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.

"You're Like Me": The Strange Links Between 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' and 'Blue Velvet'

David Lynch has created some of the scariest moments on film. The infamous scene behind Winkie’s Diner has been rated cinema’s scariest scene more than once. Twin Peaks has been named television’s scariest show. Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, INLAND EMPIRE, and, of all things, The Elephant Man have been categorized as horror movies through the years. However, Lynch has never really been a horror film director. Rather he works horror into his work in the same way that he works in comedy and melodrama, and because he does not really make films we expect to hit the beats of specific genres, those moments of humor, naked emotion, and terror always hit harder than they would in genre pictures because they are so unexpected.