Notorious (1946) – Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern
screenplay by Ben Hecht
directed by Alfred Hitchcock


Notoriouscap1click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Other than Psycho, the most
examined, most carefully raked-through picture in Hitchcock's
filmography might be the cold, meticulous, perfect Notorious.
It serves as a model for technique, offered as the pinnacle of
Hitchcock's early American period and used as proof by some that Hitch
was a misogynist. The Dark Side of Genius author
Donald Spoto wrote a fitfully interesting (if ultimately useless)
article about how the first half of the film is a mirror image of the
second–rising to a midpoint before diminishing at the end to the same
composition as the first shot. (I'd argue that you could say the same
for Shadow of a Doubt–particularly during the
movie's character-/setting- establishing sequences.) Stories of how the
FBI began a file on Hitch because of his prescient use of uranium as
his MacGuffin in Notorious are among the most
beloved Hitch arcana, and critics who favour Lacan as the prism through
which to analyze the Master of Suspense have found in the picture
compelling demonstrations of
spectatorship and gender construction. For Freudians, it has its
Oedipal elements, its Madonna/Whore complexities–it's a very fine
historical relic, one of maybe only two of the director's films (the
other being Shadow of a Doubt) that's ever entered
into a noir conversation. And at the end–among
those in the know, at least–it's the better version, in every way that
matters, of Casablanca. Robin Wood writes a
brilliant piece on it in his second Hitchcock book, taking on previous
brilliant takes by Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, and Michael Renov. I
probably like Raymond Durgnat's quick-hit the best, however, for his
pegging of the picture's iciness and of Hitch at this moment as midway
between idealistic and cynical (though I'd go farther and say he's
pretty much all the way cynical by now). Notorious
is possibly, neck-and-neck with Vertigo, the best
film Hitchcock ever made, though it's seldom identified–unless you're
Francois Truffaut–as anyone's favourite (leave that for the bitterest (North
by Northwest
), the most nihilistic (Psycho),
the least sick (Rear Window)), and when the dust
settles, the prospect of writing about it is almost as intimidating as
pretending that there's anything new to say about it. But here goes.

RUNNING TIME
102 minutes
MPAA
Not Rated
ASPECT
RATIO(S)

1.37:1 (1080p/MPEG-4)
LANGUAGES
English 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Mono)
SUBTITLES
English SDH

REGION
All
DISC
TYPE

BD-50
STUDIO
MGM

Notorious is among the most
observant films about the intricacies of male sexual jealousy (not the
male gaze, Mulvey) and the destructive impact of
traditional family structures on a woman's gender identity. It's deeply
wise about the world, deeply cynical, it goes without saying, and at
least as damning a personal referendum on Hitchcock's sexual
insecurities and peccadilloes as Vertigo. It opens
with an annotation of the scene's time and day and place, very much
like Psycho will–and, also like Psycho,
it invites a conversation about voyeurism in the image of a reporter
peeking through a cracked doorway into the courtroom, where Nazi
sympathizer John Huberman is being sentenced for treason. It's our
introduction, too, to Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), harassed by the
media (gathered like the crowds of vultures outside all of Hitch's
courts) and later by a motorcycle cop (shades of Psycho,
again) before she's bludgeoned into unconsciousness by spook Devlin
(Cary Grant) and forced to drink some milky-looking liquid upon her
return to the world. Devlin is only the first man to ask her to drink
something. (It's worth wondering if contemporary viewers would have
remembered Grant in his previous Hitchcock collaboration Suspicion,
bringing poor Joan Fontaine a glass
of radioactive milk.) Here Devlin, in the employ of the U.S.
government, recruits Alicia to infiltrate a Brazilian cell of Hun
through a sham marriage. The title refers to Alicia, of course, driven
by her intense unhappiness and unfortunate association with a Nazi to
drink, coarse talk, and, it's strongly implied, promiscuity. I like to
think that "notorious" also refers to the obvious proclivities of men
when presented with women they'd like to tame, to place upon the mantle
next to their other trophies and outward measures of masculinity.

