"Notorious" (1946)

[igenlode]

After watching Hitchcock's "Notorious" for a second or possibly third time, I'm left with precisely the same impression as last time: the only sympathetic character in the film is Alex Sebastian, trapped between an overbearing mother, a much younger wife who is playing him for a fool with her American Secret Service handler, and the confederates who want to see him dead for being fool enough to fall in love with a traitress.
Of course it doesn't help that Claude Rains can act the socks off Cary Grant, and that the designated romance is between two unlikeable characters...

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

It's a largely forgettable film, if you ask me.

Then again, Hitchcock isn't one of my favorite directors.

[igenlode]

My first Hitchcock was "Psycho", which I saw late at night on a portable black and white TV (one of the reasons I got into old film in the first place was that pictures *intended* to be seen in black and white come across a lot better on a monochrome set than the colour ones!), knowing nothing about the film other than that it was a famous horror movie and it had a 'shower scene'.
It was extremely effective.

I was rather disappointed by a lot of the Hitchcock I saw subsequently, which may have been somewhat due to elevated expectations; a lot of the ones I enjoyed more were the ones regarded as 'lesser' pictures, either because they were work done for studios as a director for hire rather than a venerated 'auteur' and/or because they were shot in England. But then I wasn't all that impressed by "Blackmail" and "The Lodger", which are both regarded as classics of his silent period -- particularly not "The Lodger", where the acting just didn't seem terribly good. I have a suspicion it looks better if you don't have any other experience of silent film and just discount it as being the stagy way they did things in the olden days...

I have enjoyed some of Hitchcock, failed to be engaged by a lot of his most famous work (e.g. "Vertigo" and "The Lodger") and have been actively annoyed by some of his more Americanised output, to the degree that (as here) I ended up sympathising with the designated villain. Like Tim Burton, I don't find his name on a film to be a reliable indicator of whether I'm going to enjoy it or not.

[betweensunandmoon]

I haven't seen Psycho and don't intend to--horror is very much not my genre. :P

Rear Window is the only Hitchcock film I've enjoyed, probably due to the combination of James Stewart and Grace Kelly. Everything else has been disappointing.

[igenlode]

Yes, I remember enjoying "Rear Window".