Thrillers, Hitchcock Style

The older films come from the early collaborations between Alfred Hitchcock and producer David O. Selznick - Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), and The Paradine Case (1947).

As is always the case with Anchor Bay editions, the tapes have been beautifully mastered from pristine negatives and since these were not made for a wide theatrical screen, they fit the video image ratio without losing anything. If they're not Hitchcock's best work, they're still well worth seeing, particularly by fans who might have missed them.

Rebecca is actually the only one of Hitch's films to win a Best-Picture Academy Award, though the statue went to producer Selznick. (Hitchcock himself never won an Oscar.) The film may be his most lavish black and white effort with memorable sets, Franz Waxman score and Oscar-winning photography by George Barnes. Laurence Olivier is suitably grim and haughty as Maxim deWinter, wealthy widower of the titular Rebecca, a femme so fatale she wore "underwear made by nuns." Joan Fontaine is mousily gorgeous as the nameless heroine who becomes Cinderella to Maxim's Prince not-so-Charming. Both of them are overshadowed by Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers, one of the screen's most memorable villains. All three were nominated for Oscars.

For many Hitchcock fans, The Paradine Case is the odd film they've somehow never managed to see, and that's easy to understand. It is perhaps the most windy and boring of all his work. Perhaps because his wife was involved with the script, he was reluctant to make the cuts and changes that might have made the courtroom drama more suspenseful. Gregory Peck plays a British lawyer who inexplicably falls for a client (Alida Valli) accused of bumping off her hubby.

Notorious is much more successful and, accordingly, more familiar. Cary Grant is Devlin, the spymaster who recruits Alicia (Ingrid Bergman), then falls in love with her before she sets out to seduce Sebastian (Claude Rains), a Nazi in Brazil. One of Hitchcock's more emotionally complex thrillers.

Ignore the breathless and totally illogical psychological underpinnings of Ben Hecht's script for Spellbound. Appreciate instead the fun everyone is having with it. Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, at her most stunning, are the lovers out to solve a baffling murder which he appears to have committed, if only he could remember it.

The new black and white film is Craig Ross Jr.'s Cappuccino, a somewhat predictable noirish thriller. Victor Erickson (James Black) is a freelance writer who's having marital problems with his wife Vanessa (Angelle Brooks) when he meets a woman (Jennifer Lee) who calls herself Cappuccino. She puts some unsubtle moves on him; one thing leads to another...

The premise and the racial makeup of the cast are reminiscent of the recent sleeper, Caught Up, but this one is much rougher. Both the writing and the acting are uneven, and one continuity error pops up in a key scene, but I still recommend the film to fellow noir fans. A certain lack of refinement is not a big deal to us, particularly when it's offset by energy and enthusiasm. Writer-director Ross, who appears in the last scene, tends to keep his camera close to his characters giving the action a claustrophobic immediacy that suits the story.

The Essentials: