The 1946 Alfred Hitchcock film starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman as spies is Notorious. Grant plays T. R. Devlin, an American intelligence agent, while Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a convicted German spy.
Devlin recruits Alicia to infiltrate a group of German émigrés living in Rio de Janeiro after World War II. Her assignment becomes increasingly dangerous when she marries Sebastian, one of the group’s leaders, to gather information. Hitchcock combines espionage suspense with a complicated romance, making the characters’ emotional choices as important as the spy plot.
Notorious was written by Ben Hecht and produced and directed by Hitchcock. Claude Rains plays Alexander Sebastian, earning an Academy Award nomination for Supporting Actor. The film is especially remembered for its extended kiss between Grant and Bergman, which was structured around brief interruptions to comply with Hollywood’s production code.
Viewers sometimes confuse Notorious with Hitchcock’s Spellbound, another Bergman film, or with Suspicion, which also stars Cary Grant. Those films involve psychological uncertainty, but Notorious is the one centered on an espionage operation in postwar Rio.