Notorious: A Trenchant Test of Human Emotion

An enthralling allegory of suspense and romance, Notorious is as much a thriller as it is a love story. Pulsed with passion, obsession and deception, it’s the ultimate expression of Alfred Hitchcock’s visual genius as a master manipulator of the audience. Toying with moral ambiguities within complex characters, he keeps you locked in suspenseful hope with torridly tense and emotionally sumptuous scenes that pull on the strings of humanity.

Released right before the Cold War in 1946, this Nazi spy plot stars Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Raines. It revolves around Devlin (Grant), a suspiciously suave American espionage agent, and his love Alicia (Bergman), the beautiful daughter of a convicted Nazi criminal. Devlin uses Alicia to seduce Alex (Raines), a Nazi hiding out in Brazil, to uncover Nazi plans.

Grant and Bergman are at their collective best with an onscreen chemistry that is just as thrilling as the story itself. Their scenes together are electrified by sexy dialogue with a subtle innuendo that keeps you spellbound in their romance, striving to find the sincerity between them.

In order to dance around studio production codes that forbade a kiss longer than 3 seconds, Hitchcock created one of the most evocative scenes in cinema. A tight shot of Grant and Bergman alternating between kissing and closely exchanging dialogue ensconced in each other’s arms for nearly three minutes.

The superb shots and virtuoso camera work in this film broke boundaries and made technical landmarks. But it also did something else—it enhanced the moral story Hitchcock was telling, in which Alicia is the paragon. How far will someone go for the person they love, and in turn how far will the other person let them go?

Alicia is a smart woman manipulated into a dangerous situation not only by Devlin, but also by her affection for him. Motivated by her emotions, she agrees to spy on Alex to prove her love. Alicia is the only character the audience can identify with, Hitchcock’s way of manipulating the audience into a dark roller coaster of emotions between Alicia and Devlin.

Does Devlin love Alicia as much as she loves him? I would say no. He uses the assignment to seduce Alex as a test of her love. Then, he watches her slip deeper into the darkness as, unbeknownst to him, Alex tries to poison her when he learns her true intentions. It’s not until Alicia is severely ill that Devlin rides in on his white horse to rescue her.

Just look at his name, “Devlin”—even that denotes a devilish quality. Would you suggest placing your love in a life-threatening situation to prove her affection for you?

Although this is a passionate love story, it’s also a somewhat broken one. Alicia and Devlin are so unsure of each others’ feelings that it motivates them to indirectly hurt each other. The moral struggle anchored around their romance results in a dark game between them creating negative emotions.

This begs the question: how far is too far? Once human emotions are in play, it’s always too far. Feelings are not something to mess around with, because eventually they snowball into an entity larger that can cause someone to get hurt. It’s this journey into the human psyche that makes Notorious and Hitchcock’s brilliance never date, but continue to fascinate.

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