The Alfred Hitchcock movie Roger Ebert adored: “The most elegant expression of the master’s style”
Roger Ebert didn’t start writing reviews professionally until the late 1960s, long after Alfred Hitchcock reached the peak of his career, but the famed film critic returned to the director’s work on multiple occasions to highlight some of his most notable contributions to cinema. He loved the psychological angst of Vertigo, which he called Hitchcock’s most confessional work, and labelled Rear Window as his most diabolical. He was also a staunch defender of Shadow of a Doubt, one of the director’s earliest Hollywood efforts, which he set in a supposedly bucolic American suburb.
When it came to the Master of Suspense’s most stylistically ravishing film, however, Ebert looked to 1946. For many viewers, Hitchcock was a director who, aside from Psycho, luxuriated in sumptuous Technicolor. His obsession with blonde leading ladies was most fully expressed in films where the flaxen hue of Grace Kelly’s hair or the white gold of Kim Novak’s could shimmer against a boldly coloured gown. But before Hitchcock became the authority on lavish colour palettes, he demonstrated his skill for using light and shadow with the mastery of the German Expressionists to heighten the tension of his suspense plots.
One of the greatest examples of Hitchcock’s pre-colour films is 1946’s Notorious, a movie that Ebert adored almost above all others. It stars Cary Grant as Devlin, a US government agent in Rio de Janeiro who is trying to infiltrate a group of Nazis who, even after the war, are continuing to plot against peace. To gain entry into their inner circle, Devlin teams up with Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the daughter of an imprisoned Nazi who is being courted by one of her father’s associates.
The film is a romance between Devlin and Alicia, but it’s much messier than a simple meet-cute and a happily-ever-after. He mistrusts and even looks down on her for her family connections and her reputation for promiscuity, but he can’t rid himself of his attraction to her. Meanwhile, she is put in the impossible position of having to align herself with another man in order to help the man she loves.
For Ebert, Notorious not only embraces – rather than glosses over – the complexity of its love story and political context, but does so through startlingly effective cinematography. “It contains,” he wrote, “[S]ome of the most effective camera shots in [Hitchcock’s]–or anyone’s–work, and they all lead to the great final passages in which two men find out how very wrong they both were.”
Overall, he argued, it was, “the most elegant expression of the master’s visual style.”
Over the decades, Notorious has been overshadowed by Hitchcock’s more playful, colourful films like North by Northwest and Vertigo, and its passing similarities to Bergman’s most famous film, Casablanca, probably haven’t helped. But it’s a reminder of the director’s skill at minimalistic storytelling.
Like Psycho, it takes the black-and-white palette and demonstrates just how emotive it can be. He would show his immense talents for Technicolor glamour later in his career, but in this early period, his creativity was firing on all cylinders, and it remains a highlight of his illustrious filmography.
