Eight months after the end of World War II, Alicia
Huberman’s dad is convicted of spying on the U.S. for the Nazis. An agent named
Devlin recruits her to infiltrate the home of her dad’s pal Alex Sebastian, a
Nazi industrialist hiding out in Rio who has long carried a torch for Alicia. Since
Ingrid Bergman plays Alicia and Cary Grant is Devlin, they’re just too damned
good looking to keep their hands off of each other, and the budding romance
complicates her dangerous liaison with Alex, played by a unsettlingly
sympathetic Claude Rains.
This bizarre love triangle is the backbone of Alfred
Hitchcock’s Notorious. Without the
Gothic feverishness, luridness, wild set pieces, or high adventure of
Hitchcock’s most celebrated work, Notorious
may stand as his most low-key and adult film. Grant even suppresses his usually
uncontainable charm to play Devlin as a cold fish whose actual motivations do
not become clear until the very end of the film. All of this does not render Notorious similarly chilly. Hitchcock
still manages to electrify his imagery with flashes of disorienting camerawork
and wrings classic moments of suspense out of such subtle actions as a palmed
key and a dwindling champagne supply. However, it is Bergman who really ignites
the atmosphere. She was rarely better than she is here as a fierce alcoholic
determined to outpace her father’s reputation but ends up as a pawn in a
potentially fatal scheme.
The Criterion Collection is now giving Notorious a 4k upgrade, and the film looks good with a natural grain
and no noticeable flaws. At times sharpness and contrast are a tad weak, but
the picture looks very fine overall. The supplements constitute a veritable
crash course in cinema studies. Chief among them is David Thompson’s 2009
documentary Once Upon a Time… “Notorious”,
which spends 52-minutes analyzing the filmmaking, describing making of details,
and placing the picture in historical/political context…some of which will
require a very strong stomach as it includes actual concentration camp footage.
There are also plenty of new exclusives, such as David Bordwell’s video essay
focusing on the film’s style and chillingly subtle ending, an interview with
cinematographer John Bailey on the look of the picture, and additional
featurettes starring Hitchcock’s biographer Donald Spoto and David Raim. There
is also an hour-long radio adaptation of Notorious
starring Ingrid Bergman and Joseph
Cotton, a very brief pathe reel featuring Bergman and Hitchcock, and Marian
Keane’s audio commentary ported over from Criterion’s 2001 DVD.
