Notorious

As Hitchcock told François Truffaut, Notorious involves “the old conflict between love and duty.” Cary Grant is in love with Ingrid Bergman, but his job as an intelligence agent demands that he let her marry another man. Bergman, who undertakes the expiation of her guilt for her Nazi father’s treason, suffers a similar conflict. In this film Hitchcock hit his stride, using camera movements and editing to direct not his actors but his audience. Yet for all its aesthetic mastery and grace of execution, Notorious is Hitchcock’s strangely disconcerting meditation on the cruel undercurrents that lurk beneath the surface of what we call romantic love.