Alicia is drunk at her party–she'll spend the rest
of the film under some form of intoxication; the MacGuffin is hidden in
wine bottles; Devlin forgets a champagne bottle in his boss's office;
and Hitchcock's cameo is of the portly director quaffing a glass of
wine at Sebastian's (Claude Rains) mid-film shindig. When Alicia's true
allegiances are uncovered by her Nazi husband and his dragon-mother
(Leopoldine Konstantin, billed as Madame Konstantin), the two conspire
to poison her slowly–Alicia's subsequent blurriness resulting in lover
Devlin becoming disgusted and accusing her of boozing again. A romance
strictly in the bleakest, darkest sense of the word, Notorious
portrays marriage as first a kerchief tied around Alicia's middle and a
drunken newlywed ride into the night (the corollary to this DUI occurs
in North by Northwest, another Mata Hari story with
Grant, this time cast as the compromised woman opposite Eva Marie
Saint), then as one of sexual enslavement in the name of Old Glory, and
finally as a betrayal of a man, Nazi or no, apparently true in his love
for Alicia. Alicia chooses love instead with an arrested, repressed,
bona fide bastard of a man. It's the correct ending to Casablanca–it's
Gilda, isn't it? The bride
is drugged and robbed of her vitality and the things that made her an
object of interest in the first place. In Notorious,
Alicia, as with other Hitchcock women, experiences a transformation
over water with news of her father's death; has decisions made on her
behalf regarding her protean nature; and is moored to surrogate father
figures intent on bending her to their own old/new patrician
ideologies. The main difference between Notorious and
Gilda, really, is that in
place of firebrand brunette Rita Hayworth, you have wholesome milkmaid
Ingrid Bergman, the embodiment of what Wood would call
"natural"–turned out like a ten-cent whore by the biggest star on the
planet.

Notoriouscap2

There's much talk, and rightfully so, of the party
scene at Sebastian's and its extended crane shot from eye-of-God to
extreme close-up of a key Alicia's hiding in her hand. It's a virtuoso
camera move–the kind people talk about when they talk about Hitchcock.
There's the checkerboard design of the floor where Alicia will
eventually collapse, the white queen as gambit–and isn't that Devlin
eternally moving across the board like a knight in Hitchcock's chess
match? There's intrigue in the way that tension is created in the
steady imbibing of wine and champagne, with Devlin in the basement like
a Jungian in-joke: Alicia's repressed desires at literal war with her
drab marital reality. The glue is Bergman, who gives her best
performance as Alicia, boozy, confused, martyred to male sexual
jealousy–the hands nailing her to the cross her own. There's a scene
at a racetrack where Sebastian, looking at his horses, trains his
binoculars on Alicia, talking to Devlin by the rail. It's an issue not
of spectatorship, as a similar scene will be in The Birds
as Rod Taylor watches Tippi cross back over Bodega Bay, but of the role
the masculine lizard brain plays in reducing Alicia to a piece to be
manoeuvred, displayed, etherized, and finally muzzled and embalmed into
marriage. The fascination comes in the idea that Alicia consents–it's
the same fascination in all of Hitchcock's American films: The women
always consent, even though surrender means the rejection of vitality,
individuality, and free will. When Hitchcock finally shoves a woman's
corpse into a bag of potatoes (Frenzy), it's not so
much shocking as it is the Master at last cutting the shit.

