I know I just posted to this one but I thought I’d add a link to another reviewer’s opinion.

As for Notorious. I rather loved the film. I felt the suspense all the way through and was somewhat like a caged panther while I worried about Alicia’s well being. The film is certainly dated in terms of who the bad guys are and in one other point that I find sad to call dated. It uses a common Hitch double theme. We see the overbearing dominant mother figure who prods and bothers her son. We also see however that Alicia is the character in central peril, this drives men to wish to see her safe to pray that she is spared in time, it plays on the now dead or at least dying idea of chivalry in men. It also plays on the notion that we have a woman who is “not a lady” but who is willing to risk everything as if she were a man and we love her for it. These dual themes carrying the idea that women both drive us crazy and are what we seek to protect are dated but shouldn’t be.

The ending upsets younger audiences but to me it was terrific. You are left to believe that Alicia will probably be ok but you have no way of really knowing if the poison has already gone too far so you are left to think about whether she lives or dies. You also might like to think the Nazi’s are caught but it is just as easy to presume that they are not and so we have an ending that not only allows audience conclusions but leaves you thinking that maybe the “bad guys” get away with one. Except for Alexander and his mother, we know they get to die. Its is there to show that not everything in life ends up in nice neat pretty little packages..in fact few things do.

I’ve shown some Hitch movies to my kids and the ones they like best are North By Northwest and Dial M For Murder.

Of course you do not expect an old movie to be fresh as a dew drop. Hitchcock always used rear projection and if that is going to bother you, you would not enjoy any of his movies. Many films of that time used rear projection. It was ‘the graphics’ of that time. And if you are complaining about filming in studios, you better altogether give the 40’s and 50’s a miss.

One point that I get from your review was that you were expecting a suspense spy movie and what you got was a romantic triangle in the spy backdrop. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, in fact I found it far more enjoyable than Psycho and Rear Window.

Frankly, I did not find anything laughable or outdated in this particular movie. The story was fine, the screenplay was good and so was staging and performance.

And don’t even use the word ‘acts’. As a professional critic you must understand audience don’t judge a film by its ‘acts’. They either find it good or bad. And I can only say that you had ‘acts’ in mind and expected one more of it and were consequently felt betrayed. For me the film was as complete as it could be. In fact, the ending is so novel that you could never call such a film dated. You wanted a lots of gun play and other heroic stuff in the end and see justice done.

What you fail to grasp is that if the spies were nabbed in the end, the film might not have had such popular acclaim. Being a daughter of a German Father and an American Mother, the daughter can be spying for Germans and yet be justified. Hitchcock chose her character to be loyal to America because he was making an American film. So he knew it would be very wise to leave the spy part open to conclusions. Rather he nicely concluded the riveting drama of the love triangle.

[Sigh...another knee-jerk response, I see. I write for contemporary viewers, Brit, and it's entirely valid as a point of criticism to say that the story simply does not hold up as a believable one by contemporary standards. It's NOT all about the incredibly bad and often unnecessary rear-projection. One of my favorite movies is Wings, from 1922 - silent, but the story completely holds up. I've defended older movies to my friends on the basis that they need to be seen through a filter of the times. But there's a limit -- when you start laughing at what was meant to be suspenseful, it has dated, and badly. I only mention I get paid because of the sheer number of newcomers who seem to think I'm just "some guy with a website" rather than a professional film critic who does in fact do this for a living, like it or not. -- LYT]

Aside from that, sorry you didn’t like the film, but a couple of your crits. are slightly odd. Okay, you don’t like back-screen projection, and, yes, it looks dated now, but it’s an odd thing to object to in an old film. However, the one I’ve really got to pick up on is the crit. that Berg. looks okay when she’s ill. I mean, c’mon, this sh*t is still going on in films today.