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Rope or Transportation? Was it Hitchcock's lugubrious humour or just coincidence that his two self-produced pictures of 1948 - 49 evoked punishments? The American-made Rope of 1948 - a queer, experimental film of murder for kicks - more or less broke even at the box-office, even though it was so far ahead of its time that no one had the vocabulary to encompass its perversities. In the second of his Transatlantic pictures, filmed entirely on English studio sets, Hitchcock transported his audience to an imagined Australia of 1831. Under Capricorn, released in 1949, failed so disastrously that his short-lived company went bust and the film became the property of the bank which had partly financed it. For years it was among the most difficult of Hitchcock's films to see and such English-language reviews as existed were so unenthusiastic that it may not have seemed much of a loss, except to the completist. But that was not the whole story and elsewhere the film had been acclaimed.
The French New Wave was born in the postwar years when a backlog of American movies hit the screens of Paris and went straight to the heads of young critics. 1951 saw the very first issue of the Cahiers du Cinéma and in it an article by Alexandre Astruc acclaimed Under Capricorn as giving an intelligent and restrained treatment to its theme, which he believed to be the mystery of the human personality. Praise for the film continued later that year when Eric Rohmer chose it as among the films most worthy to be considered the successors to the nineteenth century novel in its explorations of life's fundamental dualities. The memory lingered on and in his conversations with Hitchcock in 1967, François Truffaut prefaces each of his questions about it with some very warm remarks:
"A positive step in your evolution . . . Many of your admirers regard it as your very best work . . . The dialogue was quite poetic . . . if Under Capricorn wasn't a good movie, it was certainly a beautiful one . . . The picture is so romantic that it's surprising it wasn't more of a commercial hit . . . The casting was perfect and the acting was first-rate . . . It is clear you believed in it, that you like the story - just as you believed in Vertigo."
In his replies, Hitchcock made a succession of mainly negative points:
• Long takes were excusable in Rope but in Under Capricorn they just emphasized that the picture wasn't a thriller.
• He had no special admiration for the novel and the reason for making the film was Bergman: it was a woman's story.
• It was a tremendous feat to get Bergman when she was so in demand in Hollywood.
• Hume Cronyn was an inexperienced scriptwriter and James Bridie was a semi-intellectual playwright.
• When a director was uncertain, he should settle for the tried and tested or look for the point at which he got lost.
• He had invested a lot of enthusiasm into the picture; it was a pity it did not amount to anything.
• Joseph Cotten was not right as Sam - his first choice, Burt Lancaster, would have been better.
• It was a humourless costume picture that just wasn't right for him.
Hitchcock's comments were made when he was licking his wounds from a new round of critical attack and needed to give the impression of having learned from his mistakes. At this point in his career between making two of his worst movies, Torn Curtain and Topaz, he was clearly no longer blowing the trumpet for Under Capricorn, in which he now had no financial stake. It was clear that the entire experience had been a bitter disappointment but buried in those comments is the admission that he had invested a lot of enthusiasm in this work. Whatever its failings, it is a very personal work and it is notable that Hitchcock only evoked notions of films as collaborative ventures when they failed.
Writing in the seventies, David Thomson was able to say, mainly on the strength of Bergman's performance, that the film now looked to be a masterpiece. After a long and mainly negative introduction, his article on Hitchcock names it third in a list of pictures about which he has positive things to say. Yet, by that time, only the most indefatigable cinéastes were likely to see it.
If we stumbled across Under Capricorn on television, unheralded in the schedules, we would recognize Bergman, Cotten and Wilding so we might stay with it, intrigued by what is clearly a lavish, if studio-bound production. Yet, supposing we had missed the credits, would we detect the presence of Alfred Hitchcock as director? Coming to it with his name as the attraction, it would certainly disappoint viewers who expected thrills and suspense, especially since Hitchcock's own cameos are easy to miss and his fingerprints need a detective eye. Now, in 2006, a visually good print has been shown by the BBC and a DVD version has been released, it may be time for a reassessment of one of Hitchcock's biggest flops, and to see how it could ever have been considered among the greatest films ever made.
Since its abject failure at the box-office and the consequent collapse of Transatlantic Pictures, paper ownership of Under Capricorn fell into the hands of bankers, who were not well placed to exploit this kind of property. While Rope was bought by Universal, Under Capricorn was seen as uncommercial and languished for some years. Aside from occasional revivals at repertory cinemas, it has not been easy to see, especially in Europe. Though originally released through Warners, it has been seized on by Public Domain opportunists for DVD issue. A restored version has been made but the existence of PD versions may continue to make it an uncertain commercial proposition.
Rope and Under Capricorn were twin projects from the same production company, though born on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Rope was a disconcerting film for the late nineteen forties, but its lack of female interest and obsessive concern with technique make it the masculine twin, however dubious its sexuality. Under Capricorn is romantic, has two competing women at its heart and three or four variously foolish men around them; it was certainly conceived as a women's picture. The horrific strangulation at the start of Rope does seem to emphasize that the two films were intended for different audiences and that Hitchcock was serving notice that outside the studio system anything was possible. Yet there are some curious similarities in that both films revolve around food and its preparation: Rope is entirely about an awkward supper party, while Under Capricorn features another. Both have important housekeeper figures. Both obsessively explore a supposedly real space. Both take place effectively in glass houses, at twilight and are essentially talk-pieces.
Its unsatisfactory aspects had better be stated early on: this film has serious structural problems, flawed characters who exhibit obscure changes of mind and an unconvincing happy ending. The studio-bound opulence seems redolent of empty melodrama and when fairy-tale material breaks through the crust and floods onto the surface, it can seem a humourless pantomime. This mythic material does not seem fully digested; Hitchcock has not fully succeeded in making it his own as he was to do in later psychological studies such as Marnie and Vertigo. The exact reasons for the fault-lines in the piece must await a full history of the script's evolution. There were many hands involved but the result was not exactly a light work: the film sets out grimly as a strongly political drama, then the realpolitik is undermined at a crucial point by a regression to fairy-tale. I will suggest that the film's problems arise from its source in a comedic novel and the drastic adjustment of that source to suit the new relations between company, director and star which emerged with the eclipse of the studio system.
The echoes of Rebecca and Notorious from Hitchcock's Selznick years are obvious in the figures of the wicked housekeeper and the drunken Bergman. In Notorious she also begins as a drunk and ends by being nearly poisoned. Names also carry playful echoes of earlier works: Bergman refers to Wilding as Young Charlie, reminding us that Cotten had been Old Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt. The name of Winter and Charles's comment to Sam when Milly leaves that he will get on without her like a house on fire seem like sly references to Manderley. The coachman refuses the hospitality of the tainted house reminding us of Jamaica Inn or the fearful locals in Dracula. These multiple echoes make Under Capricorn an interesting case. From the Bible to Alice in Wonderland, it also draws on many literary sources. Since audiences have not really known what to make of Under Capricorn, they have seized on these echoes as evidence that it is an entirely weak and derivative work.
Disappointing more than it intrigued, audiences have never found the oddness of Under Capricorn appealing. The romance was lukewarm, the characters far from admirable and the most exciting events remained off-stage. It was a costume-picture but it came labelled as a Hitchcock film and, in a popular medium, it was assumed that it had aimed to do popular things and fallen short. The work does suffer from uncertainties which may reflect the number of hands in the script. It is a studio-bound affair made under difficult conditions with a temperamental leading lady. Nobody was likely at the time to scrutinize it for very long. I shall argue that in fact it is a subtle comedy of inversions, though with heavy themes such as alcoholism, murder and adultery, it is hard for the ironic tone to lift it off the ground. Hitchcock himself would move on. Having failed in independent production, he returned to Warner Brothers - a path previously trodden by James Cagney.
By the end of 1949, Bergman herself became notorious for her affair with Rossellini and the Legion of Decency encouraged the boycott of her films. It is doubtful how much real impact this had on the film's reception but the storm which broke around the star was symptomatic of the postwar advocacy of traditional rôles for women on and off the screen. A straw in the wind, perhaps, but McCarthyism was on the horizon. Under Capricorn was born on the cusp and betrays its troubled conception. Its broken surface means it does not reflect Hitchcock in the round but there are sharp edges to its details which we can relate to the more perfect works. More of a hologram than a mirror, it is a pity the thing is broken but the advanced techniques Hitchcock used in this work were supposed to reveal a new kind of reality.
Like Beethoven, Hitchcock has been saddled with a reputation for the horrid-sublime. Having stormed the heavens with the Eroica and Fifth Symphonies, audiences are at something of a loss when confronted by Beethoven's Eighth. Does it misfire completely? Is it a throwback pure and simple? Or is it aiming at something we haven't yet fully understood? Hitchcock did not become established as The Master of Suspense until his thrillers of the thirties. It is in hindsight that works such as The Lodger, Blackmail and Murder seem particularly personal. Except by specialists, the rest are seen as less interesting, since comedy, romance and melodrama date faster that murder and suspense. But Hitchcock went on to punctuate his career with works which frustrated the expectations of audiences who thought they knew him. If we leave aside the silents, then Juno and The Paycock, The Skin Game, Rich and Strange, Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, Mr and Mrs Smith, Under Capricorn, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry and Marnie are not thrillers and if we count substantial parts of other movies we could say that about a third of Hitchcock's output are The Others, those even-numbered symphonies which do not attempt the sublime or the horrid. Like Dickens' fat boy, Hitch. had ambitions to make our flesh creep but audiences were actually far more disconcerted by the romantic and feminine side of his nature.
In a collaborative art like film-making, we can at least attribute the flaws in a piece to the circumstances of its conception. There are therefore quite a few Hitchcock movies which were born the wrong side of the blanket and which exist mainly to trouble the consciences of completists, who hope in a Christian manner that the weak should inherit at least something of the reflected glory of their brethren. Just as we might suggest that the Pastoral Symphony carries all the implied threat of The Noble Savage, we can explain Hitchcock's unloved bastards as possessing interesting inverted forms of the characteristics we originally hoped to find in them pure.
In Hitchcock's earlier work, we have in The Skin Game a tale of social ostracism based on class and sexual scandal, in Rich and Strange, a tale of how elegant society and social mobility beckon a couple only to leave them shipwrecked. It has been said that with his American pictures, Hitchcock became less interested in explicitly treating questions of class, yet recent criticism of works such as Vertigo and North by North West has reintroduced the question. Figures such as a prematurely-retired policeman who was once an ambitious lawyer or the advertising executive who undergoes the humiliation of becoming a punter must evidently persue a downward path to enlightenment, if not always to happiness. We may be miles from social realism but their falls are not conceived in purely moral terms.
1949 was the date of the public launch of the long-playing record in America, so Hitchcock's new interest in long takes might seem to have been part of the spirit of the times. In fact, the single-shot philosophy was more akin to the way old short-play records were made, each side having to be inscribed as a whole, while the wax was hot.
The single-shot method is single in a triple sense: a single camera is photographing a single real space in single real time. The eye of the camera stays open for the length of the reel or as much of it as you choose. Many early movies were made that way including some of Chaplin's comedies. Though it seems to simplify things, single-shot direction is a craft rather than an industrial process. It would appear to guarantee the authenticity of what is seen, through the continuity of the gaze. Though clearly selection, rehearsal, props and effects within the shot mean the claimed authenticity is an illusion which has been carefully cultivated. It required the endless patience of actors and technicians to get perfect takes this way. Yet it was one of those restrictions which Hitchcock regarded as stimulating at the time: shooting all of a movie on board a lifeboat or within a single apartment or entirely in the studio were similar demonstrations of his mastery. It was the work of the dandy-artist who could escape the cuffs, the milk-churn and the burning building, arriving at the eleventh hour with a smile, a flourish of trumpets and a bunch of flowers. Self-imposed adversity? Artistic masochism? The challenge may have taken many forms over the years but the underlying tendency remained the same.
Hitchcock must have been well aware of the Janus-faced of his novel single-shot experiments. On the one hand they reverted to the earliest and simplest method: point the camera and keep the action going till the film is exhausted. On the other hand, in these two self-produced films, he was making a first move into Technicolor and the situation will certainly have reminded him of the early days of sound when the cameras had to be shielded by booths. He would use the best means at his disposal to keep things mobile: the cumbersome lighting and unwieldy Technicolor cameras of 1948 had to remain out of sight so that though the camera may enter a scene, draw back from a scene, rise and fall and track, crane and zoom, we may not jump around from shot to shot. The result of this is paradoxical: on the one hand it can be said that we actually inhabit a real space and time with the characters on the other hand we cannot turn around to see what they see. The result is to create a set which is real in the sense that a theatre set is real. The characters need to move within the frame to create satisfying compositions and the camera can adjust the angle and distance. Inset close-ups, cut aways and standard point-of-view shots are all denied while the single-shot is held so the manufactured intimacies of the standard depictions of reality are missing.
The big advantage of standard editing using multiple cameras is that corrections and adjustments can be made in the editing room. Using post-synchronisation on back-to camera shots, lines can be added or cut out, if late adjustments are made to the script. It is easy to see why this greater flexibility has been generally preferred. It is also easy to see why it results in a machine-made feel and why it has become the standard industrial option. The extra tension of the single take was however felt by Hitchcock to be more artistic: he said of Rope, "There's nothing like continuous action to sustain the mood of actors." Since Hitchcock's day the philosophy of single camera, unedited take has remained a challenge. Famous examples include the openings of Orson Welles's A Taste of Evil and Robert Altman's The Player. More recently, an entire film, The Russian Ark has been recorded on video in a single take and there have been renewed experiments in the live broadcasting of television plays. These remain on the margins, however, as the preferred industrial means of building complex products is by breaking the job down to the smallest most controllable units and reassembling them to counterfeit a performance which never was.
What are the effects of this way of filming Under Capricorn? By having the characters inhabit real time and real space, every movement has to be either that of the camera or that of the actor. If we are used to images flying about the screen, even when the scene is uneventful, then Under Capricorn will seem stately and slow. The fake interaction of reverse-angle and point-of-view camera shots, where the viewer is alternatively this character then the other is replaced by real interaction between the actors themselves and between the actors and the single eye of the camera. In some scenes Hitchcock uses an over-the-shoulder shot to approach the more traditional reverse angle and there are moments in the film where he uses the old techniques for effect, notably with the shocking close-ups of the shrunken head and the point-of-view shot of the departing Sam immediately after. The chosen method does place a massive burden on the actors. As his comment to Truffaut reveals, the director came to think that the method was better suited to suspense films than to this costume drama. The mismatch between method and subject could also be partly attributed to the fact that two of the major characters in this film are people sunken into themselves.
The long takes of Rope have been interpreted as a form of self-imposed and eroticized constriction. It was an experiment which Hitchcock continued along less systematic lines in Under Capricorn. By filming from a single point of view, he creates an alternative to the decoupage of the received depiction of reality. By sacrificing the usual cutaways and reverse-angle shots, we get instead mobility and fluidity, most notable when the camera rises from verandah to balcony and penetrates the boudoir. Some have complained that the result is to flatten the scenes, though it might also be said that it allows for more to be secret and hidden from the humanized camera if it is not an all-seeing eye. It may be an appropriate technique for a movie which explores the subjective nature of reality. The most celebrated scenes are the long monologues for Cotten and Bergman which come at opposite ends of the movie. The first incorporates an impressive crane shot as the camera rises up to where Bergman is standing in emotional turmoil on her balcony. The second is her own grand operatic solo which lasts nearly nine uninterrupted minutes. In dialogue scenes, the usual back and forth of reverse shots and reaction shots is replaced by careful choreography and camera movement. As the wicked housekeeper, Margaret Leighton's facial expressions at key moments are exposed to the audience but hidden from Joseph Cotten. However, Jack Cardiff's memory was playing him false when he referred to Under Capricorn as a strict exercise in shooting full reels; only one shot in the movie comes near to the ten minute limit of the film in the camera. As we shall see, Hitchcock had moved on from the relatively pure application of this method in Rope and he was now experimenting with the expressive possibilities of extremely short shots at key dramatic points.
It has been said that Hitchcock combined the Russian method of montage with the German Expressionist technique of packing each frame with telling detail. The single-shot method is an extension of Expressionism, if the dichotomy is valid. But Under Capricorn begins with a concentrated montage sequence with voice-over. There are no evocations of the wide open spaces of Australia. Even the quayside and high street look claustrophobic and are not shot to impress. The establishing shots we see of old Sydney are obvious models. This is to be an almost entirely interior-set picture. There may have been budgetary constraints, though it was not a cheap film. In the end it may be that the effect is rather more claustrophobic than intimate and that, given the ironic conception of the characters, these are not people that every viewer wants to know so intimately anyway.
The film moves quickly at the start and at the finish. It is the central section of the film, from Charles's first arrival at the house to his wounding which moves quite slowly. There are plenty of scenes but the events are small and domestic. The size of the house is misleading for the action is confined to two reception rooms, the vestibule, verandah and kitchen on the ground floor and Henrietta's bedroom on the first floor. The camera is not entirely humanized in that it cannot follow characters up the stairs. Instead we rise on the crane in a smooth machine movement.
The eradication of the space between the two houses in which most of the action takes place makes travel seem like a magic carpet. This is a celebration of camera movement within spaces but the transitions between these main spaces are perfunctory. We hear of the distance and the means used. We see people arrive and depart but - apart from one evocation of Henrietta's carriage on the main street of Sydney as she races to follow Sam, there are no journeys illustrated. This serves to force the characters into an intense social life with each other - even the big solos in this work are occasions when the characters open up to each other. Because these are performances, we may feel that they are not intimate in the way a soliloquy might be: Henrietta's big scene is operatic and rises to a fine climax. We might find it moving and it is certainly a magnificent performance but at the end of it we want to burst into a round of applause, as if to break the theatrical tension which has gathered in the nine minute solo. Accompanied by music which first steals in, this is an exquisite and perfectly crafted confection. It isn't in the least conversational or simply caught by the camera. The performance is an exercise in control by the performer and the cinematographer so we watch it with bated breath. Even when we have seen the scene a dozen times, we still wonder if Bergman will get through it and rise to the great climax, passing through a wide range of emotions. It is certainly the high point of the movie and might be considered among the greatest scenes ever filmed. The paradox of this pure-film sequence is that it is so much of a set-piece that it almost ceases to belong to film, relating more obviously to theatre or opera.
Although he came to associate the rigourous single-shot method with unsuccessful movies, Hitchcock continued to employ it on several later occasions for specific sequences. The start of Psycho was originally planned as a massive single-shot, taking in the whole city from an eye-in-the-sky before alighting on one window. Budgetary constraints reduced that ambition by the time the film was actually made but his renewed interest in the technique has been ascribed to the influence of Orson Welles: A Touch of Evil. has a famously elaborate long shot for its opening as well as featuring Janet Leigh being terrorized in a sleazy motel. Later, there is the prolonged dumb-show sequence in Topaz where the technique is associated with the gaze of an observer however there was never to be anything to match the the crowning glory of the method as seen in that nine minute section of Under Capricorn.
In fact, about half the shots in Under Capricorn are under ten seconds in length and the first scene in particular contains enough choppy editing to suggest a deliberate expressive contrast to the long takes. Though a number of continuity problems suggest pressure of time or resources made for compromise rather than artistic effect. For the record, I have compiled a table of the 151 shots in the movie:
|
Shots under 10" 10" to 19" 20" to 29" 30 to 39" 40 to 49" 50 to 59" 1'00" to 1'59" 2'00" to 2'59" 3'00" to 3'59" 4'00" to 4'59" 5'00" to 5'59" 6'00" to 6'59" 7'00" to 7'59" 8'00" to 8'59" |
75 21 07 03 06 03 17 07 08 02 01 00 00 01 |
These are the longest of the shots in descending order:
8'47": Bergman's great operatic solo, beginning 77'46" into the film;
5'22": From the almost invisible change of shot on Charles's back as he enters the kitchen to the cut to Henrietta's feet as she enters, 19'17" in;
4'34": Verandah scene between Charles & Henrietta, 39'05" in;
4'06": From cut on Charles's back as he climbs onto the balcony to his looking down at Sam in the courtyard, 50'06" ends at Interval.
Though Bergman's solo is regarded as the show-stopper, it is the second of these shots which represents the cleverest choreography of actors, camera and furniture. It carries us from the beating in the kitchen to the entry of Henrietta and so takes in the kitchen, vestibule, reception room and dining room of the Flusky house. It continues through all the arrivals of the male guests and their movement back through the vestibule to the dining table. It also incorporates Wilding's verbally complicated badinage with his fellow guests which would in itself constitute a sufficient challenge to any actor. It is five and a half minutes of astonishing film-making and unlike the Bergman solo, it seems to have been selected for the challenges it posed rather than for simple continuity and concentration.