Notorious is a beautiful, frigid
clockwork, a surgical dissection of adult manners and social mores
adorned with romantic love only inasmuch as a "Grey's Anatomy"
schematic could be called pornography. It prefigures all of Hitchcock's
subsequent work and summarizes all that came before; with Selznick
distracted by problems with Duel in the Sun (his
attempt to turn Jennifer Jones into Vivien Leigh), Hitchcock had an
unusual amount of latitude, and so, with briefly-favourite screenwriter
Ben Hecht, he plowed through multiple drafts of this loose adaptation
of a SATURDAY EVENING POST story from 1921, "The Song of the Dragon."* It's
fascinating to chart the progression of the scripts (as Leonard Leff
does in his well-researched Hitchcock and Selznick),
especially the evolutions of the character of Devlin and the ending,
which vacillated from the death of one of the major players to a
traditional wedding cutaway to how it stands today: this chilling,
amoral little smile that drifts across the face of America's sweetheart
as her demon lover helps her kill the man who loved her and who she
betrayed in every way it's possible for a woman to betray a man.
Hitchcock identified with some dark, lonesome, ambiguous element in
Cary Grant (hence their quartet of collaborations), but I do wonder if
his casting alongside one of Hitchcock's first forbidden objects of
desire doesn't speak to an infinitely more complicated relationship. A
chicken picnic originally written for this film appears in To
Catch a Thief
; it seems that when Hitch wanted to tap his own
jealousy, he hung out with his handsome surrogate. Once we get to North
by Northwest
, Hitch exacts a bit of revenge in an extended
lecture about the popularity of his wrong films for the wrong reasons
besides, casting Grant in the role of Bergman on a drunken drive and as
the protean female fucked for God and country. Edmond Rostand, eat yer
heart out.

Notorious has a wonderful scene
involving a giant coffee pot, a series of surreptitious glances, and a
set of Rorschachian shadows blending mother and son into a single black
barrier against escape. It deals with deception and play-acting, with
dangerous ideas about patriotism and how love of country is so often
transposed over the love for a father, indistinguishable in its dogma
from any other belief in the arbitrary and the irrational. Yet it's not
the technical wizardry or the political topicality, the "romance" or
the intrigue, that leave this slick aftertaste, but rather the
essential sickness of how men perceive women. When we speak of mirror
images, consider that Alicia begins as Madonna for Sebastian and Whore
for Devlin, and how that shifts for Devlin only when she's about to be
killed by his sexual rival–and how that shifts for Sebastian in what
is at its essence an identical circumstance. It speaks to impossible
complexity and unwinnable contests, to what it is to be trapped by our
nature in cycles of adoration and revulsion. The picture's closest
analogue in Hitchcock's oeuvre is Vertigo: the same
iconography of obsessive desire, the same transformation of one woman
into multiple shards and fragments in various mutant aspects. Making
more sense as you get older as a cautionary tale, it's one of the few
undisputed masterpieces in the short history of this medium, and
there's no analysis of it yet that is comprehensive. It's arguable that
one couldn't exist, because Notorious constantly
fluxes in direct pace with every audience's personal evolution. It's
different every time.

Notoriouscap3

THE BLU-RAY DISC
Through Fox, MGM drops Notorious on
Blu-ray in an AVC-encoded, 1080p transfer in the proper Academy ratio
of 1.37:1 that, again, doesn't represent a quantum upgrade to the
previous DVD release (or, indeed, the Criterion edition from a few
years back), but is enough of an improvement to be noticeable. There's
a bit of jitter in the early going, black levels are erratic, and for a
while it seems like every third shot suffers from generation loss that
in many but not all cases points to optical trickery (like when an
upside-down shot of Grant rights itself), but for me, Notorious
has proved revelatory in every incarnation…and this one is no
exception. Even Gregg Toland's grain-heavy,
second-unit Latin America work has in it the seeds of Touch
of Evil
. The connection, incidentally, between Hitchcock and
Welles has never been adequately explored; someone smarter than me
should give it a go. Presented per custom in 2.0 DTS-HD MA, the mono
soundtrack is wholly unremarkable but for the clarity with which it
delivers dialogue. Once more, echo is a slight but negligible problem.

