Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

Notorious may superficially fit into Hitchcock's spy film production line, with Cary Grant's CIA man persuading Ingrid Bergman, playing the daughter of a convicted Nazi traitor, to seduce a member of a Nazi organisation in Brazil in order to root out their secrets. But it's also the director's first serious stab at a love film, albeit a typically darkly-tinged on at that, with Grant's character only interested for most of the way through in forcing her to carry out her mission.
It is somewhat of an curate's egg in having Grant play a bit of a bastard for once, and Bergman a self-centred alcoholic, but despite what sycophants would have you believe, it doesn't work as a whole: neither as an espionage film, because there is little substance to that element of the plot, nor as a romance simply because there is no chemistry between the leads. The trademark hallucinatory scenes, innovative camerawork and air of paranoia are all there, but act more as embellishment than serving to bolster the story. For comparison, see Bergman vs. Peck in the previous year's Spellbound and witness the result of Hitchcock knowing to stick to his knitting before really hitting his stride a decade later.

5/10