Gone with the Wind producer David O Selznick, who had lured him over to America for his first Hollywood production, Rebecca (1940). Selznick helped originate the idea for Notorious, but ended up selling it on to RKO Pictures, leaving Hitchcock free to make the film without the legendary producer constantly looking over his shoulder. Hitchcock never truly thrived under anyone else's supervision.

Notorious's third key collaboration was between Hitchcock and Ben Hecht, whose Oscar-nominated screenplay - with its impeccably concise and elegant treatment of the story - remains one of this film's great joys.

One final partnership clinches a place for this tortured love story among the greatest movies made. Hitchcock had used Cary Grant already as the maybe-murderous husband in Suspicion (1941), but studio pressure had all but forced him to bowdlerise the ending of that film, a move that rankled until late in his career.

Here Grant is Devlin, the American agent who recruits Bergman's Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a convicted Nazi war criminal, to go undercover. This is not before they have fallen in love, and spent a famous scene kissing unstoppably in a Rio hotel room. Devlin is called away to meet his superiors, and when he returns he must break the news that they want Alicia to woo a previous acquaintance, the rich German businessman Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), and infiltrate his circle of scheming ex-Nazis.

The film's romantic tension turns on this great scene, which Grant plays with a glacial calculation that's startling every time you see it. The seed has been sown already in his performance - Devlin admits "I've always been scared of women, but I get over it", and Grant, doing some of the subtlest acting of his career, makes you believe this. We watch him freeze out Bergman with a cruel insult about her loose morals, before he explains what she must do, presenting it as a kind of test.

It's hard to think of a charming leading man and global star being asked to invert his own image so viciously, at least until Hitchcock's later films with Jimmy Stewart. Grant's Devlin hardly smiles in Notorious, except in the scenes where he's smiling to deceive - at the races and in Rains's mansion, where he and Bergman conceal their bitter conspiratorial whispers beneath fake jollity. It's tempting to argue that Hitchcock never directed two stars together better - Grant's cold denial of his feelings bounces off Bergman's exquisite pain, and the impact is agony, and magic. Bergman had already won the Best Actress Oscar for her not dissimilar role in Cukor's Gaslight (1944), but she's at least as good here, and so lovingly shot you can feel Hitchcock's rapture as often as Devlin conceals his.

In the smaller roles, Hitchcock triumphed - as so often - with unimprovable casting. Rains, who got an Oscar nod, is such a sympathetic villain we're almost inclined to let Sebastian off for being both an unrepentant Nazi trying to develop the A-bomb, and a desperate weakling who resorts to poisoning his wife. Like Norman Bates, he is under the thrall of a monster mother, played by the brilliantly spiderish German theatre actress Madame Konstantin, whose face glares with suspicion under a faint smile and won't let you escape. When Sebastian, terrified of exposure, admits to her that he has married an American spy, her words of maternal comfort chill the blood: "We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity. For a time."

Countless films have aped Notorious, whether in shot selection - the famous dolly down to the wine cellar key in Bergman's hand - or in wholesale plot, as you'll see if you try to summarise Mission: Impossible II or The Legend of Zorro. They'd have a deadly job eclipsing it.

'Notorious' is re-released on Friday. The BFI's Ingrid Bergman season runs until Jan 31.

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