Posts Tagged Rear Window

Champagne and pseudonyms; Notorious review

November 26, 2008 at 12:51 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I couldn’t be more proud of my readership for kicking into gear over the past couple days.  Speaking of readership, I forget if I’ve named you all.  Mr. Menick has his VCA, what should I have?  The Eaters? Suggestions would be appreciated in the comments section.

Continuing along my delayed Hitchcock kick, I was inspired to finally watch Notorious by my discussion with the aforementioned seasoned blogger about Hitchcock during some downtime at a certain debate tournament at which a certain less-seasoned blogger made a certain sum of money for judging a certain activity.  He brought up that Notorious certainly deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as Rear Window, Psycho and Strangers on a Train (were those the three?), and was probably above any breath that involved Vertigo and North by Northwest.  Rope, I think we agreed, was probably not even part of the same respiratory system (in a…good way?).  So that pushed me over the edge into seeing a movie I was already planning on seeing.

So that was an incredibly roundabout way of simply saying that Notorious, directed by Mr. Alfredonius Hitchcock himself and written by some guy named Ben Hecht, (Just kidding.  You can’t be considered just “some guy” when you write two movies like Notorioius and Gilda in the same year.) is the movie I’m reviewing this time.   The absolute first thing that jumps out at me about this movie is the unique and interesting way it uses three of the biggest actors of the time: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains.  Well, that’s more fair to say of the first two than of Rains – we’ve established even within the humble confines of this blog that Mr. Rains was a chameleon; a god among character actors, who manages to make all of his roles complicated and interesting.

But enough hero worship of Claude; we’ll discuss him more specifically to this movie later, along with the other biggies.

Notorious is the story of Alicia Huberman (Bergman), the daughter of a German-American convicted of war crimes committed during World War II who is asked by the United States Federal Government to work undercover in Brazil trying to catch some of her father’s associates doing…bad things.  Her liaison, TR Devlin (Grant), whom she meets at a party she threw to drink until she can’t feel anymore in reaction to her father’s conviction, is the one who introduces her to the mission.  She accepts after being reminded how much she loves America (and thus hates Nazis), deciding to abandon a family friend who wanted to take her on a boat cruise of the world, I think.  While in Rio (by the sea-o) de Janeiro, awaiting assignment and generally just hanging out, guess what the pair do? Give up? They fall in love.

But when they get the assignment, they find that Alicia has to woo an old acquaintance who is all kinds of creepily in love with her in order to get information.  He’s Alex Sebastien, played by Claude Rains, and he’s a former Nazi socialite.  It would be pretty stupid to do plot summary from that point forward, for a number of reasons.

As far as Grant goes in this movie, it’s not the only time he was in a Hitchcock movie (I count three: this, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest), and though I haven’t seen To Catch a Thief, I know that in North by Northwest, Grant also has moments where he (Devlin) vilifies his love interest for being unfaithful to him while in the line of duty.  But here, what’s interesting is he never even gets attached to Alicia (Bergman) to begin with.  He doesn’t trust her because of her history, even though he falls for her, and his exchange with Alicia about her seduction of Sebastien is less about feeling hurt and betrayed, and more about taking sick satisfaction in twisting the knife over Alicia’s guilt about her mission.  The racetrack scene is just fascinating, and what happens immediately after is positively Hithcockian (duh).  But that’s too spoilable to talk about, regrettably.  You’ll just have to be satisfied with me telling you it rules.

Bergman’s Alicia character is an incredibly compelling one, and for my money it blows her performance in Casablanca out of the water because Alicia actually has depth – emotions that go beyond “I’m conflicted.”  This is an incredibly well-developed and fully-realized character, and I was so impressed by her subtlety of expression.

Claude Rains, though, is the absolute top dog here.  You’re introduced to him as Alex Sebastien, a former Nazi before he ever steps on screen, so my feelings towards his every action were that everything was coated with this sinister, invisible layer.  But the more I watched Alex around Alicia (which is 90% of his screen time), the more I came to realize that his feelings for her were sincere, despite his evildoings.  In reflection, I feel that Rains lent such depth to his character that I could analyze it til the cows came home, and still be interested.

So this review has kind of turned into boot-licking, and I’m going to cut it off there.  Just know that the strength of this movie is in the lead performances, possibly more than any other Hitchcock film.