The British taste for costume drama on film dates back to the earliest days when the new moving pictures medium craved respectability. Adaptations of Dickens and Shakespeare were made before the First World War. The example of The Birth of a Nation produced a reply in the form of Britain's own Civil War picture, Jane Shore. However the fashion for lavish, historical spectacle was really established in the thirties by the success of the Korda-Laughton Henry VIII, after which they were produced on an industrial scale. Extravagant misbehaviour could be justified if it was a matter of historical record and illustrated a moral. Nor were costume pictures produced only at the luxury end of the market: the cheap Tod Slaughter melodramas such as Maria Marten could address issues such as seduction, pregnancy and illegitimacy in a framework which kept them at a safe Victorian distance. Often these stories were introduced as plays within the film, so that on the one hand the alien landscape is conjured up as a deliberate fabrication. On the other hand, the present-day prologue to Maria Marten can be seen as forming a bridge between these remote figures and the modern world.
The costume-drama with its interesting variations on traditional morality really came into its own when wartime British cinema audiences were largely female. Once seen as escapist pantomimes, such pictures as Jassy and The Wicked Lady have been stripped of their period finery and X-rayed as critiques of contemporary sexual politics, where strong transgressional women act out powerful fantasies in an exploratory moral landscape. However, it is only the undramatized back-story of Under Capricorn with its romance across class boundaries, elopement and death which would really fit comfortably into that mould. There is a tendency for the film to keep its most dramatic events off-stage though the brief but lurid scene, where Margaret Leighton gets to whip the female servants may owe something to the example of a movie called The Idol of Paris, which was notorious for a scene in which two Parisian demi-mondaines went at each other gaily with whips.
It has been said that Under Capricorn gives us a glimpse of an alternative reality in which Hitchcock had never left for America but had instead made for himself a comfortable niche in the British studio system, turning out costume-dramas for Gainsborough. If so, it was a poor time to make this shift for the heyday of Gainsborough was long passed and the company actually folded that very year when its own last releases failed. When work on Under Capricorn began at MGM Studios, Elstree in the Summer of 1948, another Technicolor period-piece based on the work on Helen Simpson was released by Ealing: Sarabande for Dead Lovers garnered some good reviews but failed dismally at the box-office. The pattern seemed to be that the most successful costume pictures with the public were sneered at by the critics as bad history and worse taste. Respectability in this field often made for box-office poison. By 1949, the salad days of the genre had passed but the British film industry was showing no sign of addressing the postwar changes in society. Given the industrial context, it is hardly surprising that Under Capricorn is essentially reactionary in its politics, sidestepping the implications of its class and colonial themes by lurching into fairy-tale territory.
Under Capricorn had been on Hitchcock's mind throughout the shooting of The Paradine Case, with which it shares some intriguing thematic links. He had wanted to make it as the first Transatlantic project. Though he was part owner and main asset of the company, it is said his fellow directors were less enthusiastic and would have far preferred him to stick to thrillers. They may have foreseen the eclipse of the costume film but Hitchcock had seen Bergman and it looked as if he could not fail. Because he could not obtain her services when he wanted them, he made Rope instead, initially seeing it as a quickie from a ready-made play. In the end, Under Capricorn was damned by the critics and ignored by the public - in fact it did far less business than Rope, which may have seemed the more challenging of the two.
Only superficially is this a costume drama: it hardly delivers on the bodice-ripping front - the romance is damped down by Bergman's tears and undermined by Wilding's flippancy. Those who wanted swashbuckling action were very disappointed and the historical spectacle is restricted to some handsome red uniforms and a brief ballroom scene.
There is every reason to think that the resulting film pleased nobody because it went through a convoluted development. No fewer than five writers were involved and that is not counting Hitchcock's or Alma's contributions. The novel was written in 1937 by Helen de Guerry Simpson, 1897 - 1940, an Australian-born writer who had worked as a decoder of foreign messages during WWI. It was adapted for the stage by Margaret Linden and John Colton. Colton was a US writer, born 1886 or 1891, depending whom you consult. he died in 1946 and his most celebrated work were the theatrical and cinema versions of Maugham's Rain, 1924 and 1932. I am unclear if Margaret Linden, whose only writing credit it appears to be, was the same Margaret Linden who appeared in movies in the twenties. There are mysterious reference online to the involvement of novelist Elizabeth Bowen and Peter Ustinov in the script but this does not seem to be confirmed elsewhere so may be the sort of error which creeps into the record by pasting material in a database.
Unravelling the Credits
According to Charlotte Chandler, Hitchcock had received a treatment of the novel from Selznick's office in 1944 and bought it for a token sum. "Before James Bridie was brought in to write the screenplay, Hume Cronyn worked on a treatment to which Alma (Reville) made contributions." She quotes Arthur Laurents, who is said to have received the novel from Hitchcock and Bernstein at a dinner after the successful completion of Rope. He was told, "Ingrid will be doing it." Laurents found the book heavy going and declined the task, blaming his refusal of the project for the end of his brief period in Hitchcock's charmed circle. I suspect the order of events here has become very confused. I think Hitchcock acquired the rights to the book in England, soon after publication: Helen Simpson had worked on the dialogue to Sabotage in 1936 as well as being the co-author of the book which was turned into Murder back in 1930.
Five names appear as follows in the opening credits in connection with the writing:
and Margaret Linden
From a novel by Helen Simpson
Adaptation by Hume Cronyn
For once, Alma Reville's name does not appear, though she normally watched over all Hitchcock's scripts carefully, credit or no credit. Hitchcock's screenplay is credited to two somewhat contrasting collaborators. The Scots writer James Bridie, a pseudonym of Osborne Henry Mavor, 1888 - 1951, was a successful purveyor of well-made plays for the London stage. Entirely conservative by instincts, it is tempting to wonder if he was not at least partly responsible for blunting the teeth of the critique of Colonialism in the material. I would guess that Hitchcock got Bridie to do a screenplay in the late thirties, possibly before he left for America. What mattered to him in 1948 was that Bergman had read some version of the script and wanted to do it. From that moment, the project seemed destined to be made and Hitchcock would get a script out the intractable material, however many hands it took.
Among the Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy papers at the Library of Congress, is Box 314 which contains nine folders of material related to Cronyn's work on Under Capricorn. In the same collection there are just two folders relating to Rope. Until those are examined in detail, it seems safe to assume that Cronyn's involvement was substantial and that the Brodie version may have been completely rewritten. There is the additional reference to a theatrical treatment by John Colton and Margaret Linden, though I can find no sign of it having been produced: could this have been commissioned by the publishers? By 1949, Bridie was well into his sixties and had just two years to live; it seems unlikely that Bridie and Cronyn, based on opposite sides of the Atlantic, ever actively collaborated. We know that Hitchcock would get successive writers to work on scripts and that the screen credits often reveal more about his contractual obligations than whose work the piece really was. Arthur Laurents was probably approached and declined before Hitchcock turned to Cronyn.
The daughter of an Australian solicitor and an aristocratic French mother, Helen de Guerry Simpson was born in 1897 and stayed in Australia to be educated when her parents' marriage failed; at the age of seventeen, she joined her mother in England. She studied French at Oxford and was employed by the Admiralty as a decoder of messages during the Great War. She had ambitions of becoming a composer but turned to writing when she was sent down from Oxford for breaching the rules which forbade male and female students to act together. Her early works have titles such as The Woman's Comedy, The Woman on the Beast, the Female Felon. In the late twenties and early thirties she collaborated with lesbian writer Clemence Dane on three works, one of which, Enter Sir John, formed the basis of Hitchcock's Murder. Married to a surgeon in 1928, she gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Clemence. A keen horsewoman and fencer, she was a student of witchcraft and cultivated an independent air by taking snuff.
Between domesticity and sexual nonconformity, between historical romance and contemporary politics, between England and Australia, between French and Australian parents, Helen Simpson seems a dual figure. If she had seemed daring in her day, the reawakened interest in her historical novels some ten years after her death is curious, as if there was a determined effort to reconnect with a pre-war version of historical romance. Aspects of feminism are found in her work, within the limits set by a comfortable middle-class background. In 1934 she published The Happy Housewife, a Book of Household Management and The Cold Table followed a year later. She was a versatile and prolific author during her short life and it would be unfair to categorize her historical romances as the escapist dreams of a housewife. Simpson continued her collaboration with Hitchcock in the nineteen thirties: she is credited as a contributor to the dialogue in his 1936 Conrad adaptation, Sabotage. Under Capricorn was published in 1937 and Hitchcock took out an option on it soon afterwards. In 1938, she was adopted by the Liberal Party as their candidate for Parliament for the Isle of Wight, demonstrating a continued interest in politics, however her health was soon in steep decline and she died of cancer in 1940, at the early age of 43.
Helen Simpson is praised in H. M. Green's History of Australian Literature for her vitality and pervading high-spirits, humour, wit, sophistication and penetrating intelligence as well as audacity. Her style is concise, short-sentenced and sometimes staccato, clear-cut and lucid, always telling, always entertaining, So many words of praise are flung around that it is disappointing to find the section concluding with the verdict that the way she plays about with reality "marks a definite limit to her talent." Historians of Australian Literature have tended to notice her an an example of native talent drawn away from her birthplace to better opportunities in England. She herself described Australians as, "a cold-blooded race under the tropic's burning-glass, self-conscious, distrustful of beauty, gamblers and the world's most unsatisfactory lovers."
Helen Simpson's original novel is said to have been a Comedy; technically this is what the film is still, in the old-fashioned sense, being concerned with the impediments to a marriage and ending happily. However, there were major changes required to transform the book into a star vehicle for Ingrid Bergman; of Hitchcock's own quirky humour, there is little sign. In the book, the Governor referred to is the historical figure of Bourke himself. Charles is his sixth cousin and there is a wide disparity between the ages of Hattie and Charles. In fact there is no romance between them; instead Charles is in love with a girl called Sue Quaife, whom he meets at a ball. Halfway through the book, Charles goes away to prospect for gold and Sue plays a part in the Flusky's household. It is to Sue, not to Charles, that Henrietta confesses the murder of her brother. The following outline of the plot follows the film. It is clear that the changes made tend to darken and deepen the romantic weight of the story, shifting it away from ironic comedy into the realms of male obsession and a suppressed narrative of female transgression.
It is 1831 and William IV has sent a new Governor to New South Wales. Sir Richard Adare has brought with him his second cousin, Charles. The youngest son of an Irish peer, he has connections but no money. At the bank, he is introduced to Sam Flusky, the biggest local land-owner and an emancipist - an ex-convict who has served seven years on the galleys for the murder of a man. A brooding individual, shunned by polite society, Flusky offers Charles financial assistance in return for using his name to acquire more land from the Governor's office. This causes a dispute with Sir Richard and Charles soon moves to live with the Fluskies in their grand mansion, Minyago Yugilla, some miles from Sydney.
Flusky gives a dinner in the hope that the General's relative will bring high society to his table; the gentlemen all come but their wives send their apologies. The dinner is interrupted by the appearance of Sam's wife, Lady Henrietta, who is a reclusive alcoholic. It turns out that Charles had known her and Sam in childhood back in Ireland and that Henrietta had eloped with Sam, when he was her groom. The difference in their social standing has continued to create a barrier between them. We learn from the Governor that Henrietta's brother had been shot during the wedding breakfast. Now Charles is attracted to her and with Sam's approval, he sets about trying to rehabilitate her and wrest back control of the household from Milly, the cruel and cunning housekeeper.
Milly is sent packing and in trying to reconnect Henrietta with her past, Charles buys her a mirror in which she can rediscover her own beauty. He also forges an invitation to the Governor's charity ball and takes great pains with her appearance so that she will dazzle the assembled guests - even the Governor, in spite of himself. However, Milly has reappeared at the Fluskies' house and feeds Sam's jealous rage; he gatecrashes the ball and makes a scene. Charles and Henrietta flee back to the house, where she tells him the full story of the elopement: it was not Sam but she who had killed her own brother. Charles encourages her to run away with him, at which point Sam arrives and ejects him from the house. Charles, no horseman, leaps on Sam's prize mare but he lames the beast and has to crawl back to the house for Sam to destroy the suffering animal. With the gun still in Sam's hand, there is a struggle between the men during which Charles is seriously injured.
While Charles recovers at the Governor's residence, Milly returns to the Fluskies and Henrietta falls back to drinking. The Attorney General makes moves to have Sam arrested for the shooting which is a violation of the conditions of his terms of emancipation. Henrietta comes to the Governor to confess to the murder for which Sam had shouldered the blame. When moves are made towards deporting her, Milly insinuates that Henrietta and Charles are leaving together and indicates that Sam should stay with her in the house. He rejects her and she makes an attempt to poison Henrietta with an overdose of a sleeping draught. When Sam is arrested the next day, Henrietta follows to plead on his behalf. Recognizing he will not have her, Charles tells a lie about the shooting so that Sam is not blamed. With the Fluskies' marriage repaired, Charles decides to leave Australia and seek his fortune elsewhere.
The opening minutes of Under Capricorn have been described as horrible. This is unfair for they are highly compressed, though arguably not effectively dramatic. First we have the titles over a map of Australia. It is little more than an outline but James Morrison is mistaken in his conviction that the map in a book. It is clear that the map has been folded in proper map fashion, unless a different title sequence was used in other territories. The musical overture begins in confident epic vein with full orchestral treatment of a folk theme. It is very much the kind of tune which travelled with colonists to new territories. Soon, however, a minor-key variant arrives bringing a more introspective mood.
The film opens with a portentous voice-over, the gist of which is that Australia exports its own raw material wealth for manufacture elsewhere. The country imports men, rough sorts and convicts, who need to be knocked into shape to be the perfect ashlars of this new world. This is emphatically not a once-upon-a-time beginning: the voice makes its points in urgent and authoritarian style and despite the Technicolor, audiences of 1949 would have seen the disembarking convicts as not unlike the shots of refugees which had haunted newsreels for years. It has been pointed out that this documentary history lesson is more than somewhat undermined by the evident manufactured quality of the establishing shots of old Sydney. Hitchcock's use of unconvincing miniatures and process shots was never an intentional way of drawing attention to the artifice of picture-making; inevitably, it is a part of the way they are experienced, however. The voice-over ends by underlining the fictive nature of what we are about to see: "And so begins our story . . ." Under Capricorn is entirely conceived in the laboratory of the studio and its lack of fresh air is palpable; it is a glasshouse movie, a rare but not necessarily poisonous flower.
Transportation to the Antipodes was seen as an alternative to the death sentence. The social death of the transgressional or poverty-stricken characters at home drives them to this reflective underworld. The pioneering vigour of life in this new world is notably missing from the film: the Governor arrives in a community which is already discontented. The stately mansions in which most of the film is set also suggest a world that has grown old fast. The voice-over at the start pointedly reminds us that this film is set just sixty years after Cooke's arrival.
We are clearly a long way from realism. Under Capricorn is an internal drama for most of its length. When it breaks out into contemporary action - the shooting and confession with its legalistic wrangling, the film becomes very unconvincing. Though this is meant to be Australia, the designs in the early scenes seem to imagine the place in terms of the Wild West. Horses, jails, cigars, saloon-type doors and Joe Cotten in a cowboyish hat. In the cinematic currency of the day it was common coin. The climate of this Australian Summer is not much commented on: Bourke arrived in December when Sydney bakes.
At least one French poster for the film gives us a deliberately misleading combination of images. We get a large representation of Bergman swooning in the lusty embrace of Cotten. Behind them their youthful selves standing over the body of her brother - a scene we hear of but never see. Or is it the shooting of Charles? The gun in the poster is not like the pistol Sam uses on the horse and his one-time guest. In Stage Fright, he would outrage some critics and audience-members with a lying flashback. In Under Capricorn, he resisted the temptation to dramatize the back-story, leaving us with the differing accounts of Sam and Henrietta. Nobody noticed that so much because no one cared enough about them or the story. It was asking a lot of the audience. Under Capricorn is a demanding movie which benefits from the home theatre medium which enables us to repeat it and replay sections at will. Close attention may not turn it into a perfect movie experience but its richness will, I am sure, be increasingly obvious.
The Music
It is ironic that Hitchcock, who professed to have no ear for music, should be associated with so many great film scores. By employing the best men he could get and trusting them to get on with it, he often struck pure gold, though insecurity would later undermine that trust. Richard Addinsell's name has faded somewhat but his Warsaw Concerto was once a middle-brow favourite. This condensed piano concerto was played at popular wartime concerts and much-recorded but it was written for the film Dangerous Moonlight in 1941. It began the fashion for such movie concertos. Addinsell combined his film work with an interest in light operatic and review pieces. He had a long-standing working partnership with Clemence Dane, a friend of the Hitchcocks and the model for Madame Arcate in Coward's Blithe Spirit. Dane's earlier collaboration with Helen Simpson makes Addinsell's involvement in the project seem either appropriate or incestuous. Later he was associated with the serio-comic songs he wrote for Joyce Grenfell, who was to appear in Hitchcock's next picture, Stage Fright. It would be fair to describe Addinsell's art as sensitive, responsive, intuitive and essentially feminine. For a strongly-contrasted approach to scoring a chamber-picture one could point at Dmitri Tiomkin's assertive and intrusive score for Dial M for Murder.
The score for Under Capricorn must have been an integral part of the conception. The firm tune of the Overture over the credits sounds confident and epic in scope so that we almost expect another Gone With The Wind but it soon moves into a minor key and hints at a more introspective world. The other-worldly mood drifts in quietly with the eerie clarinets and rising whole-tone scales which herald the first sight of Minyago Yugilla and the chromatic tonal excursions which underpin the first meeting of Henrietta and Charles. In Bergman's big scene, we have a formal melodrama in the original sense of that word: speech underpinned by music. It is a score which never draws attention to itself by loud outbursts of rhetorical punctuation. Often it steals in - as at the start of Bergman's big scene when a solo fiddle joins her as she recalls the past. As the murder is recalled at the climax, there are sustained Wagnerian chords and ominous timpani strokes. The score can also be said to have the last word as it recaps the the Mulberry Bush theme to which Charles has sung his own words. When we hear it in the orchestra in the final scene, we might feel his question to have been answered, "Who gives the orders in Flusky's house?" Its mocking tone may suggest that the question is still open. Like the subtle colour scheme and sunset tones of the photography, Addinsell's score permeates the film with a soft romantic magic and it is one of the production's strongest features.
Pure Film
It is tempting to go a lot further and divide the whole film up into a series of musical numbers, like an opera. Even passages without music, such as Milly's big solo are essentially unaccompanied arias: the music in Margaret Leighton's voice is beguiling in every sense. As befits what is, after all, a comedy we might have to designate some areas of dry recitative or even plain speech. While we are about it, we could even assign the parts with some confidence to particular fachs: Henrietta, like another fallen woman, Violetta in La Traviata combines elements of pure coloratura with more dramatic soprano warmth; The Governor is clearly a baritone buffo, Sam is at least bass-baritone and Charles a lyric tenor. Milly is a mezzo rôle. It is even possible to see the story as a close relative of the romantic operas of Bellini or Donizetti, whose unhappy heroines are much given to wedding-day tragedy, somnambulism and madness. Filmed in the year The Red Shoes was released, could it be that Hitchcock conceived Under Capricorn as as his own work of Total Film? Compared to Powell's work, it lacks brio, a flaw inherent in the material, but despite its more sedate choreography, Under Capricorn aims to enfold the viewer with every available means. Though it turned out to be a suffocating embrace, which many resisted, the sheer ambition of the piece has not always been fully appreciated.
Hitchcock's ambitions to create a pure art were described some ten years after this movie. While working on North by North West, he described to Ernest Lehman, how in the future artists might be able to dispense with their medium and operate directly on the feelings of an audience by some kind of mental organ-keyboard. Messages he left to Western Union: he was concerned with pure effect or affect. He had discovered early on that suspense was the most powerful feeling he could evoke in the cinema and made it his business to create a pornography of fear. Yet on other occasions he could lay claim to being an artist whose techniques were more than a box of tricks. In Under Capricorn he was so concerned with the artistic means that the ends became obscured. By heightening the expression and condensing the meanings, he creates a film which does not play well or follow the contours of the audience's expectations. While repeated viewings of a film may give rise to over-interpretation, this is certainly not a film that reveals its secrets at once. On a single viewing many have found it undramatic and difficult to care about. That IS a valid criticism. There are things to love in the film - chiefly I would cite the score, the verbal music and the lighting. The performances of Bergman and Leighton are astonishingly good and their big solo scenes miraculous. Elsewhere the character acting by the mainly British cast is splendid in a Dickensian way. I think Cecil Parker is marvellous at humanizing a caricature. Wilding does everything he can with his unsympathetic leading rôle and Cotten matches him in a part compounded of negatives.
