Under Capricorn

Hi Aki,

Technicolor, postwar: Alfred Hitchcock directs. Historical tale set in australia in mid-1800s. Think of Gaslight meets Rebecca.

It would have been much better in black and white. Hitchcock begins in this film (which most accounts call a failure) his experiments with long takes. The camera movements are a bit unsteady; these are exactly the shots that directors would use so much later on, after the steadicam was invented. I think this is more watchable than Rope, the more famous follow-up to this movie, where the whole film is one 11-minute shot after another.

One problem with both films is how much of the script is talk. Talk, talk, talk – when the actors and the cameramen are under a great strain to get everything right for 6 or more minutes at a time, the actors aren’t at their best, and it really shows in Rope – I’ve seen interviews with the actors from Rope where they said how nervous and tight they felt toward the end of each take, dreading lest anything should go wrong and spoil it all, and not really acting, just trying their best not to fuck up.

As for Capricorn I’ve read that in some scenes, in order to move the camera from room to room (because the dolly/camera or crane was so big) they had to crane the walls of the set up out of the way. In addition, the floors of the stages creaked under the weight. So several long take scenes had to be totally dubbed over.

The story: young Charlie Adair an Irish wastrel, but of good family, goes with his uncle who is the new Governor of Australia. There Charlie wants to make his fortune, but he falls in with Sam Flusky, or Plusky, or something. Sam is a former convict who is now a rich man and invites Charlie to his house. There Charlie meets Mrs Sam, Hattie – by a coincidence Charlie knows her from their childhood. She was also from a great family, but she followed Sam, her family’s groom and stableboy, out here and married him. It was a great scandal and now, to his horror, Charlie finds Hattie is an alcoholic. There is also a devoted housekeeper who runs the estate – and she is in love with Sam though he doesn’t even see it. This is Millie, who supplies Hattie with bottles of wine.

Charlie dedicates himself to curing Hattie, and Sam, who still loves Hattie, encourages him in this. But as Charlie begins to succeed, Sam grows jealous – Millie makes him more jealous, and Sam begins to suspect that there’s more going on than just a cure. It all comes to a head one stormy night when Hattie tells Charlie she can’t go away with him, because the murder for which Sam was convicted was actually her doing – she and Sam had eloped, and the morning after their wedding night her brother came in with a gun, to kill Hattie to save the family honor. Sam got in the way and happened to have a gun, and Hattie reached around and fired the gun at her brother, killing him.

Sam finds Hattie and Charlie close together telling these tales, and suspects the worst, and in a fight there is a gun, it goes off, Charlie is wounded and almost dies.

Sam is charged with attempted murder. A second conviction here means either death or a life sentence back on hard labor. Hattie confesses to the original murder to save Sam, but this means she is charged with murder and must ship back to ireland to stand charges.

However, Millie is driven nuts when she hears Sam say that he will sell the estate and go back to ireland to help Hattie, and she tries to kill Hattie. Hattie stops her, and Sam sees the truth about Millie.

Now Sam refuses to give evidence against Hattie for the first murder, and the authorities charge him with the assault on Charlie, and take him off to prison. But Charlie leaves the hospital and makes it to the governor and is able to swear that the wound was only an accident. He, Charlie, is sent back to ireland in some disgrace for all this, but Sam is free, and Millie is gone, and Hattie is happy with Sam, the end.

The story really calls for a more bitter end. This is the sort of story where demanding a happy ending actually weakens our response. Better tears than this weak teabag of an end.

And as I say, the nightmares of drunk Hattie (which turn out to be engineered in part by Millie) are better shot in black and white with great looming shadows, and crisp deep focus photography. Shooting technicolor means lots and lots of lights, and even then the depth of field is shallow. Shadows are all washed out. But warners (who distributed for the ‘Transatlantic Pictures Company’) obviously thought that a historical epic was good escapist fare that called for beautiful gowns and color.

One interesting bit of casting, joseph cotton is the irish groom convict millionnaire Sam. there’s hardly a bit of an irish accent, most of them are british of various classes. But putting an American in there as the low-class groom was a good choice because the different accent works to American ears. We think any british accent is better, of a higher class, than an American accent. So Sam’s complaints about the upper class would have struck a chord among the American audiences.

Ingrid bergman played Hattie, with her swedish accent, but it didn’t bother me too much. She had been bedeviled and driven half-mad by charles boyer in the earlier thriller Gaslight, and Hitchcock had directed the oscar best picture rebecca, about another woman in big house driven half mad, and creepy housekeeper, so that was another natural choice in casting the crew.

I think the movie cost a lot of money and didn’t make it back, or only a little bit.

If Hitchcock called Shadow of a Doubt his favorite American picture, he probably hated the Paradine Case most – in that one producer David Selznick called the shots and Hitchcock just executed, bored and angry. But I bet Hitchcock disliked this one also. I wonder if he came up with the long take business just to amuse and interest him because he didn’t like the story much?

Hitchcock had a long history of experimentation with technique. Since he did more long-take nonsense a year or so later with Rope, either he liked it or, more likely, considered Capricorn’s techniques unsatisfactory, but worth trying again to see if he could do better. Like I say, I like the long takes in Capricorn better because

• they take us often room to room, so there is more a sense of variety even within the one long take

• the long takes are mixed up with scenes with cutting.

In Rope everything is a long take after the first 5 shots or so. And everything is in one room or two, side by side, rooms (it’s a party) and so it seems quite stagy, like watching a film of a play. And the performances are uneven because of the strain I mentioned all the cast felt under. There really is endless talk, talk, in Rope, and the actors had to remember and deliver all the long speeches for 11 minutes at a time, as well as hit their marks. And the camera crew had to hit all their marks, for the camera is moving, moving, and the sound crew had to get it right too – though as you know sound can always be looped in later.

I think Hattie should run away with Charlie and Sam run away with Millie!!

Two reasons why that’s not going to happen in the movie:

1. Censors!

2. Sam and Hattie really do love each other. Underneath it all. They can never live without each other. Well this is what they give us as an excuse to keep them together, because the censors won’t let adulterers get away with it.

The irony here is that it’s only a year or so later that Ingrid Bergman has an affair with Roberto Rossellini and gets pregnant, and lives with him, abandoning her husband. She couldn’t get another acting job after that and had to leave the country. That baby was Isabella Rossellini. And it was Jean Renoir a few years later who gave Ingrid a part in I think Elena et Ses Hommes or some such title. This was enough of a success that she was able to make a comeback, first starring with Cary Grant in Indiscreet for Stanley Donen, or some such, made I think in London, and finally Hollywood forgave her.

But…who’s the main character of the movie?

Definitely from the script, it’s Charlie’s movie. But Charlie was played by Michael Wilding, and he was not a star. Joseph Cotten and Ingrid bergman were stars, and the emotional heart of the movie lies with Ingrid, a drunk, ashamed of herself, trying to get better but despairing she ever will, too ready to give up, then managing almost to pull it off before she sinks into depression and drunkenness again – the sort of role that actors love, and that win Oscars.

(written around 25 February 2009)