Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious follows Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia Huberman as she’s asked to spy on a Nazi sympathizer (Claude Rains’ Alexander Sebastian), with complications ensuing as Alicia’s handler, Devlin (Cary Grant), finds himself growing more and more attracted to his charge. Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, as expected, does a superb job of infusing Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious with an almost palpable sense of mood and style, with the director’s penchant for memorable visuals going a long way towards heightening the movie’s thoroughly cinematic atmosphere. It’s a vibe that’s perpetuated by everything from Roy Webb’s lush score to Ted Tetzlaff’s gorgeous cinematography to the uniformly effective performances, with, in terms of the latter, Grant and Bergman’s chemistry together ensuring that one can’t help but root for their characters’ triumph over Rains’ nefarious (yet somewhat sympathetic) Sebastian. (This is despite the almost ludicrous manner by which Alicia and Devlin fall in love, as it seems to happen entirely during the pair’s trip from the States to Germany.) Despite it’s many positive attributes, however, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, which progresses at a seriously deliberate pace, suffers from a watchable yet rarely engrossing vibe that persists throughout the overlong running time – with the movie boasting only a small handful of truly captivating sequences. (The absolutely enthralling climactic stretch, for example, is in no way indicative of most of that which precedes it.) It would be far too harsh to label Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious an all-out bomb, but it’s equally difficult to refer to the movie as a wholeheartedly effective (and affecting) success.

**1/2 out of ****