Notorious

I think this might be the first Hitchcock that just didn't really work for me. The premise feels unlike so much of his output: dated and strained. Asking Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman to both play against type is, I think, laudatory, but their work is half-baked at best. I don't care about their love for each other because it appears as if out of nowhere — a thing the script insists upon rather than something the performances themselves earn. The same can be said of Bergman's backstory as a lush and a "loose woman," neither of which she hints at with anything besides emphatic insistence that she's not that kind of girl anymore. 1Obviously, it is safe to blame The Code for much of this, but Hitchcock does not exactly bend over backward to handle it gracefully. Claude Rains and his mother — Leopoldine Konstantin in her sole American performance as the stern, vaguely comic Nazi — both acquit themselves as the stronger pair of performances ("You are protected by the enormity of your…