Ingrid Bergman's screen test, where she goes through the full range of human emotions in about a minute, is a filmmaker's wet dream. It shouldn't be humanly possible. It allows, as it does in Notorious, for the most unbelievable set of circumstances to happen without anyone in the audience batting an eye. Of course these characters are in love with her. Of course they would do dumb and stupid and dickish things in her name. In my literary thesis class we talked about physicalism vs. idealism, about how metaphysics works outside the realm of human biology, and while I didn't say it I wanted to say that love, especially the love for human beauty, is the higher level power that wins out over science like religion has always wanted too. That is not to say that the marriage of Hitchcock's pitch perfect cinematic technique and Bergman's acting powerhouse goes off without a hitch, the beginning of this movie is dull, it only starts to liven up once Bergman has successfully entered into the Nazi household. Even then, it is only in the last half an hour or so where the movie really, really, starts to tick. Cary Grant and Claude Rains, as the love rivals, are phenomenal in their unknowingly one-sided jealousies, and Rains, in the last gasp of the movie, so perfectly illustrates human failure that his final sequence has found its way into cinematic lore. Now I see where the Sopranos got their symbols of death from. One shot. The plot is a little stupid, but just fall in love when you watch this movie and you'll be alright.