Comments (2)

Other players are waiting for your turn in Scramble; Vertigo review

August 9, 2008 at 4:58 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

What I don’t understand is that after Scrabulous got so unceremoniously dumped, people turned to Scramble, a far inferior word-forming game that’s all based on speed and small words, and doesn’t have the great reasoning skills that Scrabble does.  I mean, Wordscraper is the same game, made by the same developers, just with some changes in format that I bet were put in place to make it lest lawsuitable.  And yet, all but two of the games I started on Wordscraper have gone inactive.  What’s the deal? We all loved Scrabulous!

So I crossed another movie off of my IMDb top 250 list, and this one was a biggie, one of the real culturally important ones: Vertigo, the Hitchcock classic.  Having proclaimed myself a Hitchcock fan to those with whom I talk about movies, I’ve often received incredulous looks for this gap in my film catalogue.  I’ve now seen Vertigo, Strangers On A Train, North By Northwest, Psycho, and Rear Window, and I think those are the real biggies.  There are plenty more on the list – he’s the biggest director on it, which I guess means that IMDb users consider him the best director of all time.  Though that’s not exactly fair; he was extraordinarily prolific in comparison to almost every other filmmaker, so quantity is not exactly the best indicator.  Still, most of his titles are substantially up there.  But I digress.

No longer will I have to apologize, explain away, or shrug my shoulders, for I now know what all the fuss was about, and it was certainly about something.  What separates Vertigo from the other Hitchcock movies I’ve seen is that there isn’t much of an undercurrent of suspense.  Oh, sure, there are suspenseful scenes – Hitchcock is called “The Master of Suspense” after all – but we aren’t kept on the edge of our seats the whole time.  Most of the movie involves star James Stewart as John “Scotty” Ferguson either following or interacting with Kim Novak as Madeleine Elster, trying to decipher the mystery of her and Carlotta Valdes, whose spirit appears to have possessed her from beyond the grave.  Even after the semi-climactic scene about two thirds into the movie, the pacing is very naturalistic – the scenes are functional, the plot is structured in a very rational way, so every scene is necessary, but just a logical progression.  Scotty isn’t on the run from the law, isn’t trying to prevent his own death, he’s just doing his job at first, and trying to piece his life back together later.

SPOILERS

I absolutely loved the writing decision to have Judy actually write out the letter, then tear it up.  It’s one of those brave choices in a movie – that, coupled with the flashback, lets the audience know the real deal though the protagonist doesn’t, turning it into a different kind of movie than it was before, less about figuring out what’s really going on and more about Scotty’s increasingly disturbing attachment to Madeleine.

It’s such sick pleasure along the lines of the Henry Fonda scene in the movie that I just reviewed last week to watch Jimmy Stewart turn into a crazy person who tries to control someone’s life, just the kind of scumbag you would hate with every fiber of your being if you caught his story too late in its arc.  But you still kind of half-sympathize, especially with the knowledge that the person who drove him to it is now the victim.

END SPOILERS

Stewart is, of course, still a god here, like in every other damn movie he makes.  You just can’t find fault in his performances, especially under Hitchcock.  What’s interesting here is that he doesn’t do the same trick he does in lots of his other roles that I’ve seen, where he kind of tilts his head back and looks down the bridge of his nose when he’s confused or curious about something.  No, that move is too warm for this movie, and Stewart’s character, while pleasant, is not really a nice guy, and gets less and less so as the movie unfolds.  I love that both Stewart and Hitchcock recognize that this is not just another Jimmy Stewart movie – it’s not really about him, it’s about what happens to him.

I also love that the title of the movie as a theme isn’t beaten to death, it’s only selectively used at key points.  This makes the scenes where it is used more effective and anxious; because every time Scotty goes up stairs, we hold our collecive breath a little, so when the vertigo does kick in, we don’t exhale, and that’s how Hitchcock wants it.

Novak is serviceable here, but as far as I’ve seen, Hitchcock’s only great female role/performance was Janet Leigh as Marion Crane in Psycho.  All the other female leads have just been functional, exactly what they needed to be, but not eye-catching in anything but looks.

Yawn, just another fantastic movie to add to my ever-expanding list of favorite movies on facebook.  But I refuse to subscribe to the growing trend of people who want to distill by saying bullshit like “I like movies, all movies” or “movies that don’t suck”, or “Tarantino, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Bay…no, that can’t be right…” It’s okay to have a bunch of favorite movies.  I have a huge amount of favorite movies; that doesn’t make Fargo not a favorite movie just because it’s not on my top 10 list.  I love Fargo!

P.S. – It seems to be deadlocked 1-1 between those who want to stay out of the know, and those who want more detail.  I think I’ll just cordon off the spoilers until I get a definitive majority, like they do it over at AintItCoolNews.com.  Cheers all.

Comments (4)