In Under Capricorn, we have followed Charles throughout the movie. Note that the restricted view of the parade at the start of the film is essentially his view. We feel hemmed in from early on in scenes we feel ought to be more grandly cinematic. There are a bare minimum of establishing shots. We would expect the camera to inspect the troops along with the Governor but we witness the colour from a distance. When Charles is buttonholed by a banker, we likewise feel his uninvited proximity. There is no Lady in the Lake attempt at the subjective camera - in fact the lack of the expected cutaways of routine film-making means we rarely see what the characters do. Yet the camera stays with Charles - almost its first move away from him is the moment it cranes upwards to show us Henrietta on her balcony. After the challenge to Milly, we see the gathering of the bottles in the bedroom followed by the first kitchen confrontation and Henrietta's defeat. If the kitchen is a region which she will later occupy, then the initial crane shot has defined the space Charles will now invade by climbing. With his ascent and Sam still stranded below, the first half ends with the house becoming Charles's space - he dismisses her claim that the room is beautiful. This is a rude way to refer to someone's own space and it can be taken to mean that her enclosure there is unhealthy. Yet he has no space of his own to take her. The doorkeeper is Milly and Sam is in the yard, like a watchful dog. He is left suspended. Like Scottie in Vertigo, we never see how he gets down. This is the mid point of the movie and an interval is clearly expected here.
The second half is busier, beginning with an elaborately choreographed scene of confrontations. Overfaced by the gentlemen and their words of honour, Sam submits and Milly is defeated. There is a second attempt to bring order to the kitchen and the horrible breakfasts are served with the false invitation. It is notable that the focus on Charles falters in the middle section just as the fairy-tale elements click in. He is present at the letter scene, the ball and Henrietta's big narrative but these are Bergman's scenes which he supports. Though he has banished Milly, he is no longer central to the film and has begun to retreat from centre stage before he is shot and disappears. As his shooting on the threshold of the house suggests, this place needs to be rid of him just as it needed to be rid of Milly before it can be healed. His narrative could be seen as post mortem - he rises from his sick-bed to lie to save their marriage. Nothing in his life has prepared us for this, so the old Charles is certainly to be taken as dead. Now if the shooting is a re-enactment of Dermot's death, then Charles's rewriting of history is a word of forgiveness from beyond the grave. This turns the romance between Henrietta and Charles into an quasi-incestuous one. The urge to write to Charles's married sister in the letter-scene allows Bergman a moment of radiant happiness but it is premature. Her speaking on behalf of Sam is unwarranted and the portrait of marital harmony wishful thinking it also comes directly in the wake of an inedible breakfast. The kitchen question will remain unresolved but the marital question will be played out in fairy tale style.
The passivity of Bergman's character in this picture is striking - even her operatic delayed entrance into an all-male dinner party is that of a somnambulist. The camera raises its gaze to her face but she scarcely seems to inhabit it. This is not the composed and self-aware Hitchcock female we expect. Bergman had been driven mad before in Gaslight,: suffering was almost as essential a part of the Nordic star's character as it had been of Garbo's. The desperate gaiety of the Notorious drunk has evaporated; it isn't even the necrophile fantasy of the Notorious drunk in extremis. Instead we have almost a prototype for the distracted, doomed Carlotta Valdès. She starts in the grave and her appearance at the dinner is as startling nearly as if the corpse in Rope had got up and walked. Only Bergman makes any major attempt at an Irish accent, though several of the major characters are from that country. On the evidence of the her accent, the film was not shot in chronological order, since the lilt she achieves in her opening scene seems to have way to more Swedish notes by the time she arrives at the Governor's Mansion. Cotten settles for a soft burr which rises to a nasal sneer when angered. The other Anglo-Irish aristocrats have little of the brogue, being effectively Englishmen. Still, Bergman's gentle accent gives her an apartness which is mainly touching and appropriate.
Late in the movie, we hear of the events which have led to Bergman's virtual imprisonment. In a long Wagnerian narration, filmed in a single shot, fills in her version of the back-story. As she circles the room in an elegant dance with the camera, we understand that she had once been active and rebellious. We understand it but, if we see it in our mind's eye, it is as Hitchcock chose not to film it - with younger actors to play the teenage runaways. Now it is the traumatic dream of a disturbed sleeping beauty. The evil fairy in the shape of housekeeper Margaret Leighton keeps Henrietta a prisoner in her own room, poisoning her with drink, while she dominates the kitchen staff recruited from criminals. Never was the servant crisis more chillingly illustrated!
Sam, the once transgressional groom, has built himself a crystal palace but it has become a web, entrapping him and the inquisitive Charles. Flusky tries to extricate himself from his social impasse by offering friendship to Charles and by condoning his affair with Henrietta but, though a local magnate, he is not even in control of his own household. The title of the film has usually been taken to refer to the Tropic of Capricorn but its astrological meaning is also relevant: those born under the star sign of Capricorn are ruled by Saturn, a cold and distant planet. They are driven, materialist and ambitious, a description which certainly seems to suit Sam in the film. His withdrawn, suspicious nature at the start is certainly Saturnine, though he opens up somewhat unexpectedly to Charles on the night of the banquet. Cotten's cold and sluggish ways would actually seem to fit in quite well with the society which rejects him. His desire for acknowledgement by female society is an unusual touch,which does not usually affect the self-made man in fiction.
Sam embodies three generations in one: he has been the eloping and lusty groom, the industrious amasser of wealth and finally the shrunken inhabitant of his dream palace. He seems to represent the third-generation type, delineated by Thomas Mann or even Poe, gloomy, sensitive and brooding on old evils. The old energies have gone and in their place has come the vast emptiness of material success. Sam has become wealthy and can display it yet he never properly inhabits it: time after time in this movie, his place is downstairs or waiting in the vestibule. He seems destined to remain the groom there. Even his first confessional talk with Charles serves by dwelling on the past to reinforce the class division between them, even as he seeks his friendship. Yet the overtures of friendship are somewhat soured by the frank admission that Charles was "bait" for the ladies and an "imitation" of her own class for Henrietta.
The news that Henrietta will be extradited provokes Sam to say he will follow her, though this may at this stage be a matter of preventing Charles from having her. By spurning the tender trap woven for him by Milly, he provokes her to make an attempt on Henrietta's life.
Sam is associated with the world of deals and contracts, which tends to underline his unheroic nature. He even wishes to respond to Corrigan's midnight visit by use of the pen His power resides in the pink slips he can fill in to return unsatisfactory men to the Land Office. Even the shrunken head is offered him as a deal and wrapped in print. His relationship with Charles is referred to several times as a deal.
Sam's full name is Samson, a point made at the reading of the invitation and when it is read out at the ball. His bull in a china-shop arrival at the pillared ballroom may represent his intended shaking of the social fabric but it is Charles, depicted emblematically between two pillars on the Fluskies' verandah, who is shaking up the structure in Sam's own house.
Wilding is an unlikely rescuer. A penniless Prince Charming, he stumbles across the castle when seeking his fortune. Foppish and unprincipled, he does however know a Princess when he sees one. Yet his quixotic quest to rescue her from this enchanted castle may be born out of nostalgia and instinctive class-solidarity as much as personal attraction. He will, like Scottie, be drawn into a triadic relationship by friendship. He must call the wife back from the dead in order to present her back to her husband. Indirectly, of course, by provoking the wrath of the Bad Fairy, he must also be calling the husband back from the same place! As the catalyst for change, we would expect him to be morally upright and unchanged himself. Instead we get a chain of sacrifice. Presented with the noble confession of Henrietta, Charles can swear on his word as a gentleman that Sam did not mean to kill him. The character of Charles was always regarded as problematic, even when the film was new. His adultery is embarked upon when he is effectively the friend, confident and dependent of Sam Flusky.
The romance is hardly one audiences could feel comfortable with, especially as Bergman is playing a chronic alcoholic with a poor grasp of reality. As we have seen, there was no romance between them in the original novel; the disparity in their ages has been reduced in the film but vestiges of it remain in the dialogue. Charles's concern for her as a project comes out of a clear blue sky; previously we have heard him frankly state that his goal in Australia is to get rich quick without working. Even in the context of postwar British movies, which obstinately did not reflect postwar British politics, week in week out presenting the austerity-stricken public with the doings of the idle rich as escapism or aspiration, Charles Adare must have seemed a pretty dubious hero. Even audiences who can happily swallow Jimmy Stewart as a necrophile have found Michael Wilding's cheerful upper-crust amorality a little hard to take. His only noble act comes near the end of the film when he tells a lie, which breaks the evil spell which has dogged the Fluskies.
Charles's rewrite of the murky climactic event in the movie lifts a curse which has dogged the Fluskies since Sam rewrote the story of the murder. If Sam was demonstrating a nobility of character by his self-sacrifice, Charles is sacrificing all he has left of the gentleman - his honour. Yet the story we have seems profoundly sceptical of the value of such nobility. Sam's seven broken years of sacrifice are mirrored by Henrietta's penitential wait for him but they are damaged by their experiences and cannot unite. Why Charles can redeem the marriage is unclear, if we don't simply settle for the magical explanation that he has forced out the Bad Fairy. At the human level he has created the spasm of jealousy which provokes the shooting. His noble lie might atone for his own near-adultery but will the marriage survive the removal of his romantic competition?
If the masculine type is defined as silent, Charles is the opposite. Yet in the opening scene, his stand-offish demeanour towards the banker establishes a notion of the ceremonial behaviour he thinks appropriate to his class. It is therefore surprising that he is so over-relaxed in his personal revelations in the following scene in the office. External versus internal, own territory versus foreign. The relations of Charles with his Cousin are curious. During the opening sequence he watches him as if devoted. Is it a display for the consumption of the natives or a genuine affection? The intimacy of the bath-scene is striking. But for the presence of the secretary, who knows what would go on here? As it is we are reminded that the times were pre-Victorian and we must call their intimacy homosocial rather than anything more modern. It also serves to establish an aristocratic ambiance which is at odds with bourgeois conventions. Milly will later refer to such class bonds in terms which suggest effeminacy among the men. Charles himself may have been exposed to rougher influences by the time he accuses Richard of being "an old woman" at the ball. In the event, the breach between them is quickly mended and Richard will be solicitous for his Cousin's recovery as he attends him in his dressing gown.
For most of the picture the camera tracks the fortunes of Charles. It is only when he is wounded that he disappears from our view, leaving us to follow the crisis at the Fluskies' house. This does rather create the impression that he is abandoned by the picture as well as by the events, which spiral out of his control. A similar change of focus occurs in Spellbound, when Ballantine is arrested for the murder of Dr Edwardes. In that film, according to David Boyd, "We move in and occupy the space in the psychological terrain of the film that its protagonist has vacated; his fantasy becomes our own." The same can be said of Under Capricorn, though ironically, Charles has not been the patient until now, his project of awakening Henrietta continues. She will complete the job herself when she literally wakes up to see Milly pour the whole of the sleeping draught into the glass.
Charles escorts Henrietta home and we get the long solo in which she confesses her past. Despite this, Charles urges her to run away with him because all the past was cancelled by the events of that night. In the event their romance is interrupted by the arrival of Sam in a foul temper. All Charles runs away with is the prize mare, which he promptly lames and he has to come back. The shooting of the horse leads to the shooting of Charles.
If Sam is associated throughout with the written word, Charles is associated with the spoken word: not only is he verbose but the plot will hinge upon his word as a gentleman. When, near the end, he announces that he will give his account, it is false accounting, the charge that Sam had levelled without justification at Winter early in the film. At his interview at the bank, his striking green coat points to his inexperience as well as his nationality. Is he intended as a Perfect Fool figure, who blunders into a situation he scarcely understands and leaves it little the wiser? For his departure, he actually wears the blue coat he wore in his first scene.
A problematic character for many viewers, even for those in the forties and fifties who were habituated to slightly caddish upper-class leads. The character of Charles is conceived along ironic lines, like everyone in this underworld. He is the Prince Charming who doesn't make his fortune, doesn't get the girl and who slays only imaginary pink rats. Conceived as a talker rather than a doer, he runs verbal rings around the stolid guests at the dinner but his glib way with words exposes his agenda in a way no real hero could bear. A catalyst for change, he leaves as he arrived. The trouble is that his love affair is meant to be taken seriously. It is certainly treated solemnly enough and forms the weighty matter of the film, culminating in his declaration of love to Henrietta and the suggestion they run away.
Michael Wilding was a good-looking actor who specialized in polite high-society comedies. He was a big box-office draw in the Herbert Wilcox pictures with Anna Neagle. These tended to be played out in the posher squares of a Monopoly Board West End and offered wit and glamour without any troubling social comment. The character of Charles Adare clearly draws on this light comedic background but his disappearance from the narrative after the shooting leaves the audience uncertain about the depth of his love for Henrietta. We need to be convinced of this or his sacrifice seems as weightless as everything else. From Under Capricorn, he went back to Wilcox for Maytime in Mayfair, a colourful musical which aimed to bring back an air of expensive glamour and escapism to the British screen and then Hitchcock hired him to play a slightly unlikely policeman in Stage Fright. He was married four times, becoming the second husband of Elizabeth Taylor and in 1964, his final marriage was to his co-star in Under Capricorn, Margaret Leighton.
It is clear that this Governor owes his position to his social connections and certainly not to his abilities. His vague, headmasterly speech to the crowd is heckled but the hecklers are rough, disembodied voices and they articulate no grievance we can sympathize with. Instead, the cry, "Give us a song!" seems so witless that we find ourselves thinking, "Give the man a chance!" Yet there is a clue hidden in that cry as to why we feel so at home with this character: Sir Richard is straight out of W. S. Gilbert, a combination of incompetence, forgetfulness, vanity and susceptibility. Yet was the British Empire ever rocked by the Savoy Operas? The authority figures in those works are essentially harmless and there is an underlying implication that the British way of running things is flawed but human and that if we deposed all the harmless buffoons, we'd be left with all the Hitlers.
What we see is his warmth and ease with his penniless relative and his naked pot-belly in the bath-tub which seems more endearing than ridiculous. What we do not see is any consequences of his general misrule, only the alternate indulgence and pomposity he demonstrates to Charles. When, after the shooting, he resumes his former intimacy with his cousin, it seems to his credit that he can forgive him. So what could have been sharply satirical becomes a mildly ironic subtext. Given the general emotional gravity of the film, Parker's scenes provide some welcome relaxation: it could even be said that his very English-style forgetfulness is a blessed relief from the stifling weight of the Irish memory.
Cecil Parker has such an intimate physical presence with the camera as well with his cousin that the sting of any satire is largely drawn. Stop to think about him and we see a hopeless authority figure who allows his whims and partialities to overrule his confused head. His reverses are many: from allowing his charming but feckless second cousin to fish for the soap in his bathtub to insisting that he calls him Sir. From telling Charles to leave the ball and immediately issuing the order he is to stay. He swerves from suddenly being smitten by Henrietta's charms to demanding her extradition to excusing her in what appears a series of unmotivated reverses crammed into the last part of the picture. Since these vacillations have functions in the plot, however, we are more inclined to blame the authors' inconsistency than the character himself for being such a dysfunctional weathercock. Our gaze is kept on the fate of Sam and Henrietta.
Cecil Parker, born Cecil Schwabe, specialized in English upper-middle class types, observed with varying degrees of sympathy. His rôles tended to be brusque and impatient with the lower orders but by the nineteen fifties it was a type viewed with nostalgia as befitted a conservative industry. Earlier in his career, Hitchcock had cast him as the philandering and cowardly MP, Eric Todhunter, in The Lady Vanishes. With sleeked-back hair, he played this political self-serving type as entirely dislikable and without any saving grace. Hitchcock's thirties movies were hardly radical but by 1949, there was a note of nostalgia in this view of an authority figure who seems an ancestor of Powell's Colonel Blimp. Though the script really pillories him, Parker's performance and Hitchcock's direction let Sir Richard off the hook. Parker did not star in any of Hitchcock's later big screen films but he was cast as a lawyer in an episode of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1961.
Milly the housekeeper has planned for her own social mobility; associated throughout the film with the disreputable downstairs brigade of criminal servants, she wants Sam for herself, though she overplays her hand, when her goading provokes him to his gatecrashing the ball. That takes Sam's fight onto enemy territory and it guarantees his deepest social humiliation. In the end this seems to be a conservative movie with horrible lower-orders and a nasty working-class villainess. It is notable that in contrast to the matronly Mrs Danvers in Rebecca, Milly is not besotted by her mistress; she wishes to replace her on the strength of her own merits as an effective housekeeper. She can make a rational case for it and has more or less the last word that counts when, ejected from the house for attempted murder, she forcibly reminds Sam that he married a murderess. We should remember that Henrietta had deliberately shot her own brother in pursuit of her own happiness. Like many aristocratic deeds, however, it has been sanctioned by its historical air. Her final departure represents the lifting of the curse on the marriage. By strongly underlining their moral equivalence, Milly's parting shot makes it plain that the drama which begins by raising the question of social mobility will end with an appeal to the enduring magic of breeding: Under Capricorn is essentially a story of social immobility.
The real battle in this picture is between a phallic woman and a feminized man. Milly's objections to Charles are references to his effeminacy in the older sense of the word as "men who love women's joys" not "those who follow boys" to use the double-meaning employed a couplet attributed to Donne. We might expect her to hint that his youth and virility are more of a threat to this marriage but cunningly she does not. The main thrust of her attack is the insinuation that effeminate upper-class ways make Henrietta and Charles natural partners. She then overplays her hand with the sexual implications of "half-undressed" which sends Sam off to the ball in a belated spasm of jealousy. I think it is not what she planned, though she does not try to prevent it. She presents her own credentials along class-based lines, which proposes a like-to-like attraction rather than the game of sexual opposites. Many viewers may feel that she has a good case but it is one which cannot be allowed to triumph in 1949. The homosocial intimacy of Sam with Charles is admitted by the movie - as is that of Charles with his Cousin the Governor. What cannot be sanctioned is Sam's attraction to the phallic woman. Issues of marriage, gender, sexuality and class are laid on the table from early in the movie but their resolution will be along entirely conservative lines.
Milly's origins are as obscure as her final destination. She does not seem to have been one of the emancipists. Her accent has touch of the English Midlands and she claims to belong to the working class, like Sam. Her literary antecedents would seem to be Uriah Heep and Iago. We do not know how long she been in Sam's employ. If mortal, she is a rootless opportunist, her ascendancy a symptom of this dysfunctional household. She is busy, practical and organized, or so she tells us, though her skills are mainly in taking charge of things and inspiring fear in the staff. Though we first see her wielding the whip in the kitchen, Milly is also conceived as a possessive spirit. Notice that on the verandah when Charles explicitly contrasts the Letter with the Spirit, Henrietta is immediately heard calling out for Milly. As a symbol of spiritual malaise, she is an emanation which draws its power from the blocked love between Sam and Henrietta. Once that flow has been restored - symbolized by the breaking of the glass and the confiscation of her phallic keys - she melts away, now declared harmless by the reunited couple.
We have in Winter a gentleman-convict rescued from jail to become Sam's secretary but he stands on the periphery of the drama and is placed under the influence of the evil housekeeper. His most important scene is the humiliating exhibition of Henrietta's empties in the kitchen, where she is making a doomed attempt to reassert her authority. The horrible irregular teeth of the shrunken head may remind us of the way Sam looks Winter in the mouth when taking him on as a secretary. In fact, during the film he is used as a general dog's-body by Milly rather than engaged in any secretarial work for Sam, a sign of the way she dominates the household. Near the start of his employment, Sam delegates the business of the dinner-party to his gentleman-employee. The part is not very fully developed in the script and Jack Watling makes a wet impression, unenlivened by much humour. His back-story has him transported for some ill-starred romantic interlude which only provokes Sam to underline darkly that there will be no such going on in his house. As a gentleman, he exists in the drama to reinforce the theme of a gentleman's word of honour, a phrase he uses several times and, though a convict, he is seen to be loyal and honest though ineffective in taming the kitchen wenches. Should we admire his good qualities or laugh at his weakness? His gentlemanly nature is seen as surviving prison rather as Henrietta's blue blood survives its dilution with alcohol. Sam's rough way with the emancipists he employs displays a lack of fellow-feeling, even with those who claim to be wrongly convicted as he was, albeit by his own false admission of guilt. Maybe he represents the perfect gentleman now reduced to subservience while the dispossessed Charles becomes an adventurer.
If Adare's name suggests he is a displaced gentleman destined for adventures, Winter's suggests a lean season and at the end he stays on, a trustee in the house of Flusky. It was around this time that the National Trust was taking charge of many of Britain's great houses and formerly propertied gentlemen were having to adjust to a new order.
