Notorious

It was Cary Grant movie night at Dudley, the graduate student activity center of campus. I stopped in for one of the movies, the 1946 suspense movie Notorious. It was fantastic. While it has a kind of simple “lets prevent a group of ruthless postwar Nazi Germans from creating nuclear weapons in a Brazilian mansion” kind of plot, this old black and white Alfred Hitchcock directed movie reminds me yet again that movie making didn’t always get better with time. He directs some wonderful scenes with their memorable camera shots, whether it is hiding Cary Grant from us in the opening scene, a certain angle on a coffee cup, or the ultimate feeling of suspense generated from a slow camera descent with the main characters down a flight of steps as a few distant looming figures of Nazi evil stand in the background and watch. There is a love story, but it is a cynical love, where almost every exchange of emotion is a defensive insult or a probing stab. Finally, what I loved the most was that the movie maintained a constant threat of violence that we await with every scene, only to be denied it throughout.