Great B&W movies on Blu-ray! We can't get enough!
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Grant and Bergman: Notoriously good looking.
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We picked up a Blu-ray of Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) for a crazy low price on Ebay and we're thinking this one needs to move from our "Merely Great" list to the "Masterpiece" list.
The HD is mostly pretty good if unspectacular; it looks like it is a straight transfer from a decent 35mm print (the package says nothing about a restoration).
As for looking good, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman are both astonishing looking; Almost distracting in their visual appeal.
The box quotes Ebert: "The most elegant expression of the master's visual style."
Indeed.
To put it another way, you can watch this film w/ the sound off (we know, we tried it) and you will still follow the entire thing. Hitch tells the story w/ his actor's faces, carefully-planned closeups and precision camerawork and framing.
That is how movies are supposed to be made - film is, first and foremost, a visual medium.
And Hitch was the master.
Terrific movie.
(Sidenote: there does not seem to be a single [first unit] exterior shot in the film. Every exterior in which one can see the stars's faces is back projection. At least so far as we've noted. There's one wide shot right before they kiss for the first time, on the mountaintop, but it is such a wide shot the actors are certainly stand ins. Hitch was known for never shooting on location if he didn't have to -- immediately postwar and all, tight budgets, it looks like Hitch and his stars never left the studio!)
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