The first character met by Charles in Sydney is the sinister banker Potter, who importunes him in the square. He is soliciting for his banker's trade but this unconventional way of doing business disconcerts the young gentleman. Potter's reference to the very interesting relationship Charles has with his Governor cousin may make us wonder what kind of relationship he envisages with himself. This might be to mistake one thing for another, just as Potter has mistaken this plausible fellow for someone with serious money to invest. However we are in a world of exchange and transformation, where a man drinking champagne could yesterday have been in chains. There is a notable jump in the soundtrack at this point as if a later looped version has been recorded on top of the original. Probably this would go unnoticed on a cinema sound system and it probably has no significance apart from relating the idea of exchange to the exchanges made possible by technology. In this movie, Hitchcock will experiment with long takes from a single camera, keeping to a minimum some of those exchanges of points of view which are cinema's common currency.
The opening scene is problematic. Made up of mainly short shots, there are some continuity problems which become more evident when the film is viewed slowly. Potter for example is seen to approach Charles and they stand together in the middle distance. Both figures look like stand-ins for the speaking actors. Then a few seconds later, Potter is again seen approaching Charles and opens a conversation with him.
The Potter we encounter next day in his glass-windowed office is clearly disappointed that Charles is penniless but he has a tradesman's deference to a gentlemen, assuming a rectitude in Charles and morally disapproving tone towards his best customer Flusky, whom he keeps waiting. Charles, who gave a very chilly reception to Potter's overtures the day before, now seems to open up with a frank if airy account of his circumstances. This openness about his own past is meant to contrast with the veil Potter wishes to draw over Sam's. When Potter wants Sam in the office he bangs on the glass and summons him, as if he were an employee then follows the rules of etiquette by presenting Sam to Charles. Sam suffers this treatment with habitual deference, though as soon as they are out of the door, he makes it plain he is fully aware of the Banker's hypocrisy. The Dickensian style of this scene is palpable and the film will remain in Dickensian mode in its treatment of The Land Office Manager and the guests at Flusky's house.
With his warning about Sam, the banker has performed his work and does not reappear in the picture, setting the pattern for the smaller parts to erupt into the narrative twice. In this sequence we see Sam with three tradesmen: the banker, the land agent and the black marketeer. With Potter he seems to accept the lower status afforded him. At the Land Office he shows himself brutally dominating with Winter and then appropriates the chair of the official to write his slips. Finally when confronted by the black marketeer, he physically fells him. This is the first of only two violent acts he actually commits. Despite provocation at the ball by the Governor and after it by Charles, he keeps his fists to himself. The setting of these early scenes may resemble a cowboy picture but there are just three eruptions of physical violence in the picture and one is between women.
From the same year as Cocteau's Orphée, Under Capricorn is a version of the same underlying myth. The dark war traumas of the French film may be on the other side of the globe but both ring the changes on the same theme with much mirror-play in both. In Cocteau's film, Orpheus enters the domain of the shades to retrieve a young male poet, placing some strain on his marriage. In Hitchcock's version the Orpheus figure calls another man's wife back from the shadows in order to reunite the couple. His good deed done, he himself must move on like a knight errant. Three years earlier, Michael Powell had explicitly tied the fate of a couple to a trial in Heaven which hinged on the rival values of two allied nations. In this case the gender of the characters was reversed and David Niven held in Limbo until released by the love of a good woman. There is nothing especially interesting in reducing films to their underlying myths but it a cluster of Orpheus stories emerging after the Second World War is worth noting. It is curious that Cocteau's explicitly mythic picture contains an almost documentary backdrop of war-torn France, while Hitchcock displaces his story to the opposite side of the globe and sets it more than a century in the past.
Charles successfully restores a "dead" wife to her husband in a version of the Orpheus myth which proves unstable and unsatisfactory. The couple remain on the shore of the dead, while he must be assumed to have undergone some moral redemption by his wounding. In Vertigo, the task will be attempted again, this time with a more satisfactory tragic outcome, for when a man brings back the wife of another. The symbol of the mirror is explicitly announced by Charles. There are so many mythic elements quite close to the surface here that we may wonder if they are there to misdirect our gaze. After all, it isn't hard to reduce any story to its underlying myths. It is often, however, quite impossible to see how the myths came to be clothed in such strange forms. In Dial M For Murder, a pale Grace Kelly comes back from the death cell via the French windows, as if from the shades. This time a legal husband will take a wife's place in the underworld but he is an involuntary Orpheus.
We may be accustomed to Gluck's version of the myth which was shorter and sweeter than the Greek versions. In those, Orpheus looks back on his wife, contrary to the deal struck below. Like Lot, he loses his wife for a second time. There was a lot more to the tale: like so many figures in Legend, Orpheus underwent dismemberment and his head became an oracle. The association of the myth with a disembodied head continues in Under Capricorn, though it may be accidental.
Early on we hear of an occasion on which the youthful Charles had lamed a hunter. "Sam never forgave you." We might recall the boyish sparring of Pip with Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations, which later turns into a friendship when Pip's improved circumstances take him to London. The fight in this case seems to have been postponed until Charles lames a second prize horse. These characters need to fight before the Fluskies' marriage can properly be initiated. Inverted echoes of Great Expectations may also be felt in the theme of a convict making good in Australia: Magwich returns to England and risks his life in order to see his adopted son whereas in Under Capricorn, the fortune-hunter seeks out a patron in Australia and has breeding but no money.
Henrietta may not be quite Miss Havisham with a rotting wedding-cake on the table - but there are pink rats in the bedroom and a shrunken head on the bed. Her sense of time also seems to have stopped with the tragic events at her marriage. Her dark side is represented by a separate character in the shape of the malignant housekeeper, whose cruelties are less ingenious than the romantic torment which Miss Havisham arranges for Pip at the hands of Estella. It is said that Miss Havisham may have had an Australian original in the shape of a Miss Donnithorne, jilted at the altar and reclusive for the rest of her life. The wedding of Eliza Donnithorne was said to have been planned for 1856 so the date isn't right but the locale certainly is as this is a favourite Sydney legend. The date is suspiciously late for the tale to have inspired Dickens, since Great Expectations was published in 1860, when Miss Donnithorne would have been just four years into her reclusive period. The legend appears in print in the 1890s but the only person to research any documentary proof of a planned wedding drew a blank.
The genteel lover versus rough-trade novel usually evoked in connection with Under Capricorn is Wuthering Heights, which has the wrong weather but a suitably nineteenth-century setting. In fact, the script is probably referencing a much more recent and controversial work. Lady Chatterley's Lover went through several versions but the full version was published in Florence in 1928. An expurgated version was printed in England in 1932, two years after the author's death. The trial in 1960 was over a proposed Penguin mass-market paperback. Hard-backed issues for a gentleman's library were easily obtained and went unnoticed by the law. At issue was whether one's wife and servants should see it.
The truth is that most of us first hear about the work from parodies in which Connie - I'm afraid she is called Connie, just as Henrietta's birth-name is Considine - is portrayed as a fragile cut-glass blue-blood while the Mellors figure is given a coarse accent and manners. In the book, Lawrence is more precise in his placing of these characters: Connie is a healthy and potentially earthy woman - her family has means but they have a blunt bohemianism of outlook. Mellors' accent is remarked on as being almost that of a gentleman and he only seems to add a regional inflection as a joke against his employer. The maimed husband becomes a successful writer during the book's early chapters and his social success brings him into bohemian circles he had previously despised. Sexual disqualification feminizes him and - in a sexually confusing phrase - he wants to prostitute himself to the bitch-goddess success. It was Lawrence's last novel and his powers were on the wane. The treatment of the female orgasm was fairly frank, though still encrusted with some of those poetic evasions which have continued to haunt writers of bad sex scenes.
Famously, it is a book which people wanted to get their hands on and when they did, flipped through it for the smut. Many readers, rushing on their way to find the fucks and cunts, may have missed the fact that Mellors is the second lover taken by Connie. Her first is the successful but socially ostracized Irish playwright Michaelis. He has annoyed Society so much that he despairs of finding a wife. Connie takes him in hand and invites him into her upstairs sitting-room, after which he speaks frankly. "revealing his bitter, indifferent, stray-dog's soul." He has an essential passivity which attracts Connie though sexually he does not satisfy her, provoking an angry outburst which ends the affair. Mellors' more earthy masculinity is not her sexual initiation nor does she inhabit a world in which sex is unheard of: in a memorable scene she is is expected to go on quietly sewing while four of her husband's acquaintances discuss sex in very basic terms. Her transgression is to assert her right to satisfaction and to persue it across the class divide.
Taking Lawrence's famous opening sentence as a challenge, the scriptwriters may well have decided to turn his celebrated story into a comedy. First they invert the order in which the men arrive and then they invert their characteristics. Sam is the groom she elopes with but instead of being her taste of real physical passion, it remains an unconsummated affair for some seven years after the shooting at the wedding breakfast. When the seven years are served, they have changed. Sam grows wealthy, she turns to drink. Her second lover comes to the house, an Irishman, good with words but unlike Michaelis he has social connections without wealth. He will climb up to her room and kiss her, though she still may think of him as a boy. Unlike Michaelis who complements Connie on her room, Charles will say he doesn't much like Henrietta's. Like his earlier remark about her drinking, it is not the statement expected of a guest so much as an owner.
It was one of the objections raised at the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover that its sex scenes left nothing to the imagination, "The curtain is never drawn. One follows them not only into the bedroom but into the bed and one remains with them there" (Mr Griffith Jones, Prosecution, quoted in Trial of LCL, Penguin, 1961, p.19) This continuous unending gaze of the book without cutting away at strategic moments was being held up as intrinsically pornographic. While Under Capricorn is fairly decorous, containing nothing like the subtly transgressive extended kiss in Notorious, there is an erotic charge to the extended cohabitation of camera and characters, even if they are behaving themselves. The cutaways of traditional camera-work are shy of dwelling too long on anything. To fascinate is to bind and to follow someone with your eyes betrays an interest which can be hostile or erotic - it creates expectation accordingly. Yet it requires a matching intensity on the part of the viewer. Half-concentrating on Under Capricorn is a crime against its method. Try to watch it on television between ringing phones, crying babies or brewing pots of tea and it loses nearly everything. The downturn in cinema-going in the late forties actually predates the impact of the small screen and Hitchcock's films in the fifties would get bigger and wider and more of a whole evening-out package. He would not attempt a second movie which relied on the continued gaze for its intensity. Paradoxically, the single-shot camera is not something which leaves nothing to the imagination: on the contrary, key moments are off-stage and the climactic shooting is seen from an awkward position.
Then there is a more or less direct appropriation of Cinderella - complete with three ugly cooks! The useless servants make a horrible mess of breakfast, like three ugly sisters present at the scene where Charles produces the invitation to the ball. "I've got nothing to wear!" insists Henrietta. At the Governor's Ball, Henrietta lives up the Cinderella myth by attracting everyone's glances. The Governor himself is smitten and their shared background and love of horses produces a backdrop of class solidarity into which Sam will rudely intrude as a former groom. His contemptuous flinging down of the cash serves to further emphasize that there were circles he could not buy himself into.
The Three Bears seems to be referenced by the three breakfasts - only here none of them is just right. The outline of the plot is akin to The Sleeping Beauty. It may even be a sexual inversion of Beauty and The Beast, Bergman seeing herself reflected in the shrunken head. Within a year a man who has a way with words but no money will arrive at a mansion where he will awaken a sleeping beast. She will shelter him and reclothe him and show images of her past beauty on a silver screen, while her ex-husband looks impotently on in the rôle of her butler. There is no shrunken head but her revival as Salome threatens decapitation and the tone is set early on with the funeral of a monkey. In 1950, she can imagine the revival of the costume picture and drive to Paramount to find Cecil B. de Mill still making one. The climactic shooting of the narrator - placed at the end of Sunset Boulevard closes the loop - we have seen the corpse in the pool at the start.
Offered $100,000 by Sam Goldwyn to act as advisor to MGM in the nineteen twenties, Siegmund Freud turned it down. Psychoanalysis was, for him, a text-based discipline and he felt the unconscious mind could not be represented. The appeal of dreams as a cinematic subject had been clear from the days of Meliés and Freud had no copyright on phallic symbols, as any viewing of Chaplin's Between Showers will reveal. Avant-garde film-makers were happy to litter their dreamscapes with Freudian symbols in the nineteen twenties so it is surprising that the first major film to tackle analysis head-on was Hitchcock's Spellbound of 1945.
Spellbound begins with a solemn opening title which declares psychoanalysis to be a means by which, "the evils of unreason will be driven from the human soul." Yet the film plays with Oedipal fantasies as Bergman, the unprofessional psychiatrist risks everything to untangle the truth behind the screen memories and neuroses of the patient she loves. In his paper on Spellbound, The Parted Eye, David Boyd asks the key question, "Just whose Oedipal fantasy, in other words, have we been talking about here? Does it belong to a character, Ballantine, or to ourselves, as viewers? Is it the representation of a fantasy within the text, and therefore of interest simply as an additional motivational element? Or is it a fantasy with which we are ourselves invited to identify . . .?" He concludes, "The exploration of a dream becomes itself the stuff that dreams are made of."
The explicitly Freudian baggage of Spellbound is no longer on the surface, yet in Under Capricorn, the business of therapeutic re-enactment of a traumatic past event gives the drama its structure. There is no professional psychiatrist but a Prince Charming figure who takes on the moral awakening of Henrietta as his own unaccustomed duty. He is no more professional in the rôle than Bergman was herself in Spellbound. The transference is something Henrietta seems dimly aware of as she murmurs to him, "This isn't right at all," as they kiss. With her acceptance at the ball, Henrietta reaches the destination of her own psychic journey. Though it is distressing,, she can now relive her journey in her big aria. Now she sees the forking path clearly and has the strength to resist the option of running away with Charles, which would be to return to the start of her journey. In this scene she is seen to take back possession of her own space, as she moves balletically around the room.
The amateur psychiatrist rôle is taken on more explicitly by Mark in Marnie. There is a sudden spark of fire in that tepid film when Marnie, on the bed rather than the couch, resists the male's pat Freudian analysis, revealing to him that she has at least read some of his books and revealing to us that understanding the problem does not seem to be therapeutic. Or she does not want to be cured. In fact, by the end of the picture, this seems to have been forgotten and we get not just the recall of the past but the dramatization of it - complete with special lens techniques.
Though commentators have had him on the couch for years, Hitchcock was not, so far as I know, ever under an analyst. For him, psychoanalysis offered an assortment of weapons with direct access to primal emotions in the minds of viewers. In Dial M for Murder, he plays incessantly on the riff of keys and handbags till we are quite sure, like Wilde's Gwendolen that he means something else entirely. That handbag was stolen at Victoria Station, after all! Yet as the convoluted plot works out its clockwork intricacies, we find a symbolism so insistent as to be unreal. Keys are in locks and in handbags and in pockets until we feel an invisible orgy must be taking place. In the end, some sort of order is restored when Wendice rediscovers his working latchkey and his wife is saved by losing hers.
I am sure the play with keys was present in Knott's stage play but Hitchcock's mischievous way of giving these mechanical revelations a high profile in the movie, where we might have expected him to concentrate on emotions shows I think an almost surreal delight in rattling the skeleton keys of symbolism. Under Capricorn is riddled with Freudian symbols in almost the same way as Dial M for Murder. I suspect it was written or rewritten with Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis open on the desk. From the tenth chapter, Symbolism in Dreams, Penguin edition, starting on page 186:
"houses . . . with projections and balconies are women . . . children . . . are symbolized as small animals or vermin . . . the male genitals by sticks . . . pistols and revolvers . . . female genitals by vessels and bottles . . . rooms . . . jewel . . . staircases are clear symbols of sexual intercourse . . . the room being open or locked fits this symbolism and the key that opens it is a decidedly male symbol . . . when in a dream we make use of the projections on houses for catching hold of . . . we may be reminded of . . . well-developed breasts. . . a man complains in a case of lost virginity that he found the door open . . . a woman says of her husband, 'I laid the table for him, but he turned it round.' Flame is always a male genital, and the fireplace, the hearth is its female counterpart."
The house Minyago Yugilla is clearly female, being curved, light, white, open, lying vulnerable on the ground. Charles will not ring the bell at the front door. He can see the table laid but prefers to go in the tradesman's entrance. Later he will climb up the balcony in a scene where we will think of Romeo. The childless house is characterized by the Doctor as riddled with pink rats. Mae West-like, Henrietta has detected a gun about Charles's person and he goes up to discharge it in her hearth. If one of Milly's phallic weapons has been sacrificed by Henrietta in the kitchen grate, she will later return with a more fluid and female weapon from the hidden parts of the chimney. This is double-edged as the concealed spirit is itself meant to conceal the drug. Yet as she proffers the glass to Henrietta, saying," take it and drink," she is revealed as a kind of diabolical priest, at that date still necessarily male.
We are left with the same question posed by David Boyd when he looked at Spellbound: whose desires are we seeing? As Charles's desires are depicted directly, do these symbols do anything more than add a literary sort of gloss for those who spot them? Scaling the balcony tends to evoke memories of Romeo but the pistol in the hearth has an absurdist feel to it so the viewer who does not get the Freudian joke will find it a slightly lame gesture. By adorning his work with these trophies from Freud, Hitchcock or his writers seems to be crediting them with a supernatural power they do not really possess: fetishism in its original sense. Those old "evils of unreason" have a way of re-entering via the back door!
Doublings and Alignments
The pieces in the game can be classified in so many ways that each figure can be seen as a distorted reflection of one or more of the others. If Sam is the coldest most sluggish character, he has the fewest bonds, only eventually coming together with his own wife. Charles has the greatest number of reflections in the work, making him seem mercurial for a central figure. Charles is a psychopomp, his gentleman's cane flourished at the start of his meeting with Sam. He could be allied with Mercurius, associated with change. He is not, like Mercury, a thief but his entry into the house and his near-death near the doorway of the house, suggest he is an intruder. His circuit is most rapid so he comes into the orbit of several characters: his opposition to Milly is evident from the start, he is reflected in Winter by being acquired the same day by Sam and by the theme of a gentleman's word. Winter makes a direct appeal to him as a fellow-gentleman in the scene which culminates in Milly's first departure. His relations with his cousin the Governor go full circle, suggesting that this central figure might be associated with the sun. They are depicted as physically very close. The Governor in his bathtub may be related to the alchemical image of the King in his bath. If there is an alchemical element to the game, it does not in the end produce the hoped-for transmutation.
In the alchemist's studio, under glass and fierce heat we are to witness a drama of attempted transmutation which fails, though at least we get as far as a conjunction of sorts. If the exact stages of the Great Work are not depicted in any mechanical detail, the symbols are well in evidence. Capricorn is described as the zodiacal symbol of ascension par excellence. Symbolized by the mountain goat, Capricorn struggles to overcome materiality, a struggle viewed as calling for zeal and industry, discipline and endurance. Sam is depicted as having conquered materially, yet he cannot ascend to his wife. He is in danger of being replaced in that department by the rapidly ascending but insubstantial Charles. The more lurid aspects of Saturn's reign, represented by the castrating scythe and the devouring of his own children are muted in the story but the wounding of Charles is depicted as half-hidden and the childless household bears witness to his failure to rise. The seven years of his sentence may correspond to the slow distant orbit of Saturn.
In the Governor's mansion, we see him rise from his bath, wrap himself in a towel, like a Roman toga and issue an order to his Cousin, as if he has been reborn by setting his feet back on the ground. He may be associated with Jupiter and his holy water, simultaneously hot and cold, the wine of libation, the clothes of court and convention, associated in keeping apart the lovers. Left-handed contact between the lovers is defined in alchemy as a secretive relationship, inhibited by Jupiter. The Governor is responsible for keeping Charles from Henrietta on at least three occasions: first, he forbids him to go to the house where he will meet her, later reinforcing the ban by excommunicating him when he insists on the land deal. Next, smitten by her himself, he sweeps her away from Charles at the ball. Finally, even when forgiving of Charles and renewing his quasi-parental rôle, he insists that they be both returned to Ireland - but separately. This alchemical separation of the lovers has been identified psychologically as the super-ego or parental admonition, a part which Richard represents in the film.
Sam's intrusion into the ballroom has some echoes of the Zeus-Danae myth, in which Zeus in the guise of an eagle fertilizes Danae with a shower of his golden faeces. As he contemptuously flings down the coins, his potency, still denied by this society, Sam luxuriates in rubbing in the humiliation heaped on him as a mere stable-boy, associated with faeces.
If Richard is the Jupiter or bad male, then Milly is clearly Venus, the bad mother, a devouring witch who is characterized by omnipotence, greed, envy and sadism. The parodic baby, which she places in Henrietta's bed is armed with a few quite threatening teeth, like the cannibalistic infant whose growing teeth estrange him from the mother's breast. In place of milk, Milly dispenses poison, in place of love, beatings. Her domains are the kitchen and the nursery or bedroom. When her power is challenged, she uses crocodile tears and piety to try to induce guilt. She may make a display of her retreat but will worm her way back and attempt to turn her affected humility to her advantage.
