Notorious (1946)

Notorious is a 1946 American spy film noir directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains as three people whose lives become intimately entangled during an espionage operation.

The film follows U.S. government agent T. R. Devlin (Grant), who enlists the help of Alicia Huberman (Bergman), the daughter of a convicted German spy, to infiltrate a group of German emigrés hiding out in Rio de Janeiro after World War II. The situation becomes complicated when the two fall in love as Huberman is instructed to seduce Alex Sebastian (Rains), an IG Farben executive who had previously been infatuated with her. It was shot in late 1945 and early 1946, and was released by RKO Radio Pictures in August 1946.

Notorious is considered by critics and scholars to mark a watershed for Hitchcock artistically, and to represent a heightened thematic maturity. His biographer, Donald Spoto, writes that "Notorious is in fact Alfred Hitchcock's first attempt—at the age of forty-six—to bring his talents to the creation of a serious love story, and its story of two men in love with Ingrid Bergman could only have been made at this stage of his life." In 2006, Notorious was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".