Notorious lacks many of the qualities which made the best of Alfred Hitchcock's movies so good, but it has more than enough good qualities of its own. Hitchcock has always been as good at domestic psychology as at thrillers, and many times here he makes a moment in a party, or a lovers' quarrel, or a mere interior shrewdly exciting in ways that few people in films seem to know…. [He is] resourceful, and exceptional, in his manufacture of expressive little air pockets of dead silence. He has a strong sense of the importance of the real place and the real atmosphere…. There is perhaps no telling how much of all this should be credited to Ben Hecht's screen play; but it seems safe to credit a good deal of the sharpest movie sense, and of a cool kind of insight and control which suggests a good French novelist, to Hitchcock. (pp. 98-9)
James Agee, "'Notorious'," in his Agee on Film, Vol. 1 (copyright © 1958 by the James Agee Trust; reprinted by permission of Grosset & Dunlap, Inc.), Grosset & Dunlap, 1958 (and reprinted in Focus on Hitchcock, edited by Albert J. LaValley, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972, pp. 98-9).
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