The late-night/early-morning spot for Cubs fans asks if you’re interested in free agent starter Max Scherzer
Welcome back to BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. We’re so glad you decided to stop by. Come in out of the cold. We can check your coat. There’s no cover charge this evening. The hostess will take you to your table. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week, I asked you about making a starter out of Nate Pearson. Or at least trying to. A clear majority of 68 percent thought that it was “worth a shot” to at least try. The rest of you feel Pearson should stay a reliever.
Here’s the part where we listen to music and talk movies. Our BCB Winter Hitchcock Classic is getting to the really good stuff now. But those of you who want to skip that can do so now. you won’t hurt my feelings.
Tonight we’re featuring guitarist Wes Montgomery perform five songs on Belgian television in 1965. Arthur Harper is on bass, Jimmy Lovelace on drums and Harold Mabern on piano. If you’re someone who loves great guitar playing in other genres, you owe it to yourself to check out Montgomery, who could play with anyone.
This clip has been colorized.
You voted in our BCB Winter Hitchcock Classic second-round matchup and sent 1955’s To Catch a Thief past Rope into the third round. It’s hard to argue against any film with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in it and To Catch a Thief is nothing if not a crowd pleaser. Rope is also a great picture and it has special historic significance, but even I admit that it’s a bit gimmicky. They’re still both great films.
The decisions are just getting harder from now on as we are really bringing in the films that are universally considered classics by Hitchcock. We have the film that many, including Hitchcock’s own daughter, claim was Hitchcock’s own favorite film, the 11-seed Shadow of a Doubt (1943). It faces off against the 6-seed, Notorious (1946), which filmmaker François Truffaut said in Hitchcock/Truffaut was Truffaut’s favorite Hitchcock movie.
Notorious (1946). Starring Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant and Claude Rains.
Alfred Hitchcock believed in stars. François Truffaut, in Hitchcock/Truffaut, argued that Hitchcock’s particular style of filmmaking required stars to work properly. No film in the Hitchcock canon has a better cast of stars than Notorious. In that sense, it’s the ultimate Hitchcock movie.
You really can’t divorce Notorious from the cast. Even though he seems like a natural for the part now, Hitchcock had to fight for Cary Grant as the male lead. David O. Selznick wanted Joseph Cotten for Devlin, whom he already had under contract and who had more experience in dramatic roles at the time. But Hitchcock wisely deferred to Selznick on the decision to cast Rains instead of Clifton Webb as Alexander Sebastian, the villain of the piece. In any case, Selznick decided that the plot of the story was too confusing (more on that later) so he sold the whole thing to RKO, Grant, Rains and all.
It’s funny that Selznick thought the plot of Notorious was too confusing because it’s really not all that complex. Ostensively a love triangle between Grant and Rains for Bergman’s affection, it’s really a story of a woman who is willing to sleep with the enemy as a spy for her country. Grant’s Devlin falls in love with her and becomes jealous and angry at her willingness to do this.
Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a traitor during World War II who became involved in a German spy ring. After her father’s conviction, Alicia embarks on a life of drunken debauchery until she’s recruited by Grant’s Devlin to use her father’s connections to infiltrate a German spy ring in South America.
The two of them fly off to Brazil together and while they wait for their assignment, Alicia and Devlin fall in love. But the assignment comes and Alicia is to seduce Sebastian, an old associate of her father’s who has quite the crush on her. Devlin is outraged by the thought his beloved would willingly sleep with another man, even in service to America. It gets worse as Sebastian decides he wants to marry Alicia. Devlin’s superiors are thrilled by this development. Devlin, not so much
What drove Selznick nuts about the plot of Notorious, according to Hitchcock, was the MacGuffin, which (Spoiler, I guess) was uranium stored in wine bottles. Hitchcock claimed that he had guessed the existence of the Manhattan Project and the use of uranium from pre-war articles. That’s certainly possible—he wouldn’t have been the only one although most of the others were scientists and journalists and not filmmakers. Hitchcock also claimed that the government followed him around for three months when they found out what he was working on to make sure that he didn’t actually know anything. In any case, Selznick didn’t understand uranium or the concept of an atomic bomb. Although Hitchcock assured him it was just the MacGuffin and was completely unimportant to the story, Selznick sold the film to RKO anyways.
