Awards and Honors

The film received Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Claude Rains) and Best Original Screenplay (Ben Hecht).

On the centenary of Hitchcock's birth in 1999, the British Film Institute asked a panel of noted filmmakers, among them Martin Scorsese, Atom Egoyan, Milos Forman, and Baz Luhrmann, to list the director's ten best films. Notorious came in third behind Psycho (1960) and Vertigo (1958).

The Critics' Corner: NOTORIOUS

"Ben Hecht has written and Mr. Hitchcock has directed in brilliant style, a romantic melodrama which is just about as thrilling as they come ¿velvet smooth in dramatic action, sharp and sure in its character and heavily charged with the intensity of warm emotional appeal. As a matter of fact, the distinction of Notorious as a film is the remarkable blend of a love story with expert thriller that it represents." - Bosley Crowther, New York Times, 1946

"The Hitchcock 'touch' is apparent in several scenes, notably at a party where suspense is built magnificently as the champagne slowly disappears. The American agent in the wine cellar is working against the thirst of the celebrants." - New York Herald Tribune, 1946

"This is truly my favorite Hitchcock picture; at any rate, it's the one I prefer in the black-and-white group. In my opinion, Notorious is the very quintessence of Hitchcock...It's still a remarkably modern picture, with very few scenes and an exceptionally pure story line. In the sense that it gets a maximum effect from a minimum of elements, it's really a model of scenario construction." - Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (Simon & Schuster, 1983)

"The suspense is terrific...Bergman is literally ravishing in what is probably her sexiest performance...Great trash, great fun." - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (Henry Holt, 1984)

"Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious is the most elegant expression of the master's visual style, just as Vertigo (1958) is the fullest expression of his obsessions. It contains some of the most effective camera shots in his - or anyone's work, and they all lead to the great final passages in which two men find out how very wrong they both were. This is the film, with Casablanca (1942), that assures Ingrid Bergman's immortality." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Time, 1999

"Hitchcock's first truly great film. An intense triangle drama which constantly forces you to change your feelings about the three leads, this is also a sumptuous romance, with Grant and Bergman sharing what was then the screen's longest close-up kiss. Gorgeously shot in luminous monochrome, it's all wrapped up with an extremely suspenseful last reel." - Kim Newman, Empire, December 2000

by Rob Nixon