There were still many movies that lay completely beyond my comprehension. One that stays firmly in my mind was a spy film in which the bad guys have kidnapped the heroine and she lies on a bed, drugged or drunk or something, upstairs in a large house. The hero arrives and walks in, past all the bad guys—they are all wearing dinner suits which perhaps accounts for their strange behaviour—and marches upstairs, collects the lady in his arms and carries her down again. The baddies do nothing. He carries her across the lobby and outside. The baddies stand and watch and do nothing, although one follows. The good guy puts her in the car, has a brief polite chat with the bad guy boss, and drives away. End of movie.
    Now this was ridiculous. Everyone knew that bad guys carry guns and are prone to use them, especially at the end of movies. There were half a dozen of them, and they could have easily overpowered the hero. And these guys were Nazis—the worst kind of bad guys. But they did nothing.
   Many years later I was able to identify this strange film as Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious; Cary Grant was the lucky hero, Ingrid Bergman the catatonic lady and Claude Rains the far-too-gentlemanly Nazi. Every time I see it, I still expect those villains to go for their guns—but getting away with things like that was what made Alfred Hitchcock great, wasn’t it?