Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn
by Alfred Hitchcock
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Actor: Cecil Parker, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Margaret Leighton, Michael WildingDirector: Alfred Hitchcock
Brand: Image Entertainment
Writer: Helen Simpson
Writer: Hume Cronyn
Writer: James Bridie
Writer: John Colton
Writer: Margaret Linden
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Color, Digital Sound, Dolby, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 117 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-06-17
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Image Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn
DVD Review: You could hear a pin drop
Summary: 5 Stars
The divergence of opinion among the reviewers regarding this film interests me - and reflects the changes the media itself has undergone, inspiring me to add my bit to the dialog here for what its worth. First, I confess to not having seen the DVD. I saw Under Capricorn about 20 years ago at the Nuart, a revival theatre in Los Angeles, where it played as the late night feature on a double-bill with Strangers on a Train to a packed house. The showing was memorable. By the middle of the film, the tension had absorbed the audience to the point where you could literally have heard a pin drop in there - as the cliche goes. The feeling was truly amazing - the energy was that of watching one of the great cinematic masterpieces - and Under Capricorn, great as it is - is hardly one of the greatest film masterpieces. Yet, many of the reviewers here would be surprised to know that a surprising number of the most respected critics consider this rather musty treasure from the golden age of Technicolor - 1945-55 - one of Hitchcock's greatest achievements!
Part of the problem is that the "action" in this "costume drama" hails from an age when the ne plus ultra in special effects was stuff like Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (and that was several years after the 1949 release of this film). There really is no viable action to speak of in the film - which, if films had academic subtitles, could be called: Under Capricorn: Hitch meets Henry James. Really, it is the Jamesian novel of film, before movies of James' novels came into vogue, although The Heiress, one of the most lauded and popular films of 1949, was Hollywood's first major adaptation of a James novel. One can see flashes of Under Capricorn in the more droll moments of the French New Wave cinema of the 1960's - many of whose makers were nursed on Hitchcock. But, calling this rather serious film merely slow-paced would be euphemistic. The film bombed at the box office back in 1949, and would probably not fare much better, if as well, today.
Then what exactly has earned this glorified and rather messy soap plaudits from the some of the most selective critics, an enduring cult following, and standing ovations at revival showings? Not the storyline, trite even for the melodramatic 1940s. Not the visuals. There's not a whole lot to commend Under Capricorn in any technical category. What is great, making the film appear larger than perhaps it is, is a surfeit of that elusive combination of awesome acting and on-screen chemistry (could it be that Hitch really was as great a director of actors as some have claimed?).
These actors don't need script or props - and, in truth, they don't get much of either, and yet - they cast a big-time spell.
The other reviewers have concentrated on the performances of the central characters - the beautiful, strained couple - played by Joseph Cotten, and the gorgeous Ingrid Bergman in one of her most fetching screen appearances - if her character, played the hilt, is seemingly somewhat vapid at heart. These seasoned pros are brilliant,and the subtlety of their portrayals, in which their characters show a truly lifelike, complete unconsciousness of what is going on around them, and their bittersweet devotion to each other, catalyzes the dramatic tension.
But center stage in this film belongs without doubt, to the moral battle as it evolves between protagonist and antagonist of the drama, played respectively by the magnificent Michael Wilding, in what must simply be called a larger than life performance, as "Aunt Clary's boy" who comes to Australia "to make his fortune", and the great British heavy, Margaret Leighton. And the action here, which does unfold - is moral. Under Capricorn is, in essence, an old fashioned morality play, as Wilding's character, urbane, polished in the deeper sense, puts on the `shining armor' of altruism and engages in a furious, yet utterly muted combat, with Leighton's. The latter flawlessly projects in probably less twenty minutes of screen time one of the great evils of the age, a character fueled entirely by envy, a desperate, nasty have-not, of little or no formal education, utterly lost in the fury of her blindly narrow, furtive, conditioned scheming. The escalation of the this conflict gives the film its noted ballast. As the moral extremes in us are played out against the usual banal, superficial, and prosaic social contexts, the ponderously crafted sets, the costumes are finally retired, and our real faces are revealed for what they are. As Wilding's character says to Bergman's in his incredible farewell scene: "I suppose I'll be the first man who ever went to Australia, not to return with a fortune", and she never will know how much he loved her, and how much he'd sacrificed. Sublime.
Description of Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn
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