Last night, I watched Under Capricorn for the second time. The first time, decades ago, involved a cruddy VHS tape that did nothing to argue against the movie’s reputation as one of Hitchcock’s big flops. This time, I was watching a DVD that, while not claiming to be the product of serious restoration, was as agreeable, printwise, as any new movie. I enjoyed it. This enjoyment had a strong “meta” quality to it; I should not recommend Under Capricorn to anyone except, perhaps, fans of melodrama, because that’s what Under Capricorn is — and that’s why Hitchcock aficionados dislike it so much. To the true admirer of Hitchcock, his aficionados tend to reduce him to a genre filmmaker, and to scold him when he fails to produce a “Hitchcock” movie. They’re like the the fans who like Woody Allen’s “earlier, funnier” pictures. Hitchcock and Allen are, however, such consummate auteurs that even the movies that fail to thrill cannot be dismissed as failures, because each is an interesting experiment.

Under Capricorn was the second of two pictures inspired by some itch of Hitchcock’s to claim the power of stage performances for the movies. A master of montage, Hitchcock set this mastery aside for Rope and Under Capricorn, indulging instead in prolonged takes. Under Capricorn is the less rigorous experiment; in addition to its long scenes, there are plenty of conventional shots/countershots, the most basic grammar of filmed dialogue. But the camera covers much more ground in Under Capricorn, following characters through doorways and up climbing vines. To make this happen, sets had to be constructed to fly apart at the camera’s advance, and the mechanical noise of the production was such that almost all dialogue had to be re-recorded directly after filming. These technical challenges were Hitchcock’s principle interest in the making of Under Capricorn, and if the resulting film is short on appeal, it is nevertheless an indispensable rehearsal of techniques that would make Rear Window the astounding (and very dramatic) success that it is.

In any case, it is not the sophisticated camera work that makes Under Capricorn unpopular. It is the form of the story, which dates from the previous century, when “suspense” was a feature of “melodrama,” much like romantic scenery and bad weather. Hitchcock became famous for reversing this relationship: he expressed drama in terms of suspense. Suspense is a function of the asymmetry of information. The audience knows something that a character does not — but this is not to say that the audience knows everything. In Vertigo, for example, we learn that Judy Barton was impersonating Madeleine Elster long before Scottie Ferguson does, but this just changes the nature of our suspense, for now what we don’t know is how Scottie is going to respond when he finds out — not to mention the consequences of this response. No one has ever surpassed Hitchcock’s agility at shuffling the asymmetries while never allowing the tension dissipate. Nineteenth-century melodrama, however, used suspense to punctuate “dramatic” scenes, as in “drama” as it’s used by young people today. A better word would be “emotional.” When Devlin rescues Alicia from her bedridden imprisonment at the end of Notorious, the love scene in the foreground is quite conventionally melodramatic in structure (if cooled down to modern temperatures by Cary Grant), but it remains firmly encased in a format of suspense, because the resolution of the romantic confusion between the lovers simply releases us to worry all the more about how they’re going to get out of the house, and it’s that clever escape that we really remember. There are no such escapes in Under Capricorn.

Interestingly, Hitchcock forwent a signal opportunity for suspense in Under Capricorn by opting for its opposite, surprise, at the dénouement. Complete surprises are rare in Hitchcock. (Max de Winter’s confession that he hated Rebecca is the most successful.) He could not help himself from spoiling this one by heavily foreshadowing, in the most melodramatic ways, the evil designs of Milly, the housekeeper so wonderfully acted by Margaret Leighton. Leighton is great fun to watch; she does everything but wink at the audience while she pours honeyed lies into her employer’s ear. We know that she’s up to no good, but this is expectation, not suspense. We don’t know until the moment of surprise that she has been poisoning Lady Hattie and torturing her by placing shrunken heads under the bedclothes. And because of all that foreshadowing, we’re not really surprised. So it’s a double letdown. We didn’t know what the troubled Flusky couple was going to discover, and we aren’t all that shocked when we find out. The miscalculation is colossal, but it is colossally instructive.

Ingrid Bergman’s face is one of cinema’s icons, thanks largely to the photography in Casablanca, which inspired the saying that “the camera loved her.” As a generation of theatre actors had to find out during the early years of film, camera-love is the most understated kind of love in the world — the better to make room for the flood of audience-love. Every word that an actor speaks costs him an iota of his appeal, because it marks his distance from the viewer who seeks only to meld with him. This is why film killed talky melodramas. In a stage performance, it is very exciting to watch two characters go after each other with hammer and tongs; that’s why Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is revived so often. On film, such excess is embarrassing, not powerful. (The Mike Nichols film of the play succeeds as a reality show: it’s understood that we’re witnessing scenes from the Taylor-Burton marriage, not a play.) Narration belongs to the camera, not to the character.

In Under Capricorn, Ingrid Bergman, at the center of the longest scene in the film, circles a long dining-room table and tells the story of Lady Hattie’s love affair with and marriage to a groom in her father’s stables, Sam Flusky (played by Joseph Cotten, who does not appear in this scene). At one point, she stands beyond her costar, Michael Wilding (playing Hattie’s childhood friend, Adare), and raises her hands in a gesticulation of looking into beautiful distances; the composition is as camp as Canova. Bergman is unsuited for the business, but it’s hard to think of anyone who might have carried it off. Again, however, the mistake is enlightening. And it doesn’t make us forget how radiant Bergman is at the Governor’s ball, in the immediately preceding scene. Aside from the arm-waving, she is always lovely and sympathetic.

What I found genuinely annoying about Under Capricorn was the soundtrack. I haven’t come across any other complaints about Richard Addinsell’s score, but it’s wrong in at least two ways. First, there probably oughtn’t to be background music at all — just as there isn’t in Rope. Stage plays don’t have background music — not during the action, anyway. If you want to know why, just watch Under Capricorn. All the dramatic encounters are underlined by background music. Worse, it is a very simpering kind of music, a blarney of Irish-sounding motifs that makes one wonder if someone thought that Under Capricorn could be saved by making it sound like Gone With the Wind. If the film is ever restored, I hope that the disc offers the option of blocking this music.

Patrick McGilligan writes that such humor as can be found in Under Capricorn owes to Michael Wilding’s performance, but, I say, let’s not overlook Cecil Parker, a great English character actor who probably wouldn’t have appeared in this film if it had been made in Hollywood and not at Elstree. Parker plays the Governor of Australia, newly appointed at the beginning of the film (Wilding’s Adare is his black-sheep cousin, brought along in family desperation), and he invests his role with an irresolute pomposity that suggests Margaret Rutherford and Marion Lorne. The leathers and the feathers of his imperial get-up make his fatuousness funny to watch.

There is a wonderful Sargent painting at the Museum that I like to take visitors to see, Alpine Pool. If you stand back, you see a pool of clear water and the rocks at its bottom. As you walk up to the painting very slowly, there comes a moment when the whole picture breaks down into an assemblage of abstract brush-strokes. Come closer, and you will see “how it is done” — how Sargent works the illusion. Watching Hitchcock’s movies offers a similarly bracing shock, although it works over time, not distance. As you watch them, he teaches you how to watch them, and he gradually empties your head of expectations as you learn to trust that, whatever he does, it will be interesting on the how-to level.

***

As long as we’re talking about melodrama, permit me to repeat my judgment of Gone With the Wind: it is a screwball comedy embalmed in a battlefield epic. I’ll take Mr and Mrs Smith any day.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, August 2nd, 2013 at 12:10 pm.