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New York Times (12/Feb/2012) - In Hitchcock's World of Fallible Mortals

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In Hitchcock's World of Fallible Mortals

Alfred Hitchcock made four features for the independent producer David O. Selznick. Originally released by United Artists or RKO, they've been leading a nomadic existence ever since, as rights have passed from one company to another. At the moment they're controlled by MGM, which featured the Selznick Hitchcocks as part of an eight-disc set in 2008 that was cursed by production problems (some of the discs simply wouldn't play), and now has issued three of the four in Blu-ray, leaving out the perennial stepchild that is the 1947 "Paradine Case."

The transfers are excellent, with strong contrast and grain, and the only problem is minor: faulty menus make it difficult to find the generous supplementary material. (This has been carried over from the 2008 releases.) Those who own the Criterion editions from 2001 and 2002 may not feel an urgent need to upgrade, but at this price ($24.99 suggested retail), "Rebecca" (1940), "Spellbound" (1945) and, supremely, "Notorious" (1946) are films that belong in every cinephile's library.

That Alfred Hitchcock was one of the major artists of the 20th century no longer seems a matter of serious doubt. He has almost certainly generated more critical study and biographical examination than any other individual filmmaker, and he remains as popular with the general public as he does in academia. He's the one classical-era director whose work remains easily available almost in its entirety (one curious exception: no one released Hitchcock's first feature, the 1925 "Pleasure Garden," which exists in perfectly fine form), and, thanks to his carefully cultivated television personality, he remains a familiar and ingratiating figure, everyone's favorite mischievous uncle.

Hitchcock is a lifelong commitment. He is a filmmaker you discover early, in a state of innocence, as a provider of remarkably pleasurable entertainments, like "The 39 Steps" (1935) or "North by Northwest" (1959, and where would James Bond be without the template that Hitchcock provided?). Later you discover his darker side, the playful eroticism ("To Catch a Thief," 1955) that shades into morbid romanticism ("Shadow of a Doubt," 1943). You begin to notice the mathematically precise editing (as in the climax of "Strangers on a Train," 1951), the unusual prominence given to inanimate objects (the glass of milk in "Suspicion," 1941), the elaborate camera movements and extreme long takes ("Under Capricorn," 1949).

It's with Hitchcock that many of us begin to sense the presence of the director, to understand that movies are more than a matter of attractive people reciting their lines in front of a camera. Along with Orson Welles, Hitchcock is the filmmaker most responsible for making viewers aware of form, for showing us that what we have here is something distinct from novels and plays, a medium with its own things to say and its own way of saying them.

"Notorious," for example, could be considered an exercise in the artful variation of points of view, as created through camerawork that is, with one conspicuous exception, almost entirely objective. As he would do 14 years later in "Psycho" (1960, and perhaps the film most closely related to "Notorious" in the Hitchcock canon), Hitchcock begins the film with a kind of journalistic detachment, offering a precise dateline ("Miami, Florida. Three-Twenty P.M., April the Twenty-Fourth, Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Six ...") and inviting the audience to share the predatory curiosity of the reporters and photographers waiting outside a courtroom for the "notorious" Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the beautiful and loose-living daughter of a Nazi spy who has just been convicted of treason.

An alcoholic with a reputation for sleeping around, Alicia is far from the typical Hollywood heroine of 1946. But Hitchcock quickly transfers our sympathy to her with a single, audacious image: at a party at her house, a dark silhouette, seen from behind, dominates the scene with a supernatural presence: this is Devlin (Cary Grant), a man without a past (or even a first name) who turns out to be a federal agent, sent to manipulate Alicia into signing up for a dangerous secret mission. As irresponsible as Alicia may be, we learn from the lighting and his position in the frame that Devlin is something much worse: a user, a schemer, a cop.

Devlin (the diabolical cast of his name is surely no coincidence) spends much of "Notorious" doing to Alicia what Hitchcock is frequently accused of doing to his audience: manipulating emotions to produce the results they want. Alicia is to go with Devlin to Rio, where she will "redeem" herself as a good American by befriending (and, it is implied, seducing) an old friend of her father, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), a wealthy German immigrant who is plainly plotting something big with a group of thickly accented associates. Devlin makes love to Alicia, but doesn't hesitate to send her to Sebastian; only when she tells him that he can add Sebastian to the list of her playmates does Devlin register a sense of self-disgust. Perhaps he cares for this woman after all.

The point of view now widens to embrace the couple, as Devlin struggles to complete his mission and get Alicia out safely. These passages become the occasion for some marvelously executed set pieces: the theft of the key, the discovery in the wine cellar, Alicia's realization that Sebastian knows of her treachery (by now, they are married) and is slowly poisoning her.

But Hitchcock has one more shift of perspective to execute. With the discovery of his wife's infidelity Sebastian too has become a victim. He has loved inappropriately, against the wishes of his mother -- a figure (the actress is billed as Madame Konstantin) as stern and desiccated as Mrs. Bates in "Psycho" -- and now he must pay for his error.

For Hitchcock, this is nothing less than the error of being human, of having needs and feelings within an authoritarian culture, a compound of church and state, that insists on suppressing such things in the name of order and morality. At the end of "Notorious" Hitchcock doesn't focus on the glamorous couple escaping into a future of shared romantic ecstasy but on the isolated figure of Sebastian, slowly climbing a short flight of stairs (always a weighted image in Hitchcock) on the way to facing a lonely death.

It is at such moments as this that we finally and most fully appreciate Hitchcock. Behind the dazzling entertainer, behind the peerless master of form, there is a man of great heart, who sides not with the judges but with the judged, who reserves his compassion for those unfortunate creatures -- like Norman Bates in "Psycho," Scottie Ferguson in "Vertigo," or the entire uncomprehending population of Bodega Bay in "The Birds" -- who must live under the eyes of angry gods. Which is to say, all of us.

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