This week director Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) begins a series of master classes at the Bell Lightbox honouring the work of arguably the most renowned filmmaker who ever lived, Alfred Hitchcock. Del Toro’s background in creature features might suggest his interest in Hitchcock would be the director at his most lurid and visceral, yet he starts the series with one of Hitchcock’s quiet triumphs: Notorious is justifiably one of the master of suspense’s most critically lauded works, just not necessarily the type of movie one would suspect from a director most famous for his impeccable staging of murder and lifelong streak of deadpan gallows humour. Though a psychological and even perverse affair (well, by 1946 Hollywood standards anyways), the film is overflowing with Hitch’s signature visual style and mastery of audience manipulation, used in this case to craft a more adult and elegant thriller than his most famous (and fully Simpsons’ parodied) efforts. For Hitchcock devotees and film schools, Notorious ranks alongside the likes of Psycho, Rear Window, or Vertigo and richly deserves equal recognition amongst more casual classic film lovers.  

Ingrid Bergman (not far removed from Casablanca) stars as Alicia Huberman, introduced after her father’s conviction at a trial for Nazi spy shenanigans. Alicia has a reputation for being a rather promiscuous and a heavy drinker, yet has appeal to the American government as a connected potential spy. Enter Carey Grant’s superspy Devlin (the kind of a charismatic spy who only needs one name). He is dispatched to recruit Alicia and they inadvertently fall in love. Devlin then learns that he must send her off into the arms of her former Nazi lover Alexander Sebastian (a never-better Claude Rains) to uncover his secrets from between his bed sheets. Reluctantly he agrees and remarkably talks his new sweetheart into it. Soon she not only beds Sebastian, but weds him and Devlin is in the awkward position of acting as Alicia’s contact. Together they discover Sebastian is hiding uranium in his wine seller to create an atom bomb and in the process, Sebastian discovers their relationship. On the advice of his overbearing mother (oh Hitchcock…you are consistent) Sebastian begins slowly and painfully poisoning his wife, while Devlin must find away to free the woman he loves/pimps out for the government.

Though ostensibly a spy thriller, Notorious is possibly Hitchcock’s great love story and a twisted one at that. The suspense and intrigue that the director milks for the film comes more from his perverted love triangle than the nuclear threat. It is bizarre, to say the least, to watch Grant force Berman into the bed of another man as their relationship is heating up and see her perversely agree. There’s something vaguely sadomasochistic in their relationship (as much as would be allowed by the conservative Production Code) and Grant’s performance is one of the finest of his career. This isn’t a typical winking Grant role that capitalizes on his natural charm, instead, that quality is used as an entry point to the character before the audience’s built in sympathies for Grant are tested as the plot continues. Hitchcock was one of the few directors to see and exploit the darker side of Grant and he never pushed that side farther than in Notirious. Far from a hero, he’s a rather cold-hearted and jealous figure and the dialogue he shares with Bergman sizzles with twisted innuendo (there’s a harsh elegance to Bergmam’s spurned lover barb, “You can add Sebastian’s name to my list of playmates” that cuts deeper than something like “Yeah, I fucked that Nazi for you, loverboy” ever could).

Despite the twisted strain their relationship is put under and the morally questionable leading man, Hitchcock still crafts an unabashedly romantic yarn around the edges. Bergman and Grant’s combination of star power and chemistry is palpable and fully exploited by the director in an infamous 2.5 minute flowing close-up of his stars kissing, nuzzling, and whispering sweet nothings in a classy middle finger to the Production Code’s inexplicable ban of kisses longer than 30 seconds. Their affair is fascinating and deeply complicated by the third corner of the love triangle. You see, Claude Rains’ former Nazi genuinely loves Alicia in a way that we can never be sure Grant’s spy is even capable of. Rains may have ties to an evil empire, but it’s heavily suggested that’s more a result of his overbearing mother (only a butcher knife, a shade of insanity, and a trip to the taxidermist shy of being Mrs. Bates). By the time he makes a noble final sacrifice, Rains feels like the most empathic character in the movie. Not an easy task for any filmmaker to pull of, especially in that morally rigid movie era.

This being a Hitchcock joint, it’s of course also a definitive lesson in visual storytelling. Though primarily a character piece, the director never misses an opportunity for a show-off camera move from the infamous kiss to a famous crane shot traveling from a ballroom ceiling to a key concealed in Bergman’s hand. However, perhaps his greatest touches in the film are his most subtle, with shadows and reflections used to mask or mirror his character’s faces in key sequences to underline themes of duality and dark secrets. Perhaps Hitchcock’s greatest gift was the way he could fill his films with such complex ideas, characters, and stylistic flourishes without ever sacrificing the inherent pulpy fun. While there’s plenty of material to wax intellectual about in coffee shops and film theory classes, Notorious still primarily functions as entertainment. A tense, psychological spy thriller from an era where story and character dominated popcorn fodder over explosions and special effects. Hitchcock used to say that other directors made “slices of life” while he made “slices of cake.” If that’s the case, then Notorious is a delicately crafted dessert with a rewarding bitter aftertaste by an artist never afraid to sneak a little intellectual arsenic into his froth.

Notorious will screen at the The Bell Lightbox at 7pm on May 7, 2012 as part of the Hitchcock Master Classes with Guillermo Del Toro. Other screenings in the series include:

Frenzy: May 8, 7pm

Shadow Of A Doubt: May 15, 7pm

North By Northwest: May 16, 7pm

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Phil Brown writes about classic films for Toronto Standard‘s Essential Cinema column.

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