135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

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HinkyDinkyTruesmith
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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#101 Post by HinkyDinkyTruesmith » Mon Dec 17, 2018 7:51 pm

Can anyone make head or tails out of Svet's Notorious review? It's filled with so many vagaries and abstract interpretations and words (a film's "identity", for instance), that I can't really figure out what he's trying to argue. It also seems to me he never explicitly says what the "straightforward political messaging" is. I admit I'm at odds with his suggestion that Ingrid Bergman is anything less than great here. I think this is perhaps her best performance.

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DarkImbecile
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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#102 Post by DarkImbecile » Mon Dec 17, 2018 7:55 pm

He probably just finds himself nonplussed and vaguely threatened by an anti-fascist narrative in a way he can't quite put his finger on...

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Roscoe
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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#103 Post by Roscoe » Thu Jan 17, 2019 10:32 am

The new Blu-Ray of NOTORIOUS has some oddities in it -- for the first time, that trick shot near the beginning, showing the POV of a guard peeking through a door at proceedings in a courtroom, with the image framed by the door and the doorjamb, looked really transparently fake. The wood elements were moving just enough to be noticeable, likewise the central image of Mr. Huberman flanked by lawyers facing the judge, and I sat there wondering why somebody didn't do something to just, you know, stabilize the image if possible. Similarly, I've long been aware of the shadows cast by Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman on the rear-projection screen as they struggle in the car, but hadn't noticed the really blatant shadow cast on another rear-projection screen by the traffic cop as he dismounts from his motorcycle.

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HitchcockLang
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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#104 Post by HitchcockLang » Thu Jan 17, 2019 11:30 am

Can anyone with experience give me your opinion as to whether the old MGM blu is worth hanging on to for its two different commentaries?

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Godot
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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#105 Post by Godot » Thu Jan 24, 2019 6:36 pm

Professor David Bordwell's latest blog post covers his supplement on the new Criterion Notorious blu-ray release. He also has some great links at the bottom to Greg Ruth's cover art discussion (from Criterion's own site), St. Adrian Martin's video essay with Cristina Lopez, and a Greenbriar Picture Shows post on the sexy advertising. I am really looking forward to picking this new edition up (this will be my sextuple dip on home video - embarrassing? or a testament to the evolving nature of entertainment editions?).

Apropos of that,
HitchcockLang wrote:
Thu Jan 17, 2019 11:30 am
Can anyone with experience give me your opinion as to whether the old MGM blu is worth hanging on to for its two different commentaries?
I suppose it depends on how much you enjoy commentaries - I think they are one of the greatest features of LDs/DVDs/blu-rays, so I hoard them and like having a variety of them on any given movie. I liked Richard Jewell's, I think his are a bit more engagingly historical in general (I recommend I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang), compared to Drew Casper's, which is a bit more Hollywood-focused and sometimes gossipy. But I enjoyed listening to both on the MGM set. I am particularly fond of Marian Keane's Hitchcock commentaries (which puts me in the solid minority on this forum, so caveat emptor), I held on to the previous Criterion DVD just for it, and I'm pleased that will be carried over to the new CC blu-ray release.

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Mr Sausage
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Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

#106 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Apr 15, 2019 6:41 am

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HinkyDinkyTruesmith
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Re: Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

#107 Post by HinkyDinkyTruesmith » Mon Apr 15, 2019 7:43 am

I read the novel late last year, having seen the film a couple times before. I loved the novel, and Hitch is mostly faithful to it, but returning to the movie (immediately after the novel) displays some of its weaknesses. The revelation in the film pushes the film to a halt after a strong first hour, where once you’ve learned what’s happened it’s essentially just a very long exposition drop, in my eyes. It has none of the power of Vertigo’s similar revelation. Especially because the narrator’s character arc is left incomplete in the film, or, rather, she hasn’t the character arc of the novel. There are certainly some sequences in the film that match the novel for power but the emphasis on male bonding in the second half of the film at the expense of the narrator also hurts it in my eyes (as briefly detailed earlier). It’s still enjoyable and everyone’s very fine in it, but it ranks low for me in terms of Hitchcock.