If the story is clearly about the banishment of the phallic bad-mother figure of Milly, it is also notably about detachment from the bad-father figure of the Governor or super-ego. The film begins with Charles mesmerized by his Cousin's speech - he is notably the only person impressed by this comic opera figure. It could be that he is putting on a show of support for his relative but the gaze is intense, the pleasure seems real and the resentment of Potter's intrusion palpable. The homosocial ease of the bath-tub scene is disconcerting as it is hard to suppress thoughts of a sexual subtext. The delving for the soap, the fussing with the foam, the straddling of the tub suggest things to us but I don't think the sexual hints alone will get us far. We have in fact a curious inversion: the great fat baby in the bath is really a curbing father-figure who will do everything he can to separate the lovers. His intimacy with his cousin is a reflection of Sam's toleration of Milly. Like Milly, Richard will resume control towards the end of the picture. When Charles is wounded, Richard is again depicted in a feminized way, wearing a dressing-gown and fussing over the young man's welfare. It must be another intentional inversion that the relationship of Charles with this bad-father is conceived in an emotionally warm way, whereas Sam respects Milly's usefulness without displays of warmth towards her. The lack of children in the film is a hint that the central figures are children still: Charles is a green youth out for adventure but tied to the apron-strings of his relative. This bad father is conceived in terms of nurture and care - he is directly accused of being an old woman at the ball. For Henrietta, time has stopped and she has retreated into the womb of her room, her bed, and her bottle. She comes downstairs to the grown-ups' supper barefoot, like a child.
Sam's relations with Milly are supportive of the view she is essentially a bad mother figure. When she leaves for the first time, he is upset and wonders how he can manage without her. When she later proposes that he should stay at the house with her, he is horrified by the proposal and at this stage his abrupt announcement that he will go with Henrietta is born out of sincere revulsion at the alternative. Her custody of the keys corresponds to the powers of a matriarch in old families, where young brides could be subject to the domination of their husband's mothers. Milly is therefore a dual figure: the diabolical shadow of Henrietta and the subtly domineering bad-mother of Sam. His attachment to her must be broken before his marriage can properly be consummated.
Some will resist the interpretation of a movie in such primal terms. Can't any film be boiled down to a few basic psychic building blocks? Yet Under Capricorn is a film which does not really satisfy as drama, it seems unnecessary as history and deficient in the kind of action we expect in moving pictures. Once we have decided the drama is internal, it seems legitimate to use whatever tools we can find to prise open the stony surface and gaze on the riches within. The danger is to think that any one method will provide a key to explain any work of art totally. Helen Simpson was certainly an occultist and had interests in both feminism and politics; Hitchcock we know was fascinated by Freud and his first film with Bergman had been explicitly about psycho-analysis. The unsatisfying surface of Under Capricorn cries out for interpretation. In films such as Spellbound and Vertigo, Hitchcock introduces explicit dream sequences in which the meanings are intended to be interpreted symbolically. Naturally, the rest of those movies are also then surveyed for symbolic material.
Under Capricorn does not contain anything that is specifically introduced as a dream because the whole picture is a feverish dream. Parts are disjointed, some are nightmarish, in others, time seems to stand still. In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick created his own dull dream-play, adapting a work by Freud's favourite playwright, a work which Pabst had planned to film in the twenties, a story in which a mask ends up in bed, a work which is simply unnecessary given that Hitchcock had created this immensely more accomplished dream-play exactly fifty years before. The house is a key symbol and within it we see the characters as the battling aspects of the psyche. Whose psyche? No one awakes from the dream but there has been a process at work in which a male intruder drives out a female intruder and is himself wounded. By his catalytic intervention, a marriage is restored and some kind of equilibrium restored. The dreamer never wakes, unless the dreamer is entirely associated with the viewer who gets up and leaves the cinema when the dream is done.
This is not an old dark house story. The luxurious house is like an old orangery or a Victorian crystal palace in part, yet it also calls to mind the pleasure pavilions of the nineteen thirties. Its evil repute and attractive appearance may put us in mind of the gingerbread house of fairy tales. The hero is drawn by its seemingly open and transparent look. He spies on the inhabitants before he enters then he goes in via a kitchen whose accessibility is misleading, as he discovers. An evil woman is wielding power there and the good women who never call leave its owner in a state of suspension in his own web.
Flusky's showy house is also something of a mystery. Has he built it in this style and to his own plans? Nothing is said of the building's earlier history. Inside, it seems elegant and fashionable - it does not seem intended to demonstrate rough or vulgar taste. It is hard to equate this with a man who delegates all the dinner party details to his gentlemanly secretary. There is, it is true an essential deference in Sam. He defers likewise to Charles when he excuses himself from the ball by muttering he is no dancing-master. In the final scene, he will respectfully address the vanishing penniless aristocrat as Sir. It is clear that though he owns the house, Sam has no sense of ownership. We can only describe this mysteriously-named dwelling as a magical place. Addinsell's music is very telling as Charles goes up the pathway to the illuminated façade - the climbing chromatic strands in the strings have an air at once hopeful and apprehensive. It is a place of changes. Charles will make himself at home there and explore upstairs, downstairs, in my lady's chamber while Sam will skulk about in the vestibule or keep watch in the garden, forever the waiting groom. Until we approach this magic place, the film has offered a degree of social realism, establishing the material base of this society and its human cost. We could imagine, perhaps, a different house at this point and different reactions from the guests to reinforce the gap between an arriviste's taste and their own. That does not happen. It is not to be that kind of picture.
The relations of characters to their environments are nearly as important here as their relations to each other. Kitchen, vestibule, reception rooms and bedroom are part of the moral landscape of this film. It is a significant moment when Sam rushes upstairs to fetch his gun: until this moment he has been seen only downstairs and often inactive. When Charles is shot, it is near the door which he never properly entered - his coming through the kitchen is an intruder's entrance. It is also ambiguous, referring on the one hand to his uncertain status but also suggesting that he has the run of the place. Later we will see him scale the balcony, like a Romeo. Only the feminized fallen-gentleman Winter is seen in the kitchen, after the initial scene where Charles makes his awkward entrance into the feminine space of the house.
The real villains in Hitchcock seem to pass through an existing architecture without impressing it much with their characters. Gavin Elster in seen in the plush corporate office of his shipyard and the stolid luxury of his gentleman's club. There is nothing personal in either - they bestow an air of solidity and worth on a criminal, though the old friendship with Scottie also serves to make the man seem deeply rooted in these spaces. In general it was Hitchcock's preferred method to have his villains operate in daylight and in public. They will dare to attack on the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore or they will abduct you from your club and escort you to a borrowed mansion or a commandeered church. A notable subset of villains are in respectable circumstances, notably the genteel spies of The 39 Steps and Notorious. Their houses are open and frequented by high society who know nothing of the double dealing. This association of social gatherings with underlying evil is played out in an extreme form in Rope. Sam Flusky's social ostracism, in this context, seems to be something of a testimonial to his innocence. Respectability is suspicious in these movies and even society ladies of a certain age will betray a morbid fascination with murder.
Hitchcock had proved himself politically sound during the Second World War, using his influence to encourage America's commitment to help defeat the enemy. Yet he remained fundamentally conservative in outlook, not unlike other directors, such as Powell, Asquith and Lean, who had risen through the British studio system. It is a serious weakness of his films that they have no detailed or sympathetic figures from the working class; they are always stupid, lazy, comic or sentimental. However, he also viewed the loyalties of the upper classes with grave scepticism. Time after time in his movies, the great house may turn out to be built on corruption, most obviously in The 39 Steps and Notorious but Psycho, Rope, Saboteur, Jamaica Inn and Rebecca. The seemingly open hospitality of a house - at least open to some privileged guests - should also cause alarms to ring. Upstairs there may be kidnapped children, in the cellars there may be radioactive isotopes, in the trunk a body, in the fruit-cellar a mummy, and suddenly, in the fingerless hand, a gun.
Flusky's house in Under Capricorn has a drunken woman upstairs, a nest of fighting harridans in the kitchen, a witch in charge of housekeeping and a shrunken head in the work-basket. Compared to Hitchcock's other great houses, however, you could say it is open to reform. Yes, Under Capricorn is a comedy, though there are few real laughs. Nobody dies. By the same token, it is entirely populated by adults. Not a single child is visible from beginning to end, an achievement of a sort and one he repeated in Vertigo. Instead, with the mention of pink rats in Henrietta's room, the camera comes to rest on Sam's worried face and the scene dissolves into an exterior shot of the house at sunset as we are spared the rest of the dinner and the departure of the other guests and go straight to the verandah-scene of the two men bonding. This implies a strong link between the contents of the house and the contents of Sam's head. If the house is an enclosing female space, the dissolve may even look forward to the celebrated superimposition shot in Psycho. Later, when Charles is wounded, he falls near the doorway, as if the intruder has been shot and the house is ejecting him as revenge for his unconventional entry to the dwelling. Throughout the movie, there is a strong feeling that this house possesses Sam rather than the other way about.
The house is named in a language no one speaks: Minyago Yugilla. "Why weepest thou?" It is commonly explained as the question which the risen Christ asks of the Maries when they find the empty tomb. Appropriately, it suggests a place of sadness and, slightly inappropriately, the promise of resurrection. Henrietta, will be drawn back into the land of the living by the more pagan means of a magic mirror and an improvised song. But the phrase is also found in the First Book of Samuel, where it comes in the story of Hannah. When she prays to God for her womb to be opened, the priest Eli thinks she is drunk, "How long will you be drunken? Put away your wine from you." When he perceives she is not drunk, the priest asks that her prayer should be granted. This oblique reference to a story of drink and infertility seems at least as likely to be the intended source. Some over-emphasis on the Catholic version of the words is given by James Morrison. But the translation does not come from the lips of the Fluskies or Charles, it is simply the word of the coachman. Granted, as played by Harcourt Williams, he seems an unusually learned and eloquent fellow - an ironic inversion of a minor part - but I doubt if his brand of Christianity is so important as the way his carriage suggests an elegant hearse and the lit-from-below scene suggests an underworld glow.
In one of his earliest and most celebrated audacities, Hitchcock had made a glass ceiling in The Lodger to render visible the nervous, entrapped pacing of the ambiguous tenant. Its immediate motivation was to make sounds visible in a silent movie. It was a set-up neatly inverted much later by Michael Powell in his Peeping Tom, where a blind woman declares how she could "see" the apartment above by interpreting the sounds of the inhabitant. Between The Lodger and Peeping Tom, the ownership of the enclosing house has changed: the mysterious lodger, who arrives muffled in his scarf, has become the spectral landlord, whose comings and goings are even more secretive. In both cases, the suspicious women are in the room below, their imaginations fired by what they cannot see. In Peeping Tom, the blind, alcoholic mother is allowed to penetrate the murderer's lair. Her fearlessness protects her from this monster but it will take the daughter to see his demise which needs to be witnessed. In a scene which seems to take us back to the dawn of motion photography, the killer runs towards his own extinction, triggering the cameras as he goes. Muybridge shot his horses that way. Now a glass ceiling has come to mean an invisible barrier to social or success, especially for women.
In Rope, the fine art of murder is displayed in the glass case of what appears to be an artist's studio apartment. In Under Capricorn, the Antipodean setting allowed Hitchcock and his designers to go further and create something like the Palm House at Kew. Hitchcock was intending an architecture more moral than realistic: in the harsh sunlight of these colonial climes, we might expect sensible people to seek protection from the eye of the sun or risk shrivelling under its merciless gaze. But here is Sam weighed down by old sins, even in the environment of his airy palace. The housekeeper has taken advantage of his open door and taken possession of the house as an overture to claiming him.
It is sometimes said that the shrunken head was a Hitchcockian joke, included so that he could put a shocking image in the posters. It may be that the director treated it carelessly by using a nondescript prop but it is not an arbitrary horror: it possesses both a curious literary precedent and a surprisingly precise historical justification.
There is a famous novel which also features a shrunken head near the start of the story: Melville's mythopaeic leviathan of a book, Moby Dick. Before he finds a whaling ship to join, Ishmael spends the night at The Spouter Inn, New Bedford, where he has to share a bed with the tattooed noble savage harpoonist Queequeg. The landlord enjoys teasing the young greenhorn by explaining that Queequeg may be late to bed as he is out trying to sell his last 'balmed New Zealand head:
" . . . that one he's trying to sell tonight, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is goin' to churches. He wanted to last Sunday, but I stopped him . . ."
Ishmael is in bed when he is awoken by the late arrival of his savage bedmate. The head - likened to an onion - has not been sold but, before bedding down, this exotic fellow performs a ritual in the fireplace of the room, offering burned biscuit to a small idol. The sexual innuendo of Moby Dick is hard for any modern reader to miss and it is fully drawn out in Harold Beaver's commentary and notes for the Penguin edition. It has often been noted that the approach of the black-market trader in Under Capricorn has about it something of the air of a sexual solicitation. The shrunken head is planted early, like a tuber, while both shrunken heads and fireplaces loom large as symbols in Under Capricorn.
In fact, the trade in these smoke-blackened Maori tattooed heads called Mokomokai had been outlawed by Bourke's predecessor Governor Darling in April 1831. His proclamation was used against the middlemen in Sydney, which decreased the trade but also drove it underground. As late as 1837, on Kapiti Island, it was possible for traders to select a slave and have him killed to order. This hints at a solution to the mystery of Sam's wealth, the approach of the head-seller and Sam's violent reaction: he would be in danger of breaching the terms of his emancipation by continuing in the recently-forbidden trade.
The head is not explicitly referred to as an object with a magic purpose but significantly as a traded commodity, albeit a black market one. Its eruption into the drama nearly derails the financial deal between Charles and Sam. We have seen how Sam buys and sells the living in the Land Office but even the sight of gentleman-convict Winter being looked in the mouth does not appear to trouble Charles. The shrunken head, on the other hand, makes him want to withdraw: could it be that he sees it as an emblem of himself? It is wrapped in a newspaper, which gives it an air of daily currency. Or maybe we should not believe the things we see in the papers? Sam is associated with the written word of deals and contracts throughout the film. Later, when one like it shows up on Hattie's bed, it stands as a terrifying reflection of her dehydrated interior, a demon that makes her shrink, her relapse into delirium and a parody of the child she does not have. Later it is kept in a work-basket, as a tool for Milly's exchange programme by which she hopes to supplant the mistress herself. It is a piece of work in itself and a product of a kind of manufacture. We have heard that this country takes raw men and transforms them. The full horror of that trade is something kept under wraps. Against it we have Charles's project to transform Henrietta by wooing her with her own beautiful image in the mirror and slaying the demon on the bed by a display of virility in the fireplace. His aim may be awry but then he cannot actually possess her.
The shrunken head is therefore a key image in the film, though it does not appear as if Hitchcock fully appreciated its potency. The hint of Sam's involvement in the trade is probably too subtle to register. Its ironic relationship to the buying and selling of labour and souls, as Charles pats his pocket, seems easier to pick up but it is one warning unheeded among many. It may be why Charles packs his pistol when he accepts the supper invitation but Sam is soon downgraded as a threat. Its second appearance is as a ghost in the narrative, invisible to Charles and to the viewers, it is passed off as a hallucinated pink rat. This must be a form of magical truth of a kind unusual if not unique in Hitchcock: the mechanics of the trick are never explained. We must assume a kind of symbolic truth in this awkward scene: Charles cannot see the shrunken head because he sees only Henrietta's beauty. With the mirror he will show her what he sees and draw her back from the shadows. However, its third eruption leads to its detection as a simple mechanical trick, whose power is neutered when revealed. At the climax, it seems to represent the urgent escalation of Milly's campaign and Henrietta's distress provides the pretext for administering the fatal sleeping draught. Its earlier use therefore seems to have been a high risk taken for no clear reason on a night when the house was full of guests.
The head in Milly's basket must be assumed to be a different head from the one being traded in Sydney at the start of the film, though it looks very similar. This elongated, pendulous-lipped object with its large, irregular teeth does not seem to conform to any authentic style of shrunken head. It is certainly not like the Maori Mokomokai, which were banned in Sydney and prized essentially for their tattoos. The more elaborate the tattoo, the more lives a warrior was supposed to have taken so to own an elaborately-decorated trophy was a powerful symbol of potency and conquest. For Europeans and Americans they exerted a strong fascination, bound up with images of savage darkness tamed by trade. The lack of precision with regard to this object in the film suggests that the suppressed history was not properly understood, leaving the head on the bed to operate mainly as a symbol of thwarted motherhood and the rejected carnivorous child.
Head-hunting does not appear to have been a part of Australian aboriginal culture but hideous accounts exist of the genocidal activities of military governors in Tasmania, where some 5,000 aboriginal inhabitants were hunted down and killed over a seventy year period in the so-called Black War. By 1869 just one, alcoholic native Tasmanian who went by the name of Killy Billy remained. "As a joke" he had been presented to the visiting Prince Albert at the Hobart Regatta. When Billy died, a surgeon from the Royal College of Tasmania "entered the dead house, skinned his head and removed the skull, substituting another. Under his coffin draped with Union Jacks and a possum skin, his face was a mound of blood."
There is also a shadowy tale told by Donald Spotto about a night in 1941, when Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were at the Hitchcocks' for dinner. Gable had owned a shrunken head but Lombard had given it a burial in what was now the Hitchcocks' garden. Hitchcock jokingly suggested a midnight exhumation. Lombard herself was to be buried that Winter.
There are two systems of exchange at work in the film: one is the material trade in men which is announced as the manufacture of pioneers out of convicts. In fact we see no social movement in the film: Sam is wealthy from the start and remains so. Charles leaves Australia a little wiser perhaps but materially untransformed. The person who claims to wish to transform her fortunes by hard work resorts to poison. The gentleman-convict Winter protests his innocence at the start but he seems to have accepted his position under Flusky by the end. When politics fail, there is a call on magic; the alternative system is one of spiritual transformation and renewal. This magic is not on the side of social progress either, the power of the past is evoked, specifically the joys of a privileged Irish upbringing. Reconnection with this will bring Henrietta out of the shade of Milly and restore the relationship with Sam. Yet the evocation of this world by Charles would seem to reinforce the chasm of class between man and wife; the exercise, after all, was self-serving. At the ball, the conflict rises to a confrontation as Henrietta-Cinderella threatens to be absorbed by her own class. The dream is ended by Sam throwing down his cash and reminding the Governor that his cousin has been bought with the same money.
The banker is happy enough to introduce the young penniless aristocrat to Flusky but he appends a warning not to accept Flusky's invitation to his house. Sam Flusky is introduced to us as a sullen trader in property, livestock and men - he looks the gentleman-convict Winter over as he would a horse, though he appears to draw the line at the trade in shrunken heads. Charles has really been invited to the house as the Governor's cousin to serve as genteel bait for the respectable ladies who send their apologies. By this time he has made a bid for Charles in the form of a hundred pounds for the use of his name as a beard in the property game to by-pass the rules on buying land from the Governor's Office. Sam admits this in his long confessional talk with him on the verandah. "I can get all the gentlemen I want". In the tiny part of the coachman, we hear the distinctive voice of Harcourt Williams warn Charles that there is "Something queer about that place" as they draw near the house. A couple of years earlier, Williams had given us Pinkie's quintessential seedy lawyer Prewitt in Brighton Rock. Pink slips are issued if the servants misbehave and have to be returned to custody. The rats which Charles gallantly shoots for Henrietta are diagnosed as pink ones by her doctor.
At a crucial point in their relationship, we witness Charles presenting Henrietta with a mirror - it is the most ravishingly-shot image in the film. Earlier he has placed his dark jacket behind a window to give her a glimpse of her beauty, which blossoms in his presence. She had previously banned all mirrors in the house, in a gesture which strongly underlines the fairytale aspects of the situation. If the mirror is banned by decree so is Sam's gift of rubies later. These have a hint of both blood and chain about them. She never sees them - at this point in the movie her sight is selective and Charles's gift of the mirror was given so that she would see herself in him. In contrast the rubies are intended as an adornment for her. Clearly at this moment she sees her transformation as complete, though it is a false dawn.
This lack of horsemanship in Charles suggests a lack of virility - his appetite for the lifeless Henrietta seems to be stimulated by her being another man's wife. He is also meant to be considerably younger than Henrietta and her memories of him have a maternal colouring. In Helen Simpson's original story, the disparity in their ages was much greater and there was no inappropriate romance. We would expect Charles to be contrasted with a more masculine type but this is not the case. Joseph Cotten may seem cast against type as the horny-handed groom who has raised himself to wealthy arriviste status; he is usually grudgingly conceded to be quite good, against the odds. Yet the Sam of the film seems to have lived through an accelerated rise and fall, of a kind which ought to have been spread through three generations. By the time we see him with his trophy wife and enchanted castle, he has become a husk. The name Flusky is almost too suggestive of the flunky he was as well as the husk he has become. He has material success, which in the face of social ostracism seems empty. Though we are told that he is the largest landowner in the Sydney area, there is a Proustian aspect to his social climbing. The mystery of nobility is something he wishes to penetrate. It is symbolized by the excuses made by the ladies: his dinners can be attended by gentlemen only. If Sam is the dried-out husk, then Henrietta is the sodden leaky interior of this union.
