Hitchcock masterpiece double feature hits City Lights

To finish out the semester, City Lights is offering up quite a cinematic treat. It will screen two of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest works -- "The Thirty-Nine Steps" and "Notorious." "The Thirty-Nine Steps" is arguably Hitchcock's finest post-silent British work. It has the ultimate prototypical Hitchcockian set-up -- an unsuspecting character, in this case a Canadian (Robert Donat) who is visiting England, implicated in the theft of national secrets and murder. Hitchcock utilizes the finest thriller plotting imaginable in this excessively entertaining film.\nFollowing up the above masterstroke by the master of suspense is an almost equally engaging work -- "Notorious." The all-star cast of Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claud Rains is enough in itself to propel this film to greatness, with the plot involving the teaming-up of American agent Grant and a traitor's daughter (Bergman) in search of Nazis propelling this to a ranking among Hitchcock's best.