As an aside, you have to think the oenophile Hitchcock loved making his MacGuffin a wine bottle more than the uranium aspect.
Rains was an inspired choice as Sebastian and he almost steals the picture. Rains’ Sebastian clearly cares for Alicia in his own way far more than Devlin does. He’s obsessed with her and insist upon marrying her over his mother’s (Leopoldine Konstantin) disapproval. But like Alicia, Sebastian puts duty (and self-preservation, to be honest) over love. Rains is absolutely terrific in the role, making his villain charismatic, relatable and sympathetic.
The only reason Rains doesn’t steal the picture is because Bergman turns in such an incredible performance as Alicia. She has to balance all kinds of emotions in this film. A daughter who loves her father but is ashamed that he’s a traitor. A woman who searches for redemption by becoming a spy, which leads her to fall in love with one man and marry another. Finally, she excels just having to play a woman dying by slow poison while the man she loves pushes her away.
Bergman and Rains are so good that you’re just amazed that Cary Grant gets relegated to third status here. Yes, he’s on screen more than Rains, but his part just doesn’t offer as much meat as the other two. Grant’s Devlin recruits a woman he believes to be a tramp to be a spy for the government. He falls in love with said tramp and then when she’s assigned to seduce another man, he thinks she’s a tramp again for doing her job. Grant is good, he could hardly be otherwise, and he especially shines towards the end when he realizes he may have made a mistake about Alicia. But it’s a testament to how good this cast is that Cary Grant may be the third-best thing about it.
Konstantin deserves special mention for her portray of Rains’ imperious and cold-blooded mother. She had been a stage and silent screen actress in Germany and Notorious was her only English-language performance. (She was also only three years older than Rains.) The film even has the great character actor Louis Calhern as Devlin’s superior.
Despite Selznick’s confusion on understanding the plot of Notorious, it’s actually pretty straightforward. Hitchcock wisely keeps the focus of the film on the dilemma of love versus duty. Unlike most spy films of the day, the action is kept to a minimum. Hitchcock noted that real spies don’t call attention to themselves. The tension is effectively subtle.
Truffaut called Notorious his favorite Hitchcock movie. It’s not hard to understand why. Its plot is simple but it has a lot of emotional depth. And above all, it has that cast.
Here’s the trailer for Notorious.
As a bonus, here is a fascinating video on the technical issues of one of the most famous shots of Notorious. It actually could apply to a lot of different Hitchcock films of the period.
Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Starring Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten.
Shadow of a Doubt may not have the name cast that Notorious has, but it does have a truly great cast as well. Wright and Cotten were great actors who turn in two terrific performances here. Honestly, I can see Wright and Cotten more easily in Notorious than I could see Bergman and Grant in Shadow of a Doubt. (Bergman would be horribly miscast as an all-American girl and the audience wouldn’t accept Grant as a serial killer.)
Here’s most of what I wrote last time about Shadow of a Doubt.
Shadow of a Doubt is often called Hitchcock’s first truly “American” film. Hitchcock was a huge fan of playwright Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and its portrait of small-town American life. If you’re American, the odds are you read or saw Our Town in school. So Hitchcock was overjoyed when Wilder agreed to write a script with him and he found Wilder a delight to work with. The result of their work is the two great dramatists meeting in the middle. Shadow of a Doubt is basically what if a serial killer came to Grover’s Corners.
Shadow of a Doubt revolves around two people named Charlie. One is played by Joseph Cotten, whom we first meet in a rundown boarding house in New Jersey. He’s got a suspicious collection of money and jewels and two suspicious men out front asking about him. He evades the two men and telegraphs his older sister in Santa Rosa, California, that he’s going to come out for a visit. Presumably to hide from these two men.