The shooting of Charles is a key scene but it is typical of the film that it is obscured in the way it is shot. The characters know what happened but we do not. This wounding of Charles is symbolic but his position has been weak from the start. He is presented as a young foppish type, unable to ride, while Henrietta's own early love of riding is equated with her sexual awakening and elopement with the groom. We might look forwards to Marnie, whose sexual inhibitions and criminal lifestyle she has in common with Henrietta. Marnie sustains a love of horses into the later, damaged portion of her life but the death of her favourite mount seems to presage her own taming. In under Capricorn, the horse, called Lady, is identified with Henrietta, and reinforced in the reference to Charles running off with Sam's prize mare. At the climactic shooting, we wait for the gun to go off and see Bergman clutch herself as if wounded by it. The death of the horse in Under Capricorn underlines the critical failure of this unusual hero to carry off his prize and within a few minutes he himself is wounded in a hidden way. It is the most dramatic event in the piece, yet the shooting of Charles seems accidental, and it's real meaning seems to lie in its relation to events in the past. It is a shadowy world where action is muted: no one is actually killed, nothing is burned down, a villainess is unmasked but her fate is unknown and goes for nothing. It is characteristic of this film that the doubling of events seems to throw them into question rather than reinforce their power: we are never sure what is real and what is a reflection. In the end, we may throw up our hands and declare the entire content of the movie to be symbolic, a reaction which always hints at some difficulties in believing the surface. Symbols may be deep but they claim our attention mainly when the narrative is uncompelling.
Sam knows he is being betrayed but does not directly confront Charles. If there is competition between these two men, it is hardly one of masculinity. The key scene in this respect is when Henrietta is being adorned for the ball. Charles has already usurped Sam's rôle in public by shopping with and for Henrietta - again showing a man's taste for women's wear which Vertigo will develop in detail. Now Sam wants to present her with a ruby necklace - another Vertigo touch, a notion which is laughingly dismissed as likely to make her look like a Christmas tree. In a touchingly understated scene, the necklace is silently concealed as Sam bows to the effortlessly superior taste of his aristocratic rival. A Christmas tree is an anachronism, as the German habit is said to have been introduced by Prince Albert into the UK. However it does suggest that the acceptance of Sam's gift would have been a sign of hope in this inverted Winter and a symbol of fertility. One other casually-uttered word may jar on British audiences when it is used, the American term "swell" used by Sam to describe a dinner. Its association with both fertility and social class is intriguing but possibly accidental.
Immediately after the titles, we get a toy-town simulation which features the Union Jack fluttering over a stockade with closed gates. In the background is the harbour and to the left a windmill with revolving sails. To the right there is a smaller windmill. Flag and boats and mill all rely on the wind as motive force. As the scene seems more symbolic than realistic, we must see the mill as a emblem of work and added value. Next we have a brief tableau of the new city rising. There are exposed rafters in the middle distance and a church is being constructed on the right of the picture with scaffolding and a prominent ladder. Stairs and steps are to be one of the basic images of the movie. In two previous Hitchcock films we have seen mills; in Young and Innocent, an old abandoned water-mill is the hideout for the wrongly-accused hero. In Foreign Corespondent, the language of a Dutch windmill's sails are the means used by spies to communicate with a plane, while the mill itself is used to hide a kidnapped diplomat.
We will hear work discussed during the course of the film but we only see the lower orders doing any - and they tend to be bad at it. The Governor's work begins with an inspection of the militia, with the help of a couple of dogs - it is unclear if these are mascots or strays and they don't reappear. He delivers his lame, headmasterly speech, drawing jeers from the crowd. He promises that the people of the Colony don't yet know what they are in for but his reforms seem entirely superficial: he has his secretary record his complaints about the state of the harbour, while he takes a leisurely bath. Sam Flusky is described by his banker as being something of a financial genius but we never see him doing much. Having possibly established his career selling shrunken heads, he now appears to be a property speculator - the package of land he wishes to acquire is in the rapidly-growing city and certainly not suitable for grazing, as the Governor points out to Charles. The kitchen staff are comically useless and spend their time fighting while Sam's newly bought secretary, Winter, seems weak and inclined to flap. We have in the dinner scene a worldly clergyman, a mean doctor, a treacherous Attorney, a social climber and a pompous and prejudiced and hypocritical prison governor who seem chosen to allow Charles to show off his sharper wits and way with words. Sam fits into this world of inversions by being the opposite of a lusty groom and Henrietta by being a sot instead of noble and virtuous lady. It remains for Charles to be a dishonourable gentleman and a fortune-seeker who leaves with nothing. It sounds like a scenario from Gogol and there is clearly some satirical intent but the humour is mainly ironic with some ripe caricature but little in the way of obvious jest.
The concern with work as a theme for discussion is bluntly exposed when in his first long sunset talk with Charles, Sam, after quoting the Biblical, "There is a great gulf fixed," is explaining the lack of empathy between himself and Lady Henrietta. "I had work, she had none" This seems to be offered as an explanation of why her own unhappiness has been a catastrophe. Transplanted to this foreign clime, her idleness has made her wilt. She needs new blood. It is virtually a vampire picture.
As if to compensate for the lack of a plantation or a sheep-farm, the great house revolves around its kitchen. This is the engine-room of Minyago Yugilla and it is clearly a symbol in itself, standing for all the work in the sense of a synecdoche. This may explain why the dereliction of the mistress is felt as strongly as the nearly superfluous presence of the master. At the house, Sam has no real rôle to play because he is disallowed any arena of activity. We see nothing of any outdoors life around the place. He is not even seen to occupy himself with his horses, as we might expect. Even Winter, whom he engages as his secretary, soon becomes drawn into the kitchen and so into Milly's sphere of influence.
Even before he arrives at the house, Charles has asked the coachman if he would not care to eat something in the kitchen, underlining the class division. The coachman declines and it is Charles himself who causes consternation by entering via the kitchen in the middle of a domestic crisis. Neither Charles nor Sam re-enters the kitchen at any point in the story. When Henrietta makes her first attempt to wrest control of it from Milly, even she seems uncertain if she belongs there, changing her mind over whether she should come downstairs or Milly should report to her. Sobbing over her failure, she tells Charles that she wanted to make him a fine dinner. It is the scene where she later burns the strap in the grate which brings her into the magic contact with the cinders but it is made plain that it is a lady's task to order the dinner or breakfast not to make it herself. In this workplace she institutes a system of competition in place of Milly's brutal force but the signal failure of any of the women to produce an edible breakfast is brushed aside as she rushes off to prepare for the ball.
This concentration on the women's work and the film's lack of any really masculine activity goes with the suppression of almost every vigorous physical action. The enervation is palpable: even the opportunity for movement at the ball is not exploited as one might expect. The camera prefers to scan the faces of the spectators rather than follow the movement of the dancers. The dance itself quickly stagnates into static social groupings. We have been primed to expect the eruption of an angry Sam onto the scene but the expected physical confrontation becomes a war of words and the camera loses interest in the trade of insults, preferring to follow the distressed Henrietta as she flees the scene. This kind of build up and retreat had been done by Powell in Colonel Blimp, where we witness all the preparations for a duel only for the camera to retreat from the building as the combatants engage. By depriving the film of some fairly obvious sensual pleasures, the attention of the audience is kept on the world of sensibility. The same is true of the opening scene, where the inspection of troops is kept at a distance and the welcome signs hang over a street that the camera never explores. Budgetary constraints or the unwieldy Technicolor cameras may have necessitated this perfunctory treatment of potentially showy scenes but it underlines the way the film sidesteps the priorities of conventional costumers and opts for a quieter, more internal drama.
There are references to Christianity throughout the film, though they remain marginal. In the shot of the city of Sydney at the start, a church is being built with scaffolding and ladders on the right of the picture. At Flusky's dinner party, he is thanked by the clergyman for his gift of a font, with its associations of rebirth. At the dinner itself the clergyman needs to remind Flusky of the ritual of saying grace, suggesting that the Church might sup with the Devil if it was useful. The character with most to say about the Lord is Milly, who clearly sees Him opposing anything which does not further her own interests. She treats Class in the same manner. The script may be no masterpiece but it has a sure grasp of the way these powerful forces are evoked in argument to lend weight to personal ambition. For a supposedly romantic picture, there is a hard-headed realpolitik where we might expect a heart.
There is much play with keys in Notorious and Dial M for Murder. In Notorious, Cary Grant encourages Bergman to steal the wine-cellar key from Claude Raines key-ring. In that film also she begins as a drunk and ends by being nearly poisoned. The symptoms of her poisoning are ungallantly assumed by Grant to be a return to the bottle. In Dial M for Murder, the husband arranges for a murderer to kill his wife, the plot requiring the theft of her own house-key. The plot goes badly wrong and it is the house-key which gives the game away. In Under Capricorn, the large key-chain which Milly wears at her waist represents the usurped power she has. For a single scene - the letter scene in which Henrietta dictates a letter to reconnect with friends in Ireland and finds a voice in which she speaks for herself and Sam. This marks her new command of herself but in the way she speaks for for them both, I think we may be meant to see her as overreaching herself and becoming a phallic woman like Milly. At this point she is removed from the domestic setting and set on the Cinderella trajectory which will lead to the ball, a brief crowning moment of success in her own class and then disaster. When Milly returns and makes the attempt on Henrietta's life she is punished by Sam's removal of her keys - a symbolic castration - but the domestic question is then lost, the film ending with the couple at the quay, united but notably not in a domestic setting.
Sam is no unlettered groom - the source of many letter difficulties is the letter he had written to Henrietta, instructing her to say nothing of her culpability, while he takes the blame for the murder. It is an awkward plot-point but she seems to regard this letter as a binding contract. Later we see Sam at the nearest he comes to work: buying and selling men by the contract of the pink slip. This is the conditional release of the emancipists. At his visit to the Land Office, he buys himself a new secretary and gives notice that he will return two unsatisfactory men. When an underworld figure approaches him with the shrunken head, it too is wrapped in the written word - newspaper. He rejects that proposed deal but it is the cause of hesitation on the part of Charles. He tries to give back the deed which symbolizes his deal with Sam, now convinced that he may be trading with a very dark horse. He is easily bought by a hundred pounds advance on his soul.
We see two letters being dictated in the film. First we see the Governor dictating a letter of complaint to the Harbourmaster from the comfort of his bathtub. Later we see Henrietta take charge of the kitchen and the symbolic keys. When she receives the invitation to the ball - one written by Charles in the place of another - she dictates to him a letter back to Ireland. In it she expresses the views of herself and her husband in which she may be overreaching herself. In fact the letter is another collaboration with Charles and the reconnection with her genteel Irish past will lead to a stormy confrontation at the ball. It is notable that the world of contracts, pink-slips, deeds and the fatal letter which forced Henrietta's silence all belong to Sam's world. It is entirely unheroic. We might compare it to the gangster movies in which the good honest crooks like Cagney seal a deal with a handshake while the real reptiles like Bogart shuffle their papers and point out exclusion clauses. In the end the curse on the Fluskies' marriage is lifted by the false word of a gentleman.
When Sam takes his leave of Charles in town, his departing figure is obscured by an approaching barrel on a cart. It may be as empty as he is or as drink-filled as Henrietta. When he arrives at the Governor's residence, Charles is received by his Cousin in his bath-tub. He is immediately invited to pour himself a drink and the Governor continues his dictation of a letter to the Harbourmaster on the subject of the disarray of the port with barrels afloat everywhere. The screen-writers had clearly taken to heart the principle that every scene should reflect the main theme.
The land deal causes a breach with his cousin the Governor and drives him figuratively into bed with the Fluskies, taken in like a stray dog. The mirror he gives her to be her own conscience. She will see herself come riding back in it beating back the shadows and once again to be queen in her own kingdom. It is later described as her reincarnation. Their romantic gazing into the mirror is intercepted by the hard look of Milly. At this key moment, he gives her back her identity and insists that she now takes charge of her own household. If this mirror is a portal through which Orpheus brings back a woman from the Shades, Charles should do something musical at this point in the film. And so he does, making up a little song, "Who shall give the orders in the Fluskies house?" and whistling it. Her first attempt to seize control is countered by the calculated humiliation of the empties scene. Later Charles insists, "She's coming back, I tell you!" though the process may be longer than anyone imagined.
When Sam's surname rings a bell for Charles, he views the approaching magnate through the glass window of the banker's office - an innovative office by the standards of the 1830s. He runs through some variants as if they might spark the relevant associations, "Musky, dusky, rusky . . ." Scent is supposedly the senses which most strongly evokes memories. The musky scent of stags may be a prelude to some mating competitions and the play with their canes in this scene suggests antlers may be locked; in the more immediate future, Charles will comment on the rats in Flusky's house. The dusk will fall during his long verandah conversation with Sam, who seems prematurely to be in the twilight of his days. Rusky may suggests the hardtack of the convict ships or the teething food of babies. Meanwhile Flusky - the name which also now belongs to Henrietta may suggest flustered, flushed, flask, flurried. Applied to Sam, it could refer to his red complexion or the flushed state of his bank balance. The associations may not have been intended to be explicitly drawn out but Charles's word-play gives us permission I think to see names of the characters as symbolic. Later he will similarly toy with the name of Mrs Rigg, inventing a Mrs Tigg and Mrs Wigg as among the absentees at Sam's dinner.
Milly has the diminutive quality a good servant name ought to show. It could disguise her militant nature, not only as a fighter for her own interests, employing class-based arguments when they suit her or uttering pieties she may have learned from the Church Militant. She is certainly a hard worker for her self-interest and may see herself as a slave at the mill, an emblem we have seen at the start of the picture. In our first sight of Milly we witness her using her strap to mill - or beat - the women in the kitchen and subdue the mill - or fight - which has broken out. There are at least two windmills in the opening tableau. It is pointed out twice that Sam is properly Samson not Samuel Flusky. A strong man shorn of his strength by a woman's wiles? A man blinded at the mill? A man who will shake the structures?
The tendency for Charles to repeat with variations can be taken as a sign of his ludic nature. The script has a number of phrases which are passed from character to character e.g.. Potter's, "He has taken quite a fancy to you!" becomes Sam's own phrase with just the gender changed to refer to his wife. The script of Under Capricorn shows a concern for these corresponding details which is not matched by care for the underlying structure. The problems pile up at the end of the film and many have expressed dissatisfaction with the very condensed opening chapter . . .
1: Two Episodes of shrunken heads.
2: Two Sights of the Union Jack top and tail the film.
3: Two Dogs run after the Governor during his inspection of the troops.
4: Two Offices are visited by Charles on his second day in the city.
5: Two Houses are the main scenes of the action.
6: Two Mirrors seen in the Governor's residence.
7: Two "Gentlemen" take up residence in Flusky's house.
8: Two Verandah scenes.
9: Two Mirror scenes - the jacket and the unwrapping.
10: Two Scenes involve shooting.
11: Two Things on Hattie's bed but later revealed to be the same.
12: Two Power-struggles in the kitchen.
13: Two Letters are dictated.
14: Two Accusations of murder - Charles has actually shot a horse!
15: Two Key uses of Sir as an address.
16: Two Scenes with the Attorney: the dinner and the attempted arrest.
17: Two Scenes with the Doctor: the dinner and attending Charles when wounded.
18: Two Scenes with the Prison governor: the dinner and nabbed by Mrs Rigg at the ball.
19: Two Accusations of Trash.
20: Two Departures of Milly from the house.
21: Two Harbour Scenes.
22: Two Key Monologues. Or three, if we include Charles's lying narrative.
23: Two Scenes in which Milly is stripped of her keys.
24: Two Contrasting Opinions of the waltz.
25: Two Windmills in the early tableau of the city.
26: Mr Rigg at the dinner encourages Charles to call on his wife - a reflection of Sam's complaisance?
27: Mrs Rigg at the ball - now a shadow-Cinderella?
28: Two mentions of buying clothes in Sydney.
29: Two scenes in which older characters meet grown-ups they had known as children.
It is not that the film is oppressive or mechanical in these symmetries. We are not, for example battered over the head by the two mirrors in the Governor's residence, though we are bound to notice the round mirror which threatens to give us an eyeful as he steps out of the bath. This is carefully avoided. In the succeeding scene, as he takes a more authoritative line with his relation, the dressing-table mirror behind them is turned downwards, reflecting some tools of his office? No doubt this list of dualities could be further extended.
The act of shooting Charles is part of the removal of the spell. We are told early on by Henrietta that Sam had never forgiven Charles for laming a hunter. Now there is an identical situation and Sam can act. It may be telling that he allowed Charles to escape after overhearing of his planned theft of his wife.
In her long Wagnerian narrative, Henrietta lays the emphasis upon her years of living in a filthy hut on the waterfront, awaiting Sam's release from the galleys. Her degradation seems to have been complete yet it seems not to have eroded their differences of birth. Either we feel that Henrietta's nobility has been paradoxically enhanced by her sacrifice or that the gulf between them may be something for which class provides a convenient alibi. Though Sam is clearly under the spell of Milly for most of the film, it is certainly not a sexual enchantment. She has been allowed to dominate the household by default only and the thought of any liaison with her seems not to have crossed his mind. Despite a household of untamed women, Sam has no desire to play the seigneur. Only at the end of the film is his cold blood stirred at the idea of losing Henrietta to Charles.
What is the matter with the Fluskies' marriage? We hear both their accounts. Sam's first. He describes their youthful relationship as based on their shared love of horses. Yet he asserts, "I would no more have thought of making love to her than to a blessed angel! . . . We weren't the same the two of us . . . There was a great gulf fixed . . . She missed her own sort." Though this seems to be about the class issue, we are clearly about as far from D. H. Lawrence as things can get. Sam may be the outdoors type but his earthiness does not seem to amount to virility - at least where Henrietta is concerned. We are told that the couple had run away to Gretna Green and been interrupted at their wedding breakfast. Today, the mere mention of breakfast may suggest the morning after consummation but of course a wedding breakfast takes place on the day of the ceremony. We must imagine, I think, that the affair suffered for some seven years or more of coitus interruptus. Censorship of references to sex outside of marriage was still fairly stringently enforced in 1949 but the Fluskies seem to have carried restraint to the point of perversity.
There are some matters which remain mysterious. We do not know, for instance how long Henrietta has been a recluse. Sam's enrichment appears to have happened quickly and soon after his release from the galleys. Milly's origins are obscure: she does not appear to have been an emancipist. All Sam says is that she has been at the house a long time. Her associations with the place and the fact her name is easy to find in Minyago Yugilla suggest she is a spirit.
When Sam refers in his monologue to "A great gulf fixed," the reference is to the parable of Dives and Lazarus, Luke, Chapter 16, verses 19 - 31. In that harsh morality, the angel advises that a great gulf is now set between the dead men and that the virtuous Lazarus cannot now alleviate the sufferings of the once-wealthy and now damned Dives. Christ seems to be urging us to virtue in this life as the gulf will be fixed afterwards. It is actually a call for the rich of the earth to change themselves and their ways and not to assume that they can enjoy a selfish success without paying later. Sam, however, interprets the angel's words as applying to life on earth. It could be taken as a sign that he believes himself to be effectively dead and that change is now impossible for him.
The reversed fortunes of the story are an aspect he appears to miss. Or does he? "I had work, she had none." seems to explain why she has collapsed utterly and he had maintained some self-respect. The assumption in Sam's narrative is that he sees Henrietta as out of reach because she is above him socially. We are encouraged, I think, to see the reference to the 19th Century notion of the rich man in his castle the poor man at his gate. Yet the parable of Dives and Lazarus may be a clue that a reverse in their relations has happened after Sam's virtual death in the galleys. The revelation must await her version of the back-story, late in the picture: she has waited for him in a stinking hut on the sea-front. "Down, down, down!" she continues to luxuriate in her humiliation. She had no work - so what did she do? Later, he will vent his anger when she appears to be reverting to type by betraying him with Charles. He calls her Trash twice, once before the shooting and once when she returns from town. The gulf which is fixed is this inverted post-mortem gulf in which Henrietta is guilty trash.
The large table can be viewed in terms of both The Last Supper and the Mad Hatter's tea party. Mad Hattie will appear just as the guests are playing musical chairs. She will seat herself, like Alice, at the far end of the table. The violence we have seen in the kitchen may recall the violent attitude of the Duchess in Alice. Later, the labelled bottle which Milly has strongly resembles the one in Tenniel's illustration, the one which says Drink Me and which Alice foolishly obeys. It is an invitation to drink which Henrietta more sensibly declines. The references are to Alice in Wonderland and it may be that life down-under was conceived as topsy-turvy in its inversions or back-to-front as through a looking-glass.
