Every true-blue movie fan has a favorite Hitchcock film, and heaven knows there are plenty from which to choose. The first Hitch movie picked for the National Film Registry was VERTIGO.  His 1960 PSYCHO came out with the highest ranking on the AFI's initial list of the “100 Greatest Movies of All Time.” Some are ga-ga over REAR WINDOW, others would say that the Hitchcock film which towers over the rest is NORTH BY NORTHWEST, but there are also strong supporters for REBECCA, TO CATCH A THIEF, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, DIAL M FOR MURDER. THE 39 STEPS and a fair percentage of the other 45 movies the great man directed. (Hitch himself once said SHADOW OF A DOUBT was his own personal favorite of his “babies”).

For me - and I suspect many others -- it's this lush, super suspenseful 1946 tale of a passionate love affair colliding with a ring of Nazis operating out of Rio immediately after World War Two. NOTORIOUS! to me, is definitive Hitchcock: not only is it a riveting tale, masterfully told, but it has a cast picked from the highest echelon of Hollywood's star system - and Hitchcock was never better than when working with grade-A superstars who brought with them an automatic high wattage all their own. Certainly no actor was handsomer, smoother or more in demand in the mid-1940s than Cary Grant. No actress was more talented or popular at that time than Ingrid Bergman. And no one could add more class or brilliance to a supporting cast than Claude Rains. Put them all together - with Hitch at the helm - and you have, indeed, the movie equivalent of a prizefighter's TKO, a movie which plays like gangbusters in any format but delivers an added wallop when you see it projected on a big screen in a theatre, the way we're showing it here during this film festival in Athens.

The celebrated Ben Hecht wrote the screenplay, something he was commissioned to do by producer David O. Selznick, who was initially planning to produce the film himself until he found himself too busy with his gargantuan western DUEL IN THE SUN to take on another project at the same time. With that, he sold the entire package to RKO studios, much to Hitchcock's joy. Hitchcock was under a personal contract to the producer at the time, and the two had constantly battled during their earlier collaborations. Selznick's exit from NOTORIOUS! left Hitchcock free for the first time to be his own producer, something he'd always yearned to do. Except for one last Selznick-Hitchcock collaboration (1948's THE PARADINE CASE), Hitchcock never again worked for another producer, producing and directing all of his future films. But in my opinion, none is better than this gripping tale which teamed, for the first and only time, three of the screen's genuine giants, each of them, like the title of this movie, deserving an exclamation point - Grant! Bergman!  Hitchcock!

1946. 101 minutes. Producer-director: Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay: Ben Hecht. Cinematography: Ted Tezlaff.  Editor: Theron Warth. Music: Roy Webb. Costumes: Edith Head. Cast: CARY GRANT, INGRID BERGMAN, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern, Leopoldine Konstantin, Reinhold Schunzel, Moroni Olsen, Ivan Triesault, Alexis Minotis, Lenore Ulric. Released by RKO.