“The story of Notorious is the old conflict between love and duty,” comments Alfred Hitchcock in Truffaut's “Hitchcock.” “The sentimental angle,” Truffaut says, “is the simplest in the world: two men in love with the same woman....”
It is Ingrid Bergman's patriotic duty to absolve her father's Nazi collaboration by marrying Nazi Claude Rains and infiltrating his spy ring. It is Cary Grant's duty to push Bergman, whom he loves, into the marriage. (“One can hardly blame him for seeming bitter throughout the story,” Hitchcock says. And her?) But it is as clear that Grant's bitterness is a form of innate cynicism as it is that, of the two men, Rains loves her the more purely. And it is unclear whether Bergman is doing penance for the sins of her father, or for her own reputation as a “fast” woman. Not such a simple story, after all.
“Despite a lapse of 20 years it's still a remarkably modern picture,” Truffaut writes. “...In the sense that it gets a maximum effect from a minimum of elements, it's really a model of scenario construction....”