The Times (14/Feb/1947) - Mr Hitchcock's new film, Notorious
(c) The Times (14/Feb/1947)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Claude Rains, Ingrid Bergman, Notorious (1946)
MR. HITCHCOCK'S NEW FILM
"NOTORIOUS"
A spy story with that suspense for which Mr. Alfred Hitchcock is famous, held in reserve until the last 20 minutes or so of a film which runs for over an hour and a halt.
Alicia (Miss Ingrid Bergman) and Devlin (Mr. Cary Grant) are secret agents on the same side, but that does not stop emotional differences from cropping up between them, and Miss Bergman has not only the German organization, presided over by Sebastian, to contend against, but Devlin's persistent and laconically expressed distrust of her. To add to the poor. girl's difficulties, Sebastian insists on marriage, a step Alicia undertakes in the interests of her country and which seals Sebastian's fate, since the Hays Office does not permit happy endings so long as villainous husbands are alive. Sebastian is, to be sure, a rather mild and sentimental villain, since he is endowed with Mr. Claude Rains's particular brand of avuncular whimsicality, but the process of slow poisoning to which he and his terrifying mother subject Alicia once her secret is out, enables Mr. Hitchcock to hold his camera over cunningly contrived scenes of the victim caught in the snare of apparent affection and concern. There are one or two admirable tricks by which tension is drawn out and then left to snap back in the face of the audience, but generally Notorious is more charged with emotion than excitement, and Miss Bergman if hardly convincing as an agent, gives the persuasive study of a woman desperately in love. The film is to be seen at the Odeon Cinema, Marble Arch.
