Number 97 on IMDb's Top 250
Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the American daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, is recruited by government agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) to infiltrate a group of Germans who have relocated to Brazil after World War II. During her training, Alicia falls in love with Devlin; his feelings for her are tempered by his knowledge of her past. When Devlin is ordered to convince her to marry Sebastian (Claude Rains), one of her father's friends and a member of the group, to find out what he's plotting, he agonizes before choosing duty over love. Bitter at his betrayal, Alicia does wed Sebastian. Alicia accidentally and unknowingly stumbles upon the plot, but in the process leaves a clue that her husband traces back to her. Now Sebastian has a problem: he must silence Alicia, but cannot expose her without falling under suspicion with his fellow Nazis. He discusses the situation with his mother, who suggests that Alicia "die slowly", gradually by poisoning. The poison is mixed into Alicia's coffee and she quickly falls ill. Devlin becomes suspicious when she meets him and tells him that she merely has a hangover and yet shows signs of grave illness. He becomes further suspicious when she fails to report to their next meeting. Hilarity ensues.
Trivia: Alfred Hitchcock claimed that the FBI had him under surveillance for three months because the film dealt with uranium. Both Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman found the famous kissing scene quite problematic, according to Alfred Hitchcock, because of the complicated blocking that needed to be remembered in the several long takes that it took to shoot it. The legendary on-again, off-again kiss between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman was intended to flaunt then-current film code regulations that restricted the length of kisses to only a couple of seconds each.
Once again, Hitchcock makes the list. Seven of the top 100 belong to Hitchcock. In order they are: 13. Rear Window, 22. Psycho, 25. North By Northwest, 35. Vertigo, 76. Rebecca, 84. Strangers On A Train, and 97. Notorious. This one stands up just as well as the others. In fact, this movie has the most famous example of one of Hitchcock's MacGuffins. (What is a MacGuffin? Come back next week for my vocabulary lesson). Good Movie, Bergman was beautiful and Grant was debonair.
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