Having fallen in love with Ingrid Bergman, Magnum’s co-founder Robert Capa pretended to be covering the shoot of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious for Life magazine in order to gain access to the set. The result was the first publicity shots for Magnum and the beginning of the agency’s long association with the cinema.

Notorious is ‘one of Hitchcock’s finest films of the ’40s, using its espionage plot about Nazis hiding out in South America as a mere MacGuffin, in order to focus on a perverse, cruel love affair between US agent Cary Grant and alcoholic Ingrid Bergman, whom he blackmails into providing sexual favours for the German Claude Rains as a means of getting information. Suspense there is, but what really distinguishes the film is the way its smooth, polished surface illuminates a sickening tangle of self-sacrifice, exploitation, suspicion, and emotional dependence.’

U.S.A., 1946.
102 mins.