Not one but two Judas figures are eating at Sam's table: Charles will betray him by loving his wife and the Attorney General Corrigan - another Irish name - clearly relishes his opportunity to take a convict back into custody at the film's climax. His motives are not much explored by the script but as an agent of the law he clearly places little faith in notions of reform.
The film is critical of Colonialism and the inherited class structure but the critique is essentially a contemporary i.e. 1831 one, seeming to argue for an expansion of the ruling class and greater social mobility. At home in Britain, the First Reform Bill was passed in 1832, widening the franchise to 100,000 men with a property qualification. Flusky seems to thrive on hard work alone but he gets little satisfaction, being empty within. Though his release from the shadows which had fallen across his marriage demands that Charles breaches the code of class-solidarity by perjuring his word as a gentleman, the structures remain firmly in place. In the final scene, where the Fluskies stand together on the quay, as the crowd moves away from them, there may be a hint that the sturdy institution of a sound household may form a firmer basis for society in future times.
Though there many confusions and some odd reverses, none of the plot-elements seems to have any morally improving trajectory. Even the single heroic act of the hero is to tell a lie at the eleventh hour. Yet intentions are hard to untangle. As a critique of Colonialism, it lacks historical weight. In any case its main criticism of Sydney Society seems to be that it isn't inclusive enough. As a shadowy sexual drama it has murky undercurrents enough - maybe too many. As a modern fairy story it lacks gaiety and fun. In place of any critique of the exploitation of the aboriginal population of the continent, it offers us instead a shrunken head from another continent entirely. So Under Capricorn remains a failure on many levels. By being set in a remote country, the film does manage to create and explore an imaginary space in which history, myth, sexuality and Empire are richly melded until they become epitomized in one dysfunctional couple and a disturbing guest. If this Australia was imagined entirely on studio sets, it represents a projection of things which no location could adequately contain. Empire was already being seen in terms of a troubled conscience.
For post-colonial Australia, 1949 was a key year. The Nationality and Citizenship Act 1949, which came into being on 26 January 1949, created Australian citizenship. Before that date anyone born or naturalized in Australia was a "British subject." In 1945, Australian Immigration Minister announced plans to admit 50,000 British war-orphans. From 1947 there were assisted passages to encourage adult Europeans to migrate to Australia and the UK had passed a Children Bill in 1948, which allowed orphans and delinquent children effectively to be transported. Some may have found a bright new life there but a House of Commons Select Committee of 1998 heard horrifying tales of physical and sexual abuse which some children had suffered at the hands of the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers who ran communities there. It even transpired that many of those children had been had been told falsely they were orphans, some discovering the deception when it was too late to re-establish contact with parents. 1948 was also the year the British began the construction of the Woomera Rocket Base as a weapons testing facility as the shadow of the Cold War reached the Southern hemisphere. These matters may seem remote from Hitchock's film, which had been planned originally in the late thirties. However, it may have affected its reception, as migration to sunnier climes was contemplated by many at this period. The freak winter of 1947 had provoked anxieties about the effects of the nuclear bombs on the climate and men returning from the wars found that the Welfare reforms of the Labour Government may have taken the edge off the most abject poverty but life was grey and grim. Given the existence of sunny advertisements for life down under, Under Capricorn's setting seems to promise an escape it does not deliver. The hot-house climate - evoked entirely under British studio lighting - serves to ferment bad blood and divisions transplanted from the old world.
Though politically, Britain had decisively embraced Socialism in 1945, Conservatism with a capital would reign at the heart of British film-making for another ten years at least. The Doctors had negotiated for themselves a very profitable freedom from the State and film-makers appeared to maintain their own patrician distance from the austere realities of postwar life. Escapist entertainment dominated the late forties and most of the fifties. When the war was not being re-fought and re-won by the middle-class heroes, costume drama was the norm. But where was any radical cultural renewal to come from? The Theatre was still under the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain's office. In 1949, the war against Hitler had been fought and won but books by such writers as James Joyce and Henry Miller were still liable to be confiscated and burned by British Customs. The controversies over Look Back in Anger and Lady Chatterley were many years ahead. Culture showed every sign of retreating into unthreatening cosiness.
Under Capricorn comes three years after Michael Powell's Black Narcissus, but appears to have much less to say about the Colonial questions which were very much on the political agenda at the time. Despite a precise historical setting - 1831, shortly after the accession of William IV - it is very hard to see how Under Capricorn served any mainstream social, political or moral agenda in 1949. To what extent is that a matter of confusion? Granted there are problems with the comic conception of the Governor and a complete lack of any normal societal picture. High Society is depicted as a series of caricatures while the criminal servants represent life at its most base with no good example for them to follow.
It was the consumer-boom of the nineteen-fifties which placed women back into the kitchen with a vengeance after their wartime adventures in employment. The austerity years of the late forties prepared the ground with a new feminine look in fashion and a reassertion of traditional rôles in cinema. Bergman's drinking in Notorious begins as an assertion of her free spirit; she is willful and reckless at the wheel. This does not preclude vulnerability and during the course of the picture she is reduced to a dependent thing that must be carried from the house. In Under Capricorn, she begins as a dependent drunk whose neglect of her household has allowed the rise of a phallic woman to usurp her duties and threaten her marriage. Milly carries the Freudian keys as a symbol of her reign. The kitchen is the main battleground but we hear of the linen-cupboard and in a central scene, Milly declines to put the mistress to bed, when she unlocks the bedroom door on a scene where Charles is attending Henrietta who is half-undressed.
The turning point must be the breakfast scene. Their unseen wedding-breakfast was disrupted by her vengeful brother. With Milly gone, Henrietta announces a new regime in the kitchen. In place of the strap, which she burns, servants will be kept in their place by a system of competition. Three breakfasts will be prepared and they will decide who gets the plumb job of cook. Tasting three breakfasts may bring in memories of The Three Bears. In fact, none of them is "just-right". We glimpse the unappetizing plates of burned bacon and raw egg - a particular Hitchcock aversion. Now we plunge into fairy-tale territory with a vengeance, as the cooks fade into the background as decorative ugly sisters, Charles unveils his faked invitation to the Ball. This re-entrance into the elegant world marks the sidelining of Sam as Charles effortlessly usurps his position at the ball and in preparing for it. This dive from realpolitik to fairy-tale suggests that the Sleeping Beauty must awaken to a life as Cinderella, combining the upstairs duties of a glamorous trophy with the downstairs routine of the household. The disastrous competition for jobs in lieu of any skills or training is quickly removed from our view; perhaps it is implied that in future Henrietta may need to get her own breakfast. By accepting the frock of Cinderella, she may be volunteering for the fluffy cuffs but she cannot be allowed simply to assume Milly's keys. That would be to substitute one phallic woman for another.
When she burns the strap, Henrietta rubs in the fact she has made a symbolic gesture. We have the impression it is done first to exorcise the ghost of Milly, secondly to strengthen her own faltering spirits and finally to impress the troublesome staff. Her first task is to mirror her own rebirth by giving back the birth-name of Susan to a servant -girl who answers to Crumpety on account of being weak in the head. Under Capricorn has another explicitly symbolic object in the form of the mirror. Given expressly as a means to call back Hattie's better self, Charles's gift of the mirror is an exercise in practical magic. The shrunken head is not explained by any of the characters, only Sam near the start of the picture describes the trade in such things with a disdainful curl of his lip. Certainly Charles has second thoughts about his deal with Sam on seeing that he might also have connections with an underworld. He is brought back on side by the gift of a hundred pounds but when he takes up the invitation to go to Minyago Yugilla, he makes sure he packs a pistol, even though he keeps it hidden by his coat-tails. Hattie seems to have discerned it when she calls for him to shoot the thing on the bed: on the staircase she asks him if he has it. Mae West's remark about a gun in the pocket seems an unsubtle interpretation of this but none of the symbols in Under Capricorn are notable for subtlety. In one of the many striking reflections in the film, a gun will be called for later, when Charles has lamed the mare. At this point, having been disarmed by long residence as a guest in the house, he has to call on Sam to do the deed. In what seems a clumsy piece of staging, Sam has to rush upstairs for his own gun. Yet it is the first time that we have seen Sam venture up the stairs in his own home.
A drama of usurpation throughout, the phallic woman and the effeminate man are to be banished by the end. As evil fairy and prince charming, they are exorcised in the final minutes. How the spell is broken is less easy to see. It is again Milly's overplaying of her hand - she does so three times during the film - which causes another spasm of jealous rage in Sam, as she implies that the expulsion of Charles and Henrietta back to Ireland is effectively a honeymoon. This provokes Sam to express the wish to sell up and follow them - to Milly's horror. By attempting the murder of Henrietta, Milly is exposed, castrated of her keys and expelled from the house. She is allowed to disappear, suggesting that she was more a spirit than a woman. We have to take it on trust that Henrietta's dipsomania is lifted with Milly's departure and that, in a sense, Milly has been Henrietta's delirium. It is when the men arrive to take Sam's statement and he sends them away that we see Henrietta half-descend the stairs. They embrace and go back up together, signalling the repair of their marriage. The next day he is taken into Sydney and she follows. Now Charles rises from his sickbed - perhaps with the implication that he has been sick throughout like Henrietta. His lie - made on his oath as a gentleman - finally lifts the curse. It is a selfless act by Charles which rescues the marriage but this leaves Sam seeming as weak as before, especially if we read the gulf between him and Henrietta to be the inverted one suggested. If he was disgusted by her seven years in the stinking hut, how are we are to assume he is mended by jealousy? Yet Charles has remained immaterial throughout the drama; his status has not improved. Viewed as s a Prince Charming, he has served the odd purpose of scaling Henrietta's tower in order to bring her firmly down to earth. His mission done, he must leave by the next swan.
The weakness of the conclusion is palpable. Milly's banishment is a magical event, the end of an evil spell but we know the curse of alcoholism is not lifted in a day and Henrietta is a recidivist in that respect. Samson's imprisonment is ended by Charles's lying narrative which rewrites the scene we witnessed. Even after several viewings, the shooting scene can seem murky: Sam seems to be raising his arm to strike Charles, rather than aim the gun to shoot him. The gun does remain in Sam's hand but held at a downward angle so as to be unlikely to make a shoulder-wound. In the end however, Sam is freed by the lie and crucially not by any positive deed of his own. There is said to have been footage shot of Sam in prison but it never made the finished print of the movie. The result is that the bitter-sweet quayside ending seems provisional
We might not expect much veracity from Under Capricorn as history. The middle-classes seem a remote and long-established caste with no pioneering sense of adventure or openness. You might almost think they had never left home. Sir Richard Adare is a fictional figure but he is based on Dublin-born Sir Richard Bourke, who was Governor of New South Wales from 3rd December 1831 to 5th December 1837. There is a suggestion of the tension between the new Governor and his subjects at the start of the film but it is not greatly explored. His headmasterly speech to the crowd is heckled by unseen voices. At the end he confides to his Cousin that the people do not yet know what they are in for. As a new broom, however, he is not seen to concern himself with any radical changes and when next we see him he is immersed in his bath-tub dictating a letter about the state of the harbour. Clearly his notion so renewal are superficial. and the only strong line he takes is over his cousin's dubious land deal, because of the necessity of appearing whiter-than-white.
In fact there was tension between Bourke and the Sydney community. He was something of a reformer, wishing, for example to restrict to fifty strokes the number of blows a man could rain upon his servant. He was also at the centre of the move to turn a community of emancipists into upstanding men with rights and responsibilities. It is said that Bourke's successful reforms were largely responsible for Britain's abandonment of transportation as a punishment in the 1840s.
Yet 1949, the fag-end of Empire, the year the Republic of Eire was proclaimed in Dublin and recognized by London, the year in which India adopted a constitution as a federal republic and Nehru became President, the year in which Holland granted sovereignty to Indonesia and France to Vietnam, was not a year to celebrate reforming colonial governors. Governor Adare is played by Cecil Parker as a comic and crusty old Conservative with an eye for pretty ladies and a soft-spot for his cousin. That was about as far as social criticism could go: British Colonial rule, displaced by more than a century and half the globe was embodied by an essentially amiable comedic character actor. He could put his pot-belly on display sure enough but before we know it he is up and dressed and giving orders. The bath scene may be construed in retrospect as a sign of confidence rather than vulnerability.
It may be that the Anglo-Irish background of the characters was intended to draw attention to British rule closer to home. It may also have helped to explain the financial embarrassment of Charles. We may also understand the flavour of an aristocratic country-set whose equine pursuits bore the foppish Charles and drive him to seek his fortune abroad. It also, implausibly, requires Sam and Henrietta to elope by sea and then overland to reach Gretna. Yet it could also be seen as interposing a buffer which precludes any more direct mockery of an English Colonial Governor. The climactic ball scene is explicitly signalled as an Irish Society event.
The question of nepotism is raised by Charles accompanying his Cousin to Australia. Though he enjoys privileged access to his relative - notably in his bath-tub - he does not enjoy any grace and favour official position. The banker Potter is clearly disappointed that he has solicited a penniless youngest son of an Irish Peer. It is the reflected light of his Cousin's rank which Sam hopes will attract the ladies and it is evident from the conversation of the guests that in himself Charles has only relative-value. From early in the movie, Charles is a commodity as much as Winter; the price he pays may seem steep but the groom knows a thoroughbred when he sees one.
There may have been a more thorough treatment of the Irish question in the original novel; in the film it keeps peeping through the surface like something that could not be adequately buried. We get, for instance the boorish comment made about the Irish by the Prison Governor at Flusky's dinner. Charles passes as the perfect Englishman, demonstrated by the way he deflects the remark with an airy riposte. A few moments later we will get to hear of Sam's long Irish memory for unforgiven injuries, when Henrietta reveals he has never forgiven Charles for his childhood laming of a hunter. There certainly was a strong Irish contingent in Sydney at the period in question however, it is difficult not to feel that the Irishness of these aristocrats serves mainly to mute the criticism of British colonialism.
Governor Adare's authority - which seems at risk at the start with the heckling at his arrival - has become more established by the climax of the film. Or he has retreated into the regions where he is least likely to be challenged: in the ballroom scene, he seems quite confident that his very public and abrupt change of heart over Henrietta will not undermine his authority. Charles underlines his vacillations but Sir Richard shamelessly applies a military rule to settle the matter: the later orders are correct. This is clearly a world where the Blimps can still enjoy some elbow-room and always find an arm to offer to an attractive lady. The fairy-tale world of the ball is something the camera is invited to share and enjoy; the exclusion of gloomy old Sam from this scene encourages us to see him as an impediment to Henrietta's social rehabilitation. Her reabsorption into the social whirl seems assured as the conversation drifts to horses. With exquisite timing, Sam arrives to intercept these exchanges of social tokens and to underline the underlying material basis of this world.
His boorish intrusion is unpleasant and embarrassing, especially as his Old Testament thunderings erupt into a scene of reconciliation. The camera concentrates on Henrietta's flight from the ball, when midnight has struck and her dream has ended. We hear the argument between Sir Richard and Sam escalate with the Governor reminding him forcibly of his emancipist past. Sam's explosive intrusion is a premature detonation which underlines his own weakness. It is also an exchange of insults rather than blows.
This final section of the film is clumsily designed as it is hard to see how either Sam or Henrietta can be socially rehabilitated for the happy ending. We last see them together at the quay and alone as the crowds drift away, so perhaps they are to be less fixated with social success from now on. Yet it is hard to imagine their life, now they have been awoken from suspended animation. Henrietta has already been shown to be a recidivist where alcohol is concerned and the banishing of Milly is not in itself enough to convince us of her lasting recovery. Sam meanwhile is released by the lie of a gentleman, rather than by any deed of his own. The late flowering of his love for Henrietta seems to be brought on in a spasm of jealousy when he thinks she is leaving with Charles. Charles has been defeated by Australia and the Colonial obstructions to social mobility remain firmly in place. It cannot be called a realistic or ironic ending as the social structures have been crudely drawn without much sense of documentary detail. It is this unreal social background which handicaps the film. It isn't as if this critique is thorough but it can hardly have been inadvertent.
Yet in the repair of his own marriage, he will present a new alliance at the film's ending: old titles and new money together represent a challenge to the old order. It is hardly the Socialist agenda that Britain had embraced in 1945 and it takes place under the continuity of the Union Jack but the Governor is a notable absentee at the departure of his Second Cousin. Charles's shadow, the gentleman-convict Winter, is the last man he speaks to on the harbour steps and as Charles departs, Winter rises, as it were, in his place. It is a nuanced end and dramatically unsatisfying. Yet it has a certain internal logic.
In fact the relations between Flusky and the established community seems to represent something more akin to political relations in Great Britain at the time. The First Reform Act of 1832 would extend the franchise to 100,000 males with a property qualification and that seems to be about as far as the politics of the film extend with Flusky wishing to be accepted into the ranks of an old-money élite. As a self-made man and Sydney's wealthiest land-owner he interprets his inner worthlessness to his past as a convict and member of the lower orders. The men of Sydney are happy to do business with him and even grace his table yet he can't feel he has arrived anywhere without the approval of the polite society of women. This rings false though he is happy enough to tell Charles that he was bait for them. In his desire for the vote of the women, Sam was way ahead of his times yet his pariah status in the community clearly constitutes a political estrangement. There is in the film a suggestion that an integration between the industrious energy of Flusky and the civilizing effects of polite society is a consummation devoutly to be wished for. The outcome of the film shows this to be premature or over-ambitious - maybe just the delusion of a dysfunctional marriage - and we are left with a fallback position, the restored couple through which a better society may come into being. As it is, the crowd disperses.
In the end, Charles summons up the moral courage to tell a lie. By blaspheming against his gentleman's honour, he frees the Fluskies from the curse which class had laid upon their marriage at its birth. This seems to be a magic formula but it does nothing to redeem the drama. This lying narrative is not dramatized as a flashback. at the end, Sam calls Charles Sir, as if acknowledging that he has become a true gentleman by denying any class-based notion honour. It is the convict-gentleman Winter who remains in Australia continuing as the secretary to the reunited Fluskies. On the soundtrack, Addinsell makes a reference back to the tune he had earlier used for the song, "Who gives the orders in Flusky's house?" This was intended to encourage Henrietta back into the kitchen. It was ironic at the time, as it was clear that Charles was taking charge of the house and heading for a show-down with Milly. By the end of the film, it hard to say how the reunited couple will now relate but the question implies a patriarchal answer. The Governor is noticeably absent from the send-off of his Cousin. The couple stand together as the unit of a new order but in 1831 it was more of a promise than a reality with female suffrage barely even discussed.
The social strata in the movie are as well defined as anything in Marxism. At the bottom we get the people who are bought and sold, mainly they are lumpen, like the useless kitchen staff. Opportunities to rise may be extended to fallen gentlemen in the shape of Winter and Charles but the social mobility of Sam inclines him to advance the interests of gentlemen rather than horse-thieves. He is blind to the pious social scheming of Milly, considering her a good woman till his eyes are finally opened. Milly can hypocritically propose a notion of class-solidarity to Sam, in order to advance her own case but her attitude to her own class is to beat them ruthlessly. Henrietta serves as a terrible warning about the dependency and decadence of the ruling class. When she gets her act together, she makes a theatrical display of burning the whip in the kitchen grate but immediately institutes the notion of competition between the staff for the post of cook. It seems this is to be the spur from now on. In the light of the three inedible breakfasts presented, it seems to have been a bad idea but the film prevents us dwelling on it too long by lurching into pantomime territory with a vengeance. Having been effectively the Three Bears without giving Goldilocks a breakfast that was "just right" the three cooks now blend into the background as Three Virtual Ugly Sisters to her Cinderella, when the invitation arrives to the Ball.
As period drama, Hitchcock's work here looks forward to Visconti's analyses of decay rather than backwards to the historical escapism of Selznick or Korda. The loving detail of the interiors reminds us that Visconti was often dismissed as essentially a set-decorator. The Visconti link would have been inescapable had Hitchcock cast Burt Lancaster in the Cotten rôle as had been his original plan. Cotten came to Under Capricorn immediately before his starring rôle as Holly Martins in The Third Man - a scenario which David Selznick had objected to as Pure Buggery. There was a certain gravity to the patrician Cotten which directors sought to illuminate with flashes of potential perversity. In The Third Man, does he want Alida Valli for herself or for her connection with his beloved Harry Lime? Valli had herself sacrificed everything for a queer servant in The Paradine Case. The triadic theme is taken further in Under Capricorn, where Cotten is in competition with a newcomer for the disregarded love of his own wife. Yet both parts involve the notion of transplantation and both involve a triadic relationship with possible homoemotional aspects. As the writer Martins, as the newspaper man Jedediah and as the contract-loving Sam, Cotten is tied to the written word. As a Samson or a Jedediah, he seems firmly Old Testament - in each of those rôles, he is a representative of the letter of the law. In Kane, he preserves the magnate's original pledges as a reproach.