Two non-Criterion, very conspicuously "MGM"
commentaries dress the disc, the first from film professor Rick
Jewell–who goes on at extreme length about the history of RKO, the
involvement of Selznick, and the efforts of Hitchcock to assert himself
as producer with fairly dickish demands and peevishness–and the second
from the ubiquitous Drew Casper. Casper concentrates on the film
itself, but at times he can sound more like a cheerleader (as when he
gawps at how long it takes the Grant character to grow a name) or a
narrator. Much preferred is Rudy Behlmer's yakker for the Criterion
platter, if you can score it. The "Isolated Music and Effects Track"
for whatever reason pulls Roy Webb's score out from under the picture.
"The Ultimate Romance: The Making of Notorious" (28
mins., SD) is the only place on this BD where you'll find Behlmer, who
gathers with others (Leff included) to discuss the romantic-ness of the
picture. No. Michael Medved contributes the worst comments to the piece
with his broad, ignorant generalities, declaring, among other things,
that all of Hitch's American films featured big stars. Truly? I hate
this man–and this did nothing to change my mind.

"Alfred Hitchcock: The Ultimate Spymaster" (13
mins., SD) does its best to recast Hitchcock as the Master of
Espionage, which handily, I think, deflates what this film is about
along with every notion ever put forward about the form and function of
the MacGuffin; and in "The American Film Institute Award: The Key to
Hitchcock" (3 mins.), beautiful Hitchcock granddaughter Mary Stone
introduces footage from Hitch's AFI award ceremony, complete with a
cameo from Bergman. A "1948 Radio Play starring Joseph Cotten and
Ingrid Bergman" (60 mins.) has everyone's sociopathic uncle doing
another Hitch-flick role in a well-honed radio adaptation, while the
now-perfunctory snippets from Bogdanovich's (2 mins.) and Truffaut's
(16 mins.) chats with the Master continue the supplements. Rounding out
the all-SD, 100%-recycled presentation are a cool "Restoration
Comparison" (3 mins.) that would fit in well with any Academy
interstitial plus the theatrical trailer for Notorious.
If only Criterion had done these three Hitchcock Blu-rays (Rebecca,
Spellbound, and this one).
If only. Originally published: March 6, 2012.

*One
image from the third draft persists with me as though it were
shot–something to do with it kind of having been filmed as the entire
Forio weirdness in Marnie: Picture Alicia
surrounded by prized racehorses as they foam and snort, eyes
rolling–and a shot, briefly held, of a dollop of said foam as it lands
on Bergman's snow-white shoulder. return

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6 Comments

  1. Will

    Walter, based on your mention of Laura Mulvey I was wondering, have you ever read any criticism by Kaja Silverman regarding Hitchcock? She was one of my favorite literary critics in college, and while I forget if she refers extensively to Hitchcock in “The Acoustic Mirror” or her other works, I recall enjoying her criticism a lot.

  2. Will

    Walter, based on your mention of Laura Mulvey I was wondering, have you ever read any criticism by Kaja Silverman regarding Hitchcock? She was one of my favorite literary critics in college, and while I forget if she refers extensively to Hitchcock in “The Acoustic Mirror” or her other works, I recall enjoying her criticism a lot.

  3. Will

    Walter, based on your mention of Laura Mulvey I was wondering, have you ever read any criticism by Kaja Silverman regarding Hitchcock? She was one of my favorite literary critics in college, and while I forget if she refers extensively to Hitchcock in “The Acoustic Mirror” or her other works, I recall enjoying her criticism a lot.

  4. Thanks for the comment – Silverman does some work on the male gaze as it relates to PSYCHO, I think. It’s been a long time. I like her, too – went through a Lacanian period (in both ways) and she figured large for a brief moment.

  5. Thanks for the comment – Silverman does some work on the male gaze as it relates to PSYCHO, I think. It’s been a long time. I like her, too – went through a Lacanian period (in both ways) and she figured large for a brief moment.

  6. Thanks for the comment – Silverman does some work on the male gaze as it relates to PSYCHO, I think. It’s been a long time. I like her, too – went through a Lacanian period (in both ways) and she figured large for a brief moment.

Comments are closed