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Roscoe
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Re: Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

#108 Post by Roscoe » Mon Apr 15, 2019 8:48 am

I read the novel before I ever saw the film, this being in the years before home video and you had to wait for a rep house, if you had one nearby, to run things or hope that a local TV station might run something. The thing that I noticed when I finally saw the film, and still notice every time I see the film now, is the current Mrs. De Winter's behavior after the catastrophe with the dress. In the film, I always find it impossible to believe that anyone in that position wouldn't have told Mrs. Danvers to pack her bags and clear out immediately, and fuck the two weeks' wages and forget about a reference bitch, which wasn't the case when I read the book. Of course there are plot reasons why that can't happen, I entirely understand, but I still find it an example of a situation that worked on the page that didn't work when dramatized.

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Re: Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

#109 Post by Jonathan S » Mon Apr 15, 2019 10:58 am

HinkyDinkyTruesmith wrote:
Mon Apr 15, 2019 7:43 am
It’s still enjoyable and everyone’s very fine in it, but it ranks low for me in terms of Hitchcock.
I agree; despite Hitch always being one of my favourite directors, for decades I didn't feel any need to have Rebecca in my collection... until I became a Hitchcock completist. Just as the equally overrated Lady Vanishes is a garrulous writers' picture, Rebecca (like Spellbound and Paradine Case) feels like one its producer's interminable memos in which words dominate everything else. Indeed I recall Selznick reshot sequences after Hitch left the project and of course he was the one who received the Oscar.

Its popularity as a romantic movie always surprises me (maybe it's a deliberately ironic Hitch touch that the marriage proposal is shouted off-screen from a hotel bathroom!?) I suppose Olivier's typically icy, rigid demeanour is more appropriate here than in some of his other roles but I rarely found him an interesting actor on screen. It's really left to Judith Anderson to supply the movie's only hints of real passion - I suspect that's primarily where Hitch's interest lay and, as usual with him, the nominal villain invites the most empathy from me.

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Re: Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

#110 Post by schellenbergk » Mon Apr 15, 2019 2:55 pm

Rebecca is - to me - an odd film. I like it but I don't love it. Usually I love Hitchcock's work, but I don't find it to be a typical Hitch film (too Selznek-y). So it doesn't work for me on the level of admiring the director's work.

What does work for me is that it's a great early example of LGBTQ Cinema. I watch the film now really for just one scene: where Mrs. Danvers lovingly caresses Rebecca's underwear. To me, it ranks as one of the great 'Queer' moments in pre-WW2 Hollywood.

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HinkyDinkyTruesmith
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Re: Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

#111 Post by HinkyDinkyTruesmith » Mon Apr 15, 2019 3:03 pm

For me, the moment where Danny attempts to persuade the new Mrs. de Winter to commit suicide is just as effective as anything else in Hitchcock. There's an overhead shot in the sequence that always appears with the excitement of invention, always unexpected somehow.

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Rayon Vert
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Re: Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

#112 Post by Rayon Vert » Tue Apr 16, 2019 12:31 am

I really like the film and don't react negatively to the some of the points described here. It’s a sneaky film in that it starts off fairly simply and then develops into a near epic-sized baroque monster full of tone changes and plot twists, as grand and labyrinthine as Manderley. That mansion really is a central "character", like the house in Psycho you could say. Visually very appealing also.

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Re: Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

#113 Post by dustybooks » Wed Apr 24, 2019 12:39 am

I'd seen Vertigo and many episodes of his TV shows as a child, but Rebecca turned me into a lifelong Hitchcock fanatic. (And probably a classic Hollywood fanatic to boot.) The claustrophobia and deceptive beauty of its world can feel in a way like an outlier in his work, but apart from its unusual debt to a famous (and excellent) text, it's really a fairly representative introduction to the kind of work he would do in Hollywood, of rendering Beautiful People / Beautiful Places into fixtures of tension and ugliness, as opposed to the scrappier, more working-class sensibility of his British films. (I think it was Bill Krohn who said once that Rebecca, thanks to its setting and florid Gothic sensibility, felt more European than, say, Young and Innocent.)

