When you have a tough day, a good movie can help.  Prayer is the preferred route, and God is present to us at all times.  Communicating with God is always efficacious whether you wish to acknowledge it.  When your heart and mind are oriented towards the Lord, you can see where He can work through anything you do.  Since I am not a monk or a priest, my entire day is not devoted to prayer.  Yet, that does not mean that I am barred from making whatever it is that I involve myself in into a prayer.  I try (and mostly fail) to do this, even with my film watching.  My feelings were half into such a state this afternoon when I chose Notorious (1946).  It also does not hurt that it stars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, and is directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  I figured with these ingredients, I would be in for something good.  God did the rest.

It does not get more Notorious than the trial of a Nazi spy in Miami, Florida.  The daughter of the condemned German, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), leaves the courtroom to a flurry of questions from reporters.  As she goes, people in the background vow to keep an eye on her.  The person sent to do so is an agent for the United States government, T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant).  He gets himself invited to her home where she is having a party with some friends and is quite drunk.  She notices the handsome man in the dark corner and eventually invites him to go for a drive with her, which he bafflingly accepts.  Her swerving through traffic is soon noticed by a police officer, but Devlin shows his credentials and agrees to get her home.  This official exchange manages to arouse her suspicions, but when they arrive at her house, he tells her that he has a mission for her.  The Americans suspect a ring of former Nazis operating in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (before the construction of the Christ the Redeemer statue, sadly), and they want Alicia to infiltrate it.  She claims to only want to have fun, but Devlin plays a recording of exchanges secretly obtained between her and her father in which she protests her loyalty to the United States.  She also has a reputation for being flirtatious, though it is one she is trying to be rid of, particularly since she is still attracted to Devlin.  He tries to remain aloof, but as they travel to South America, he can no longer hide his feelings.  They are about to have an intimate dinner when he is called by his boss, Captain Paul Prescott (Louis Calhern) of the Secret Service, to get their assignment.  Captain Prescott wants her to get close to Alexander Sabastian (Claude Rains), a German businessman with ties to the Nazi regime.  Devlin is aware of Alicia’s past with Alexander, and wonders whether she will go for it.  Captain Prescott remains firm on his orders, and Devlin decides he must distance himself from Alicia in order to deliver the news.  She is saddened by his sudden change in behavior, trying to give him the opportunity to say he loves her and not let her follow through on the mission.  Devlin does not go for the bait, and the next day he arranges for her to meet Alexander.  After a date or two, Alexander asks her to dinner at his estate where there will also be a number of other former Nazis.  As they go to sit for the meal, one of their number notices the bottles of wine put out for serving and makes a fuss, which Alicia notices.  As soon as she is able, she relays this information to Devlin and Captain Prescott, but it is not her only bit of news.  She has further need of advice as to what to do about Alexander’s marriage proposal.  When it comes around to Devlin, he tells her to do whatever she wishes, which is not the response for which she had been hoping.  She goes through with the wedding, and upon returning from their honeymoon, they host a party for Rio’s elite.  Having obtained a key to the wine cellar, Alicia manages to pass it off to Devlin, who has come as a well-wisher.  He goes into the storage room alone while she keeps a look out, but he manages to accidentally push a bottle off the shelf.  Upon breaking, instead of liquid issuing forth, it is full of a dark sand.  He gets a sample and they clean up as best they can before Alexander comes down with the butler to get more libations, but they are spotted.  To cover themselves, Devlin kisses Alicia, saying he forced himself upon her before making his exit.  Still, Alexander notices a few other things out of place, like the fact that his key is missing.  This leads him back to the cellar, where he sees a bottle label out of place, which had evidently been broken since he finds a shard with an earlier vintage on it.  Based on all the clues of the night, and with a little encouragement from his ever-suspicious mother, Madame Anna Sebastian (Leopoldine Konstantin), Alexander decides that Alicia is an American agent.  Madame Sebastian urges restraint, reminding him that if the others learned of his poor choice in wives, they would be likely to kill him.  Instead, the Sebastians opt for slowly poisoning Alicia, which Devlin initially dismisses as yet another one of her hang overs.  Meanwhile, the Americans have identified the substance from the bottle as uranium enriched sand, but do not know its source.  Alicia overhears this information one evening after dinner, but is too weak to get away to tell her handlers.  A few days pass and Devlin becomes worried.  With Captain Prescott’s blessing, he pays a visit to the Sebastian residence.  With Alexander meeting with his co-conspirators, Devlin sneaks upstairs and locates a near-death Alicia.  Telling her he loves her, he manages to get her up and moving towards the door.  He talks his way past a frightened Alexander by threatening to reveal Alicia’s true loyalties.  With this, Devlin makes it to his car and drives away, leaving Alexander with two former Nazis who want to have a word with him.

Alicia may have been Notorious, but she is proof of what love can do to a person.  Clearly, Hitchcock is referring to romantic love, but when you open yourself to God’s love, it can have a similar effect.  Alicia earned the eponymous reputation because of her father’s compromised morals and the stigma attached to being related to a Nazi.  Devlin, like God, sees through this façade of only wanting to have a good time, and shows her real feeling.  At the same time, there is something bigger than infatuation with a member of the opposite sex, though that is an unfair way of describing it.  He has his duty to his country to think of, and, though it pains her to do so, she has the same commitment.  This is in line with Catholic teaching, which says that God should come first in any relationship.  It is not a good comparison, but the state (or the cause of democracy, if that sounds better) takes the place of God in this metaphor.  Alicia and Devlin could have abandoned their country and run off like two giddy lovers.  However, would that have been true, lasting love?  Granted, not every Christian relationship that has God at its center is successful.  Unfortunately, I have seen couples that I love and respect as Catholics get married and then divorced after only a few years.  Conversely, I know of non-Catholics, or even non-Christians, that have a deep and abiding love for one another.  After all, God works in mysterious ways, as they say.  What is less mysterious is the fact that God loves us beyond anything we can comprehend.  When we serve Him, or look beyond ourselves rather than fixating on our desires for another fling, good things happen.  This is not a congruent way of looking at the film, but the themes a relatively the same, in principle.

What is interesting about Notorious is that you have characters that are willing to push their principles to the point of being broken.  In the end, they do not do so, and again it is love that saves them.  It is for this reason that I found myself enjoying the film and rooting for the characters.  I highly recommend this one.