Review: 'Bringing Up Baby' Blu-ray

In 1937, Hagar Wilde published a slight story in Collier's about a couple who get over a rocky patch in their relationship by tending a panther together. That same year, Wilde adapted her own story for the big screen with the assistance of Dudley Nichols. With a bonus subplot about transporting a dinosaur bone, Howard Hawks directing, and Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn starring, Bringing Up Baby became one of the defining screwball comedies. In fleshing out the story, Wilde and Nichols made Susan Vance (Hepburn) a socialite who sucks nerdy, uptight paleontologist David Huxley (Grant) into her whirlpool of lunacy, which causes the hapless duo to lose both cat and bone, get arrested, steal and crash several vehicles, collapse a brontosaurus skeleton, and of course, fall in love. Hawks commented that the film's one "fault" is that there are no "normal" people in the film, but the through-and-through zaniness of Bringing Up Baby makes it constant fun. The film's greatest strength is its two leads. Dashing Grant and level-headed Hepburn play against type with surprisingly effective results even though their romance is as illogical as everything else about this screwball classic. 

Appropriate for a film of its stature, Bringing Up Baby is one of the newest additions to the Criterion Collection. The image is clean and stable with a few stray blurry shots (such as a long shot of the two leads right before they attempt to lure Baby off a roof by singing the cat's favorite song) that may have more to do with how the movie was filmed than a lapse in its 4K transfer. 

The most substantial of the numerous supplements is an hour-long film featuring Hawks's final interview. It's a bit dry, but filmmaker Hans-Christoph Blumenberg's approach is pleasingly natural as he captures Hawks at home or visiting a car race. More entertaining is an audio-only interview with Cary Grant from 1969 in which he discusses his career with his trademark stammering charm and humor. There are also video essays on Grant's development as an actor, cinematographer Russell Metty, and visual effects artist Linwood Duncan, who devised a number of tricks to keep the actors safe from the leopard who played Baby. Wilde's original story from which the film was adapted is also included.

Review: 'The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films'

Hammer Film Productions made more than 160 movies, about a third of which were the horror flicks that earned the company its looming reputation. With so many films and so many producers, directors, and writers who helped Frankenstein them to life, Hammer is well deserving of a monstrous encyclopedia like the one Chris Fellner is about to publish.

The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films is exactly what the title describes. Fellner’s tome supplies more than 525 pages of entries on the expected movies and crew members, as well as entries on Hammer’s forays into television, such as The Hammer House of Horror, and even some items with a somewhat tangential relationship to the production company, such as Blood of the Vampire (a non-Hammer production made by a crew with deep ties to Hammer) and Ida Lupino, whose husbands and father worked for Hammer and who played house-host to Hammer’s number-one star, Peter Cushing.

Entries on films each follow a similar format with subheadings listing cast and crew and UK and U.S. release dates, summarizing plots in great detail, offering quotes from critics and cast/crew members (Christopher Lee’s quotes are almost invariably about how he wasn’t being paid enough), and tersely running down production notes and trivia, some of which are quite interesting (I had no idea that Cary Grant was a major Hammer-head who almost starred in Phantom of the Opera in 1962). That terseness prevents this book about fun films from being truly fun. It would have been nice if Fellner took a more playful and less drily encyclopediac approach to composing his encyclopedia. He only drops his dry professionalism when discussing the so-called “Hammer Glamour” actresses for which the studio is famous. While the way Fellner leers over these actresses is technically appropriate in a book about a studio infamous for the way it exploited its female stars, it can make for uncomfortable reading in 2019, especially when the author does such unnecessary things as relaying certain actresses’ measurements. A book about the sixties does not have to read like a book written in the sixties. 

Review: 'Notorious' Blu-ray

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.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 110

The Date: January 18

The Movie: North by Northwest (1959)

What Is It?: In the midst of his darkest run of movies (Vertigo through Marnie), Hitch has a lot of fun by running Cary Grant through a mistaken-identity gauntlet of kidnapping, drunk driving, cornfield stalking, and Mt. Rushmore climbing.

Why Today?: On this day in 1904, Cary Grant is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 60

The Date: November 29

The Movie: Suspicion (1941)

What Is It?: Alfred Hitchcock’s kooky noir flummoxes expectations by casting Cary Grant as a potential creep who may be plotting to moider perpetually anxious Joan Fontaine. That glowing glass of milk is certainly suspicious…

Why Today?: On this day in 1986, Cary Grant dies.