Alfred Hitchcock tells a patriotic romance in his film “Notorious.” In his movie T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) is assigned to commission Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) to spy on a Nazi friend of her imprisoned father. She is told that she must move to Rio and start a relationship with Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains). While in Rio, T.R. and Alicia fall in love which poses problems with their mission. After meeting Alicia in Rio, Alexander asks Alicia to marry him right away.
This film has great historical significance because it is set right after World War II. The whole plot is based off the fact that Alicia’s father was a spy for the Nazi’s during this time. This movie came out two years after World War II, which made this movie even more significant at the time. “Notorious” back in 1946 brought back emotions of what it was like during World War II. People were being put on trial at this time for war treason and were a very controversial topic.
Throughout the movie I found myself at the edge of my seat wondering if Sebastian was going to find out that Alicia was a spy. The scene in that produced the most suspense was when Alicia stole the key from Alexander’s key ring so that she could get into the locked wine cellar. When she stole the key I thought that she was definitely going to get caught. When Sebastian found out that the key was missing, he still had no clue about what was taking place.
A lot of the time during this movie I found that Alfred Hitchcock was giving me, the viewer, hints as to what was coming up. He used a lot of close-ups throughout the movie to tell us what was going on. For example, in one of the scenes we hear a man gasp after looking at something and then a second later we see a close-up of the wine bottle that he was staring at. It just so happens that later in the movie we find this wine bottle is very significant to the story plot and tells us what the Nazis are up to.
Film editor Theron Warth used mostly dissolves in “Notorious” to connect two scenes to one another. This is where the film lacked a little; I didn’t feel like it used editing to its full extent. He could have used more sound, and I thought if used temporal relations at the beginning and reorganized the story to flow nicer.
I found “Notorious” to exceed my expectation. I usually think of black and white movies as dull and boring. In this movie though, I didn’t notice the color because I was so involved with the plot. The characters seemed to really work together. The relationship between Alicia and Devlin was very believable and added to the mystery element of the movie. It wasn’t very believable however, that Alicia could randomly start acting like she was in love with Sebastian. Yet again, she did seem to easily fall in love. The acting in this movie makes the fact that “Notorious” is in the top 100 just.
This film has great historical significance because it is set right after World War II. The whole plot is based off the fact that Alicia’s father was a spy for the Nazi’s during this time. This movie came out two years after World War II, which made this movie even more significant at the time. “Notorious” back in 1946 brought back emotions of what it was like during World War II. People were being put on trial at this time for war treason and were a very controversial topic.
Throughout the movie I found myself at the edge of my seat wondering if Sebastian was going to find out that Alicia was a spy. The scene in that produced the most suspense was when Alicia stole the key from Alexander’s key ring so that she could get into the locked wine cellar. When she stole the key I thought that she was definitely going to get caught. When Sebastian found out that the key was missing, he still had no clue about what was taking place.
A lot of the time during this movie I found that Alfred Hitchcock was giving me, the viewer, hints as to what was coming up. He used a lot of close-ups throughout the movie to tell us what was going on. For example, in one of the scenes we hear a man gasp after looking at something and then a second later we see a close-up of the wine bottle that he was staring at. It just so happens that later in the movie we find this wine bottle is very significant to the story plot and tells us what the Nazis are up to.
Film editor Theron Warth used mostly dissolves in “Notorious” to connect two scenes to one another. This is where the film lacked a little; I didn’t feel like it used editing to its full extent. He could have used more sound, and I thought if used temporal relations at the beginning and reorganized the story to flow nicer.
I found “Notorious” to exceed my expectation. I usually think of black and white movies as dull and boring. In this movie though, I didn’t notice the color because I was so involved with the plot. The characters seemed to really work together. The relationship between Alicia and Devlin was very believable and added to the mystery element of the movie. It wasn’t very believable however, that Alicia could randomly start acting like she was in love with Sebastian. Yet again, she did seem to easily fall in love. The acting in this movie makes the fact that “Notorious” is in the top 100 just.
1 comment:
This classic movie seems like a great watch. I hope to start watching these films to learn more about what makes it a good classic movie
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