John Bailey on NOTORIOUS (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

[@TheDreadfulCurtain]

Love the early POV shots of Cary Grant. Notorious is such meticulously crafted film with supreme control and artifice. I think it is Hitchcock’s best film. The intimacy and the emotion expressed by Bergman towards Grant makes the plot all the more crushing. The objects In the film such as the champagne, the key, the wine bottles and the cup are all masterfully suspenseful ticking time bombs. Hearing about the cinematography and how complex it was has just made me appreciate what appears so easy and smooth in the film that much more. Thanks for this.

[@dmccaffreydm]

Fantastic video, thanks!

[@nessieness5433]

What an incandescent beauty, Ingrid Bergman. Her acting in this film is really one of her best performances!

[@poetcomic1]

"Say it again." "I love you." That close up of their two faces near the end is one of the most romantic moments in cinema.

[@grimper35]

Incredible insights, thanks! Notorious is one of my all-time favorites and you just added more reasons for that.

[@kellyanastasia2752]

Thank you Mr. Bailey for this fine visual analysis of Notorious. The description of the camera work at the party scene with the crane was fascinating and very informative. Notorious is probably my favorite Alfred Hitchcock film.

[@MarloweDash]

This discussion was amazing. There are so many other presentations about Hitch and Notorious but this one - the pov of an experienced practitioner is more valuable to me than almost any other. Just fantastic. Wow. Thank you.

[@eztuby]

Beautiful

[@arnesahlen2704]

10:45 Hitchcock's silent-film training shows in storytelling without dialogue as you describe here.

[@trialandcreate]

Amazing thank you!

[@judithlauron2856]

Have watched this great film dozen times; it’s perfection. Grant and stunning Bergman remain As Hollywood’s finest. Ben Hecht, superior writer…

[@fosbury68]

2:06 wasn't Cary Grant a lucky guy.

[@sanilalkuttimon1755]

❤️❤️

[@jeff__w]

_The quality of Hitchcock’s rear projections_ 17:24 “Gregg Toland is said to have shot the process plates in Rio de Janeiro. Although he’s uncredited and these are the plates we see in downtown when Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman are meeting in the park on the bench and so forth. Hitchcock used plates all the way through his career and they were very effective in black and white films because of the kind of abstraction of the black and white but when you got to the color era, you know in his color movies, I think not only did he become less technically sort of concerned about the plates but the color became more difficult to control and you’d have a color disparity between the plates and the color temperature of the plates and the foreground action. I don’t think he was concerned with it at that time. As a matter of fact *you could almost make a case, given Hitchcock’s predilection for technique, that having the plates themselves not being convincing was actually part of the artifice of the whole style that he used in film.* And if you look carefully at the park scenes and especially the café scenes in _Notorious_ the plates really look squirrely not technically but in terms of the focus. There seems to be very little real-life correspondence for what I know as a cinematographer between the focus on the actors and how we would expect the background to fall out of focus. … “Whether [Ted] Tetzlaff and Hitchcock actually had the projector on the RP plate thrown more out of focus to make it more abstract I’m not sure but I’ve always felt that there was very little sense in Hitchcock films all the way through that there was an attempt to create an illusion of real space and of real depth of field in his process plates where other filmmakers really tried to make them convincing. I think it was just part of, you know, Hitchcock’s maybe perversity that he just either didn’t care or he wanted the audience to be so invested in the emotional life of the actors that he wanted the background to be out of focus.” I always took the quality of the rear projections, to the extent it was not part of the technical limitations of the era, to be “ part of the artifice of the whole style that [Hitchcock] used in film.” The background conveys where the characters are, so, in one sense, a somewhat out-of-focus, not particularly convincing background, as long as it was not wildly implausible, was good enough. And, aside from _the audience_ being emotionally invested in the characters, it conveys how the characters themselves are focused _on each other, rather than on their surroundings.

[@tommoncrieff1154]

I disagree we don’t think of Hitchcock as an innovator. He’s one of the great innovators and most copied directors.

[@Skatakephalos7434]

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