Notorious

A while back I gave Hitchcock a bad review for Rope. It sucked, but the point is that I tried to redeem myself by reviewing The Lady Vanishes. That's a great film, but I still felt as if I was selling Hitchcock short. Thus, I present one of the top ten greatest films ever made: Notorious. This film seeps with life, it's sexy, it's thrilling, it's moving, it's funny, it's sad, it's gorgeous. Roger Ebert calls it "the best expression of the master's visual style". Well, it is. There's no more beautiful a Hitchcock film than this (although North by Northwest comes awful close). But in Notorious we get close up's of a finger that is the only part of the body not in character, we get keys hidden in hands that have no business being there as we go from a shot of an entire body to that scintillating key. And then the story, as good as any Hitchcock ever concocted: Alice Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is the daughter of a well renowned Nazi. She herself is loyal to the Allies. The government seeks her out after the death of her father, and a man named Devlin (Cary Grant) drives the drunken girl home after a party. He convinces her to help the Allies, and she is sent off to Rio de Janeiro to infiltrate a group of Nazi's headed by the evil man who used to be in love with her: Alex Sebastian (Claude Raines). But Devlin and Huberman fall in love, Devlin is furious in his shell of a body as he must give her up for the sake of the Allies to a Nazi. This pain is so apparent and gorgeously done it's inexplicable. More so, the pain and dirt Huberman is dragged through is more affecting. She must, at one point, deliver Sebastian to hell. He will either be killed by his Nazi friends, or she will fail at her task and be killed herself. Notorious is so well-done a film that it will stand as one of the best of all time. It was made in 1946. It features a stellar cast, and it is directed with a masterful hand. It's probably the best film Hitchcock ever made.