The other Charlie is Charlotte “Charlie” Newton, played by Teresa Wright. Charlie was named after her uncle and she idolizes him as the fun and exciting member of the family. She’s bored with small-town life and wishes her uncle would come and visit her. So it’s a fortunate coincidence for both of them.
As it turns out, the two men following Uncle Charlie are police detectives who suspect him of being the “Merry Widow Killer” who befriends elderly widows, murders them and runs off with their money and jewels. (Although there is a second, unnamed suspect.) But Charlie’s family suspects none of that, even when Uncle Charlie arrives bearing expensive gifts for the whole family.
While Charlie is initially overjoyed that her Uncle Charlie has come to visit, eventually the two detectives get to Santa Rosa and start to sniff around. When Charlie finds out what Uncle Charlie is suspected of, she doesn’t believe it. But eventually, the clues start to add up that Uncle Charlie is not what he seems.
There are two really great performances at the heart of Shadow of a Doubt from the two Charlies. Cotten rarely played heavies, but here he is perfect as the charming psychopath. Cotten puts a coldness in his voice so that even when Uncle Charlie is smiling and being kind, there’s this odd sense that something is terribly wrong with him. And Cotten has to take Uncle Charlie’s demeanor from friendly to sinister in a second when he suspects that Charlie knows more than she’s revealing.
Wright has the even more demanding role and plays it just as skillfully. While she’s technically an adult at the start of the film, her character is really that of a bubbly innocent teenager. As she begins to suspect more and more about her Uncle Charlie, she loses her innocence, turns darker and just has to grow up quickly. She’s clearly a jaded, cynical adult by the time the film ends.
Hitchcock really wanted to recreate small-town family life in Shadow of a Doubt, so he gives Charlie a big family life with a mother, father and siblings. Her younger sister Ann is a precocious nine-year old bookworm who knows everything in town and immediately senses that there is something off about Uncle Charlie. Charlie’s mother adores her younger brother as much as Charlie does and longs for her simple childhood in Minnesota with her younger brother—a nostalgia that Uncle Charlie does not share for unspoken reasons.
No Hitchcock thriller is really complete without some dark humor and Shadow of a Doubt reaches that with Charlie’s father Joseph (Henry Travers) and his brother-in-law Herbie (Hume Cronyn). Joseph and Herbie are detective novel fans and spend every evening discussing how to get away with murdering the other one—all the while a possible serial killer is having dinner at Joseph’s table.
Hitchcock picked Santa Rosa to set the film because at the time, it was still a small town of about thirteen-thousand people. It is also in the middle of California wine country and Hitchcock fully took advantage of the wineries every night after work was done. (That may be one of the reasons it was Hitchcock’s favorite.) Hitchcock put away his aversion to shooting on location to film the whole movie in Santa Rosa, although some re-shoots were done on sound stages in Hollywood.
Santa Rosa becomes as much a part of the film as any of the other characters. The shot of Uncle Charlie’s train arriving at the Santa Rosa depot billowing black smoke everywhere is a metaphor for the snake that has been let loose in this small-town Garden of Eden. It sets the tone for everything that follows. . .
Shadow of a Doubt . . . [is] a terrific portrait of evil comes to a small town and a duel between the good Charlie and the evil Charlie.
Here’s the trailer for a re-release of Shadow of a Doubt.
Now it’s time to vote.
Notorious is available for rent, or there’s a few copies floating on the internet, including this one on YouTube. (I found that particular one to be the highest quality transfer. But there are others.)
Shadow of a Doubt is on Criterion and something called Darkroom for free with ads and registration. (I can’t vouch for that service. I’ve never heard of it before. It does appear legit.) Shadow of a Doubt is also available for rent from the usual suspects.
You have until Wednesday to vote.