I know of at least one Hitchcock scholar who considers the midsection of Rebecca -- from the arrival at Manderley to the discovery of Rebecca's corpse -- to be the absolute pinnacle of Hitchcock's filmmaking. It's easy to understand why; it really is enchanting, and it has a ghostly urgency and resulting intensity of emotion he only came close to (or even attempted) with Vertigo, though its classic romanticism probably also has some analogies in Notorious. (Discarding The Birds, these two films and their almost palpable manifestations of the dead are as close as he got to showing us anything supernatural since the ghost in The Pleasure Garden.) I really believe Mrs. Danvers whispering "Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?" is one of the most chilling moments in cinema. Really all of the scenes in Rebecca's bedroom dance around on the edge of a nightmare in a way that strongly evokes the tower sequences in Vertigo for me; somehow, there's just some edge-of-life-and-death feeling Hitchcock touches there that I've not found elsewhere in the movies.

I've made peace over the years with how plotty the last hour or so is -- reading between the lines of the Truffaut interview, I feel this is probably what dissatisfied Hitchcock about the film, along with the fact that he clearly didn't have an entirely pleasant collaboration with Selznick. (I don't think it's entirely correct to say the movie is more Selznick's than Hitchcock's, though; for one thing, the latter shot the film in such an unorthodox manner that Selznick had a difficult time sculpting it to his preferences. I think Leonard Leff goes into a lot of detail about this in his book, and probably on the commentary he recorded for Criterion's disc.) As noted, it's unusual for Hitchcock to adapt a text that's so widely celebrated in and of itself; even in the case of a terrific book like Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, he clearly saw an opportunity to take the story somewhere better by adapting it freely, mostly using her vision as a launching pad, and very successfully. I don't know how Hitchcock felt about du Maurier's novel -- I am aware he liked her personally and I seem to remember a story that he looked into buying the rights before he came to Hollywood, but his treatment independent of Selznick would obviously have been very different -- but I know that he'd regretted the one time he adapted something he considered a "masterpiece," the Sean O'Casey play, because he felt it left him with no creative wiggle room. In the same way, I'm sure the level of fame of this novel and the obligations and pressure inherent to (a) adapting such a popular book in the first place and (b) doing so for David O. Selznick probably left him feeling his hands were tied in tying up various story obligations that, under other circumstances, could have been more ambiguous. Again, though, I think it works... especially if you read through the "code" and discern the darker things the film can't come out and say that the novel can. And he does manage to keep the macabre elements active with things like the wide-eyed, disturbed gardener at the inquisition who keeps repeating that he doesn't want to go to "the asylum," before gloriously bringing the nightmare back into focus with the closing fire and Danvers' surrender to madness.

Ever since I've been interested in film, it's always been bewildering to me that there's a certain subset of people who feel Hitchcock was an anti-"actor's director," that the camera was paramount over all else; there's truth in his attention to cinematic technique, clearly, but no one who disparaged the craft could have coaxed those miracle performances out of Judith Anderson and especially Joan Fontaine in this movie. You can name so many other moments of absolutely sublime-beyond-words acting in his films; I rewatched Strangers on a Train recently and Robert Walker's work in that is a great example. But Fontaine's capturing of alienation and anxiety in Rebecca is as good as it gets, for me; it's a perfect fusion with Hitchcock's mastery of storytelling to create this absolute sense of identification with the character and her thorny, horrifying situation, particularly in the second act. The director told Truffaut years later that he preferred making films about "situations" rather than plots, and if the lengthy setup and wordy, busy denouement (which is still engrossing and well-performed, if a huge and inevitable step down) are the only way we can have the intoxicating hour in which Fontaine's "I" is getting subsumed in the wonder and dread of Manderley, it's totally worth it.

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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#114 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Mar 21, 2020 8:25 am

Finally getting to the second disc of extras on the re-release edition of Rebecca, I quite enjoyed the French documentary from 2016, In The Footsteps of Rebecca. Actually that does not seem to be listed in the extras on the disc as shown on the first post of this page. Even more of a pleasant surprise though was to find in the credits to the documentary that Kristin Scott Thomas is voicing the excerpts from Du Maurier's letters. Is this the first Criterion release that Kristin Scott Thomas has appeared in so far, albeit only in voiceover similar to the way that John Hurt first appeared in the collection not in a feature film but in that BBC Arena documentary included as an extra on the Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters release?

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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#115 Post by artfilmfan » Sat Mar 21, 2020 11:30 am

There was a Criterion Collection laserdisc of The English Patient. That was her first Criterion appearance.

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Randall Maysin
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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#116 Post by Randall Maysin » Sun Mar 22, 2020 4:16 am

Here's hoping Criterion snaps up Bitter Moon or that Pintilie film she did at some point! She is so lovely...and so androgynous...she's starting to look like the young Terence Stamp! LOL

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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#117 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Mar 22, 2020 5:39 am

Oh gosh, I'd forgotten all about that and I even have the Miramax DVD that ports over that Criterion commentary track too!

I think there would be great scope for an 'early French Kristin Scott Thomas' Eclipse set, if possible! I'd quite like to see Autobux - Aux yeux du monde (aka The Bus - The Eyes of the World) get some attention, in which Scott Thomas plays the schoolteacher whose bus of children gets held at gunpoint by Yvan Attal's character as a gesture of commitment to his uninterested paramour, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg! That was one of Yvan Attal's earliest acting roles and as much as I dislike his later film My Wife Is An Actress (which also co-starred Gainsbourg) at least Autobus, by necessity, provides some sort of counterpoint to his character's amour fou! (That's the difference between acting for someone else and being both the star and director indulging their star, I suppose!) And Scott Thomas is also in the other 'bad boy' film of the late 80s with 1989's Force Majeure, which is sort of the in between point between Midnight Express and Return to Paradise.

I'm getting into the screen tests section of the second disc of Rebecca now. Gosh, those comments on the actresses are brutally blunt, especially about Vivien Leigh's complete unsuitability for the role! (Though I agree fully with their assessment!) Even in private studio memos Hitchcock is able to throw out some zingers, with potential "I"'s of Miriam Patty said to be "too much Dresden china. She should play the part of the cupid that is broken, she is so frail" and Audrey Reynolds said to be "suitable for the role of Rebecca, who does not appear in the film"!

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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#118 Post by Calvin » Fri May 05, 2023 10:57 am

A new restoration of Spellbound will premiere at this year's Cannes Classics

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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#119 Post by ryannichols7 » Fri May 05, 2023 11:30 am

I'm really curious how Criterion will handle the upgrade for this. surely Hitchcock is UHD worthy, but would Spellbound really be the first of his titles they go for a UHD bump for? it's certainly a film worthy of it but I'd be surprised if anyone wants to see it on before Rebecca or Notorious (though visually it may be better). I like dustybooks' idea of them bringing back the Wrong Men and Notorious Women box as a UHD upgrade - now that would be a must own boxset

either way, props to Disney for restoring all three of these films

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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#120 Post by Rayon Vert » Sat Jun 17, 2023 3:45 pm

Finally getting to the Notorious Criterion blu-ray.

I'm bowled over by David Bordwell's visual analysis piece. Makes me wish he would make a full-commentary on every film that merits such analysis!

When I was young studying literature (for 6 years or so) at university, my psychological make-up and developmental needs, you can say, were usually keeping me centered on meaning, themes, and form was secondary. Purely formal approaches left me cold. In my older age, discovering the cinema, I think form is the aspect I appreciate the most (or I should say understanding how form contributes to meaning), and when you get a scholar revealing the hidden-in-plain-sight treasures there, it's like a whole new world opens. I certainly would not appreciate two thirds of what Ozu was doing if I hadn't read Bordwell's book along with seeing the movies.

And getting 4 blu-ray commentaries for this film is quite the treasure trove itself!

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Drucker
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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#121 Post by Drucker » Sat Jun 17, 2023 4:17 pm

Hey I just revisited this last month as well and have been going through the extras myself. That Bordwell piece is fantastic, agreed, though I think some of the extras covered similar ground with the 'how long can a kiss last' piece of trivia, as well as the way Zanuck had to step back from production to focus on Duel In The Sun.

I will say this rocketed to the top of my favorite Hitchcock list after this recent rewatch though. Grant and Bergman are simply marvelous, and that final scene, especially the decent down the stairwell, is riveting, tense, and feels like it could last forever. The movie featuring both it and the wine cellar scene is just so much goodness in a single film.

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Rayon Vert
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Re: 135-137 Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious

#122 Post by Rayon Vert » Sat Jun 17, 2023 5:01 pm

Vertigo is still tops for me (quite unoriginally) but this is a close 2nd. “Objectively” I don’t think there’s a more perfect one, although it arguably has a few equals.

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