I'm going to start off telling you all about one of my favorite movies of all time - Notorious.

This Hitchcock film stars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, two of the most watchable people I've ever seen. The story takes place just after the Second World War, and features Bergman as the daughter of a German spy and an American mother. Her father has just been sentenced to life in prison, and Alicia Huberman (Bergman) is pursuing life as a dissipated party girl, throwing parties for equally shallow people and planning boat trips with lecherous old men -- basically acting like a self-indulgent brat, or a woman trying to smother her pain and distress.

Enter the mysterious Devlin (Grant, of course), who turns out to be under assignment from the U.S. government to recruit Alicia for a covert operation to unearth Nazis in South America, one of whom was friends with her father. Alicia rudely (and drunkenly) refuses, on the grounds that she is neither a spy nor a patriot. Devlin neatly undercuts her by playing a recording of her arguing with her father about his anti-American activities; she passionately declares her love for the land of her mother and pleads with her father to stop. Confronted with her basic soundness of character and the folly of carrying on pretending not to care, she accepts the job.

It turns out that the man Alicia is supposed to get close to is a scientist named Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains, the wicked old thing), who had a crush on Alicia when he worked with her father. When Devlin finds out that Alicia's assignment will involve her seducing Sebastian, he objects, since he's already falling in love with her. His superiors override him, assuming that she will not balk at the task, since she's already marked as a loose woman because of her wild days, which admittedly were only a week or so behind her. But she has reformed because she's fallen in love with Devlin, too, and she's appalled and hurt when he comes to tell her what she's meant to do. There's a wrenching scene where her tender new self-respect is squashed by his cold cruelty; she begs him to not let her do it, but he just says that it's up to her, and he knows she's up to the job. His (pretended) indifference drives to her despair, so she dives into the job and ends up not only lovers with Sebastion, but married to him.

There is danger all around Alicia, but she is determined to carry on, at least to prove her loyalty to her adopted country, even if she knows that her love has deserted her. Devlin makes arrangements to have someone else take on the job as Alicia's contact, but she doesn't show up for the meeting when he was going to break the news. She finally arrives, late and in obvious ill-health. She passes it off as a hangover, but really she's being poisoned by Sebastian's mother, who lives with them and has begun to suspect Alicia.

What makes this movie so great is the simplicity of the narrative combined with great skill in the telling of the story and with skillfull acting. As with most of Hitchcock's movies, there is a sense of a great deal of expirtise in the crafting of the whole thing. From lighting (so vital in black & white films) to camera angles to the soundtrack, everything is planned out to support the emotional turns evoked by the actors. While Cary Grant can be accused of always playing the same character in all his roles, he substantially tones down his suavity for this one. He spends a great deal of time hiding his emotions and pretending he doesn't care about Alicia, and it's believeable because of his bitterness at having to put the mission ahead of his own desires. It seems natural that the situation would evoke just that kind of reaction from a man with believes in the work he's doing.

Meanwhile, Bergman doesn't allow herself to simply look beautiful (although she can hardly help being stunning), she also is convincingly and sweetly vulnerable when she is first in love, and then she snaps closed again when her man doesn't show that he believes she's changed. He is basically pimping her out for the good of the cause, and that's gotta hurt, no matter how noble the cause is. The writing gives her a solid foundation, but it's her emotion that sells us on the idea that she would go through with the plan, once her rose-colored dreams of romance with Dev have been dashed.

It's worth mentioning the kiss scene that was devised to thwart the censors. It happens during the only sweet romantic scene we see between Alicia and Devlin, when she's getting established in her apartment in Rio, waiting for Sebastian to arrive in town so she can accidentally meet him. At this point, neither she nor Devlin know the details of her assignment, and they are swooningly in love. She is flitting around the apartment making plans for dinner, explaining how she has such great ambitions to become a good girl, even learning how to cook and making jokes about how he'll eat whatever she makes, no matter how it turns out. During all of this delightful silliness, he gets a phone call telling him to come to the office for instructions, and while he's on the phone, she is clinging to him and kissing him repeatedly - brief little kisses that add up to the cumulative effect of a long, intimate moment, but slipped by the censors because their rule was only about the length of time of each kiss, not how many could be packed into a few seconds. Of course, when we find out soon thereafter what the men on the other end of that phone call had planned for her, it twists the sweetness of the moment into something nasty.

Of course, the best part of the story is the ending, but I won't ruin it by telling you what happens. I'll just say that I'm a sucker for neatly tied-off storylines and a general feeling of justice for all. Also, remember not to drink anything that suspected Nazis prepare for you.