The choices just get harder from now on as two murder stories face off next—Strangers on a Train (1951) takes on Frenzy (1972).
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
The Cubs are widely believed to want to add one more starting pitcher before the start of Spring Training. I have no doubt that Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki would be their first choice, but I have no idea how likely that is and I suspect the Cubs front office doesn’t either.
The Cubs have also recently been connected to free agent starter Jack Flaherty, who is the best starter left on the free agent market. Flaherty seems to be waiting to market himself to teams that miss out on Sasaki, so he may not sign for a while. He may also command more years and salary than the Cubs would want to give him as there will be 29 teams that don’t land Sasaki. (Although it is rumored that only seven teams, including the Cubs, are still “in” on Sasaki.)
So what might Plan C look like if the Cubs fail to land Sasaki or Flaherty? In this article by Gabe Lacques, he suggests that the Cubs sign future Hall-of-Famer Max Scherzer. So let’s discuss Max Scherzer.
I don’t think there’s much doubt that Scherzer is heading for Cooperstown one day. He’s a three-time Cy Young Award winner and one of the best pitchers in baseball during the teens. He’s won World Series titles with the Nationals in 2019 and the Rangers in 2023.
Of course, the reason why teams aren’t jumping to sign Scherzer is that he’s 40 years old and was injured for most of last season. He started last season on the injured list recovering from back surgery. After he came back, he made eight starts before getting sidelined with arm fatigue. He returned to the Rangers in September only to make one start before going on the IL with a hamstring strain. Age is undefeated, man.
The good news is that at 40 and coming off an injury, Scherzer is likely to sign a one-year deal for a reasonable amount of money. The other thing to remember is that prior to last season, Scherzer has been remarkably healthy throughout his career. He’s thrown at least 170 innings every year from 2009 to 2019. He was also healthy in the abbreviated 2020 season and then turned around to throw at least 145 innings in 2021 to 2023. So while Scherzer may not be the same machine that he once was, I don’t think it’s fair to assume that he just broke overnight when he turned 39. You can’t expect 200 innings out of him anymore, but you can’t expect 200 innings out of anyone anymore.
Scherzer was also reasonably effective when he did pitch last year. His velocity was down a bit, but it’s hard to say whether that was age-related decline or just him never getting into a groove with all those injuries. His velocity was only down a touch in 2023 over his career norms.
Scherzer has been compared often to Randy Johnson, and Johnson had several solid seasons after he turned 40. (He also had one bad one, although he recovered from that for a few seasons before his final season at the age of 45 was also not good.) But at the age of 40, Johnson led the league in bWAR and finished second in Cy Young Award balloting after a poor, injury-filled age 39 season. So it’s not unheard of for an aging Hall of Fame fireballer to still be good at 40.
Even if Scherzer’s days as a Cy Young-winner are long gone, the Cubs would love to have his 2023 season when he had a bWAR of 3.2. Especially on an affordable one-year deal—and the general assumption is that Scherzer will take a one-year deal.
On the downside, Scherzer is a risk. It’s possible that whoever signs him for one-year and $20 million just tosses away $20 million. If you think he’s done, he’s done. But while he was injured for much of 2024 and he certainly isn’t the dominating ace like he used to be, when Scherzer did pitch last year, he was solid. And he was more than solid when healthy in 2022 and 2023.
So what do you think about the Cubs signing Max Scherzer? Jon Heyman is reporting that four teams are “in” on him at the moment although he doesn’t say what those four teams are. The Cubs certainly could be one of them.
I don’t know if Scherzer is going to wait until Sasaki makes up his mind to sign. I suspect not. So while this question assumes that Scherzer would be a backup plan to Sasaki and possibly Flaherty, I don’t think Scherzer can be a true backup plan because of that. But for anyone voting “yay,” I assume that your interest would change if the Cubs thought they were going to get Sasaki. And we’ll take your vote that way.
So should the Cubs try to sign Max Scherzer to a one-year deal?
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