Alida Valli was chosen by Visconti to star in his 1954 picture Senso, alongside another Hitchcock refugee, Farley Granger. There she plays a married Italian Countess who sacrifices everything to persue a handsome Prussian soldier. When she finally catches up with him, he is drunk, with another woman and mocks her mercilessly. Visconti's use of some of Hitchcock's stars suggests that when he embarked upon his own cycle of emotional melodramas, he had some models on which to draw. It is curious that a similar scene to the Governor's naked bath occurs in The Leopard in 1963, though only Wilding makes to fish for the soap between his Cousin's legs. Both establish a homo-social tone which is decidedly pre-Victorian. The way Wilding positions himself with a full view of his cousin's pot-belly and strategic foam will be replaced by a frostier distance when - fully-clothed and with the attorney-general in attendance, he comes to consider the dubious land deal. It is curious that Visconti's The Leopard has a naked bathroom scene early on and climaxes at a ball. Visconti's epic was set in he 1860s, dealing with the demise of the old aristocratic order and the rise of the bourgeoisie against a backdrop of Italian unification. The fact that Hitchcock had originally wanted Burt Lancaster to play Sam is fascinating, given that Lancaster's patrician qualities were to develop over time. In the character of the Prince, Lancaster combines the governatorial rôle with one of relinquishment - we are some thirty years or more down the road. If we are seeking the antecedents of Visconti's Cinema of Twilight, Under Capricorn must come high on the list. Senso was the first Italian colour picture and it erupts, five years after Under Capricorn, into a landscape dominated by Neo-Realism. The grand opera which Hitchcock had approached in his set pieces now forms an explicit backdrop to the story. No doubt Visconti could have argued with Puccini that Verismo was still being served so long as your central characters are operatic enough.
"You don't remember?" We have come to think of Vertigo as the Pygmalian story par excellence, the story of a man who tries to recreate a woman in the image of one he has lost. It can obscure the fact that the first part of the picture is also about rebuilding a woman. Madeleine Elster has been taken over by the spirit of her ancestor, a dark distracted entity which is urging her to suicide. From the crude Freudism of his earlier psychological efforts, Hitchcock appears to have moved into Jungian territory: a retired detective enters a maze. He pursues a spiralling path to try to reach the goal of the individuation process for Madeleine. We reach a moment of truth and at that point the self appears to destroy itself. In fact, the story of the haunting was a fiction: Madeleine was a phantom. Ironically, the dark ancestor seems once to have lived. In the second part of the picture, the detective finds the woman who has impersonated Madeleine and attempts to reconstruct her. The focus shifts to the external and the woman within complains he does not want to love her for herself. She cannot bring herself to tell him the truth but a piece of jewelry gives her away and he uncovers her identity. For a second time, the arrival at the centre of the spiral amounts to a death.
Vertigo is a hall of mirrors infinitely more complex and intriguing than Under Capricorn. It has also received a great deal more attention from audiences and critics, especially over the last twenty years since its re-release. On the surface it would seem to have little in common with the earlier picture but in both a man rescues a woman from the drink. In both, the woman is another man's wife or appears to be. Vertigo's use of multiple mirrors creates a dazzling array of reflections. If Henrietta is haunted by her own past, Madeleine seems to be haunted by another woman. Henrietta has a flesh and blood shadow - Milly seems more real than she herself and she threatens to supplant the mistress. The class divide between Henrietta and Milly reflects the division between herself and her husband. Vertigo is also the tale of class division: the vulnerable kept woman Carlotta loses her mind when deserted by her man. She is not acknowledged as his wife so her empty existence leads to her distraction and suicide. In the second half of the picture, the shop assistant Judy becomes a kept woman as she is progressively transformed back into the rôle of Madeleine. That process leads to her death and makes real the fate of Carlotta. It is curious that Carlotta Valdès is given the dates 1831 - 1857, so being born in the exact year that Under Capricorn is set. It is a ruby necklace which gives Judy away. Henrietta and Charles disparage the idea of wearing rubies, so Sam conceals them.
Near the midway point of Vertigo, Madeleine describes the way she is a mystery to herself. She describes the experience in terms of a long corridor and fragments of mirrors, nothing but darkness but, "I've always come back." though "There's someone with me who says I must die." In Under Capricorn, Charles presents Hattie with a mirror in which she is to summon back Sister Hattie from the shadows. In Vertigo, Madeleine cries out, "If I could just find the key!" In Under Capricorn, Charles insists that now she has returned, Hattie must take possession of the housekeeper's keys. In Vertigo the theme of falling is reiterated over and over while at the climax of Henrietta's narration in under Capricorn she describes her own moral fall, "Down, down, down!" This scene is a melodrama in the original technical sense of being a narrative with underlying music. This nine-minute single take is a tour-de-force and probably the highlight of the movie. Richard Addinsell's score is subtle here, stealing in with an Irish tune on the fiddle and moving towards a portentous Wagnerian gloom. Bergman encompasses the varied moods of this narrative as beautifully as if it were a great aria. To have done it in one take was something of a miracle.
Sam's willingness to ride into Sydney with her to buy finery is set aside when Charles offers to take his place. As Henrietta regains her dignity, she seems to move ever further away from Sam and into the arms of the suitor of her own class. In Vertigo, Scottie will try to turn an accessible shop-assistant into a more elegant and remote woman, a woman of higher status than himself. The irony of course is that she has already played that rôle for another man.
The gender and class conflicts of Under Capricorn are quite directly expressed. Those of Vertigo are easier to miss. For example the character of Midge is often described as motherly and cited as one of the reasons Scottie cannot commit to a full relationship with her. In fact, Midge is a working woman who does nothing domestic in the movie. The only person who enters the kitchen area of her apartment is Scottie himself who makes a drink there. In his own apartment, nursing the recovering Madeleine, it is easy to pick up on the possible sexual fetishism of the things done to her hair and clothes while she sleeps. Yet his work with taking out hairpins, drying clothes, making coffee and supplying the warmth of a hearth are all traditionally feminine and nurturing tasks. Later in the movie, when he is romancing Judy, it is clear she is a bed-sit working girl and not a home-maker. There is no kitchen in her room in the Empire hotel. His taking her out to dinner seems a romantic treat yet much is made of the fact that she is actually hungry. The picture of this older man as a lover may partly hide her girlish enjoyment of Scottie as mother. His infantilising effect on her is perhaps too clearly seen in the girl-in-corner attitude she adopts in the department store. If the phallic woman of Under Capricorn was stubborn and keeps returning, Judy's hard-faced attitude thaws quickly and is seen as a sign of her vulnerability. Vertigo is not a film which highly profiles any social comment but, like the partly-hidden issues of ethnicity in the movie, there are rich nuances which help give that impression of extraordinary depth.
It would be hard to think of any picture which on the surface seems further removed from Under Capricorn than Citizen Kane. The only connection would seem to be Joe Cotten and in Welles's picture, he plays a supporting rôle as Jedediah, Kane's college chum and conscience until they become estranged. Citizen Kane is noirish, high contrast, black and white, loud and brash like the central figure in his youth. Yet there are strong thematic similarities; both concern a central figure who builds a pleasure-palace which turns into a virtual prison. Both feature innovative camera techniques. Both feature explicit debates about what constitutes a gentleman. Both have Dickensian elements which derive from Great Expectations. Both feature the theme of reconnection to the past. Both feature a love affair across the class-divide which goes badly awry. Both feature a central male character who grows powerful and rich but remains politically isolated. Both feature a female alcoholic who is nearly poisoned by a sleeping draught - in both cases, the bottle even has the same Wonderland look.
While Kane becomes ever more full of himself, Jedediah takes to drinking and withdraws. The landscape with which he is associated: saloon doors, the glass offices within a newspaper office and even props such as the hat which he wears and the cigars he smokes are remarkably similar in the imagined Sydney Joe Cotten inhabits in the opening scenes of Under Capricorn. Sam can be seen as combining the wealth of Kane with the bad conscience of Jedediah. Kane's second wife is also a notable drunk, though more aggressive than the maudlin Henrietta.
The contrast of tone and technique are more striking, however. Welles does everything he can to vary the narrative as a collage of recollections and supposed archive footage. Time is chopped up as we see an accelerated version of Kane's life in the opening minutes then re-examine it from several different points of view. Despite this, it is one of the major disappointments of Kane that the portrait which so many hands paint turns out to be the same. For all the virtuosity and worn film stock, Kane lacks the epic uncertainties of any true documentary. The ultimate boys' toys film, it tells the saga of a man deprived of his sledge who runs a newspaper as a game and plays with people's lives to console himself. It may be ironic that the film itself plays with a life by cutting it up and piecing it back together, however the insistent low-angle shots of the anti-hero betray the fact that the view is essentially infantile. It is also an aggressively male film, which may be why it has been a favourite of male critics for decades. Any comparison with Welles always shows Hitchcock to be comparatively quiet, feline and feminine.
While Welles allows Cotten to write his scathing review of Susan's operatic debut while drunk, as if following the old adage in vino veritas, Hitchcock has a more Keatsian take on Truth and Beauty so that Bergman's famous aria comes after a night at the ball when she has drunk nothing. While those round her drink champagne, she is depicted with a slightly lurid green salad at the ball, as if to signal the recovery of her wilted self and the restoration of her salad days.
The contrast between the two magical kingdoms is also pronounced. While Xanadu blackly reaches heavenwards, behind fences, like the Tower of Babel, Minyago Yugilla lies white and open and accessible in the Australian sunlight. Male and Female buildings. The distortions of scale in Xanadu are not attempted in Hitchcock's film, rather the promised space seems to press in on the characters, Sam oppressed by his own inertia as Kane is by the empty triumph of his will.
Sunset
Under Capricorn seemed to be looking back as if to refurbish the myths, dangling the possibility of romance only to acknowledge it was impossible, finally, without a great deal of conviction, taking refuge in the sanctity of marriage. About a year later, Billy Wilder was to take the Orpheus myth and twist it to breaking-point in the blackest of all his comedies. In Sunset Boulevard, the crisis of cinema was directly addressed and the gaze of the camera becomes reflexive and regressive. The agony is played out as lacerating black comedy which offered at least the alleviation of lancing a boil. In Under Capricorn, the ache is displaced historically and the great star is given her glorious sunset. Yet despite the Technicolor the picture has got small in the sense that the star is bigger than the fragile framework can hold. The fact that Bergman, in reality three years younger than Wilding, is explicitly required to be considerably older than him marks the changing relationship. This aspect of the script was radically changed from the novel, where the age-difference was substantial and a romance out of the question. In the film, the romance is clearly wrong but it is treated at length and with apparent seriousness, despite the ironic trappings of the context. Wilder had the courage to take absurd inversions to their limit: a much older woman, not just a weak rescuer but a dead one, not a Sleeping Beauty but a Sleeping Salome or Gorgon, not a rebuilt woman but a corrupted man, not an ambitious servant but a demoted husband, not a party to which no one comes but a card game of ghosts, not a magic life-restoring mirror but the silver screen itself as the serial killer, as surely as in Peeping Tom.
It was perverse of the French to acclaim Under Capricorn as among the greatest films ever made. It is perverse itself: showy yet secretive. Yet this once-thought mainstream and anonymous costumer, undeniably lacking some of the more obvious Hitchcock trademarks, may turn out after all to be one of his most personal creations. Or will people always be tempted to throw stones at glass houses?
It is a broken-backed movie in the end. It might on paper have worked as a wisp of a thing but its romance is uncomfortable, its morality obscure and its tone misjudged. As a fairy-story it lacks lightness of touch, as politics it is evasive and as a love story it is frustrating. There was a satiric edge to all the characters which is still detectable in the finished script: everything down-under is to be an inversion. However the film insists on the central drama being played with massive solemnity. There is a great operatic solo for Bergman but it prevents her being part of a comedic experience. We are left with the final ambiguity - is this a political fable that is blunted by its fairy-tale evasions or is it a piece of escapism that has been overloaded with an adult theme? These tensions may or may not correspond to the division of labour on the script. It seems likely that the original novel was the origin for the inversions of character and that the ironic tone was misjudged in its conversion to film. How consciously was the social criticism muted? Was it ever a biting satire? I suspect that the duality may have extended into the minds of the authors, who may have been gazing into mirrors but were firmly based in the realities of the twelve-year period between the book's writing and the making of the film. This is why it it is hard to take too seriously the claims that the shrunken head and the name of the dwelling represent the absent aboriginals. There is no fundamental regard for territory here - in fact the film repeatedly erases any sense of realistic space: we regularly hear about the distance of the Flusky house from Sydney but it is a distance traversed like a magic carpet. Nor is the house related to the soil or the crops or the grazing. Even if the name on the sign is derived from an aboriginal language it serves merely as a hocus-pocus word which announces a magical domain. It is not a film about Australia's bad conscience with regard to its native population so much as a troubled fever-dream at the end of the British Empire.
It might be illuminating to compare and contrast Under Capricorn with Black Narcissus of 1946, another hot-house melodrama photographed in Technicolor by Jack Cardiff on studio sets masquerading as exotic climes. Notably that tale of when nuns go bad ends with the retreat of the order from their convent, previously a harem. Yet that tale of the end of Empire is conceived primarily in cultural terms: the convent is meant to be as self-sufficient as possible but the climate is inhospitable and the complex relations between native people, agent and nuns will defeat their best attempts at coexistence. The economic basis of Empire is largely ignored by showing the occupying aliens as a well-meaning community of mainly unthreatening nuns. The economic skeleton of Empire is given a higher profile in Under Capricorn, though it seems to have no grasp of issues like crops, soil, climate, or any labour apart from domestic. The world of Under Capricorn is one of the written contract.
The problem of tone is mirrored by the problem of style. We begin with the Dickensian world of Potter, we observe the Gilbertian antics of Sir Richard, we lurch briefly into Stevenson territory for a Black Spot moment, when the head arrives. The casual trade in men which is harshly conceived as if by John Gay or even Brecht takes us into a startling theatre of cruelty and alienation but the shop is minded by another round, Dickensian figure who resembles a Cruikshank drawing. With the transition to Minyago Yugilla, we enter magical territory and hints of Wonderland in its cruelty and word-play.
Does Bergman overplay her rôle? Opinions will differ on this. Clearly conceived as a set of emotions, expressed poetically, the art is all in the transitions between them. The film has been called a hymn to Bergman's face and so the part is conceived mainly in the minor keys. There remains the question of her accent. I think she must have been coached during the making of the film and I'd guess the ball scene and Charles's sick-bed scene were filmed first. Here there is a pronounced accent and it certainly isn't Irish. The great distracted entrance-scene finds her accent at its best, I think. I especially like the way she stumbles on her way down to the end of the table and her courtly leave-taking, which is wrong in exactly the right drunken way.
The script contains many invitations to grand operatic rhetoric but the performances are remarkable for their sotto voce quality and marvellous sense of line. Margaret Leighton has a solo of nearly four minutes which contrasts with Bergman's eight minute show-stopper. Many would consider that the music of this more demotic figure is more elusive than the grand style of Bergman's part. Leighton uses an endless variety of pitch, tone and rhythm to make this solo a triumph of the legato style.
Bergman's performance is variable, especially her Irish accent. Fortunately in the great moments she manages a shy trailing inflection which is plausible. Her big operatic scene has only the momentarily jarring vowel-sound of "Dahn, dahn, dahn!" Yet this is so clearly an operatic aria with sculptural gestures that the continental vowels serve to remind us this is an international diva at work. In the corresponding place in a romantic opera we might expect the convention of a Mad Scene. In operas such as Lucia di Lammermoor, the heroine loses her mind and goes sailing off into the vocal stratosphere with only a flute or two for company. This being an inverted romance, the big scene is actually a therapeutic reconnection with the past and a truth she has avoided too long. It is, so far as I can gather, the unique example of a Sane Scene.
This film in which Hitchcock is not really himself, written by a decoder of secret messages has an unusually stark presentation of class relations. The relations of Capital to Labour are here reinforced by all the power of the State: the ex-convicts may aspire, like Sam, to succeed materially, though he has no delusions about such people. His route to success no longer appears to be open and the system of pink-slips now seems to compel the emancipists to labour for employers. Though Sam appears to have a rapid turnover of staff, those seen are all domestic so there are limits to how complete the societal view is, yet it is certainly schematic. In Lady Henrietta, to crown it all, we have a classic symbol of the decadent ruling class: as Milly labours and grows ever stronger in the household, Henrietta languishes and becomes ever more dependent.
Not until Losey's The Servant do we get a more explicit treatment of a domestic class struggle in a British movie. In Losey's film, the servant is seen as a threat to the old order bringing a Dionysian chaos into the household. Those destructive forces are divided in two in Under Capricorn: the useless, lazy and comic servants dissipate their energies in squabbling and time-wasting. They are certainly lumpen enough, representing a Hobbesian level of unenlightened brute existence, which cannot even rise when offered the incentive to compete. In the later film, the domestic staff have dwindled to an affordable single butler and the master is all at sea on a rising tide of hedonistic sixties individualism. Drink, sex and drugs blur the boundaries of the permissible. The genders are inverted but a comparable conflict erupts between established servant and a high status intruder, in this case the aristocratic fiancée. As with Milly, the bad servant is dismissed but later returns. By the sixties, however the domination which was once wielded in earnest has become a fetishized game of power and who ends up on top may be a happy accident. Yet Barrett's motives remain obscure: there are strong hints of sexual competition which are later muddied by his apparent incest. In the end the class struggle has been reimagined in terms of flies living off a corpse. Class consciousness has disappeared along with any other moral compass.
In both movies, the Marxian layers are broken through by thrusting individuals whose ambitions are more selfish than political. In the same period - which partly coincides with Hitchcock's later work - we get the rise of the European film-makers who combined Marxian analysis with a relish of decay. Hitchcock's cold-war films such as Topaz offer a cynical view of defectors who prove to be selfish individualists and revolutionary freedom-fighters who wear army dress but keep mistresses in appropriated mansions. It is hard not to see Hitchcock's conservatism as that of a fat-boy who would prefer to eat a solitary dinner than have much truck with his bullying peers. In the end he seems to have been all too willing to be drawn into the rôle of cold-war warrior by numbers but his earlier films are more sceptical about the ruling class. In this respect, I consider the earlier version of The Man Who Knew Too Much to be rather more than a smart Bulldog Drummond story: the world into which our upper-class hero descends is a shabby-genteel underground of disguised buildings and strange cults.
Though the class background of Under Capricorn seems almost schematically Marxist, there is no prospect in this world of co-operation, communal values or mass action. At the bottom, we have the Hobbesian brutes and out of that slime a few ambitious and selfish individuals will rise to dominate the disorganized masses. At the point where the film seems to move towards advocating a more compassionate form of management, the experiment comes to an abrupt end with the presentation of three inedible breakfasts. None of these creatures has the skill to cook, they have only followed orders. There is a moment when Henrietta restores the name Susan to a girl called Crumpety. On the one hand this is a reflection of her own move towards rediscovery of herself but it also suggests a symbolic raising of a single individual out of the undifferentiated mass. This moment has the mystery of a solemn blessing and there may be a hint of Christianity in her selection of the weakest in mind. It mainly serves to focus attention upon herself as the bestower of blessings. The rabble seemed nonplused by this but their calm seems unreal and unlikely to last. It is however, the last we hear of them before the film plunges into fairy-tale and melodrama.
It is hard to think of any Hitchcock film which ends with social jubilation and the integration of the hero into a wider society. Pairs may bond, marriages may be made or rescued or renewed but there is a suspicion of social success which is notable. Though it is a minor film, Rich and Strange gives us the purest form of one of Hitchcock's underlying moralities: happiness lies in cultivating one's own garden. It was an attitude he adopted in his own life, preferring life at home to Hollywood celebrity circles. At its most self-centred, we learn that Hitchcock was extremely concerned for his own comfort, having gourmet meals flown in for his solitary enjoyment and so loathing the discomforts of outdoors shooting that he would decamp prematurely from locations and risk compromising his own movie by substituting process shots for the desired footage. His happy endings are often tentative and there is the suggestion that the cycle may be about to begin again, for example the threatened meeting with a stranger on a train at the end of that film.
The writers of one popular online guide to Under Capricorn remark that the deaths of Cronyn and the others involved in the production must leave its raison d'être now forever obscure. It may be that investigation of Cronyn's papers will illuminate the complex history of the script. Until now, the reputation of the film has been so low that no one appears to have done so. However, the hermetic world of this film can be opened a little with the clue that Helen Simpson's original novel was a comedy. This has often caused great surprise to viewers of the movie who find that its themes of murder, adultery, imprisonment and alcoholism are on the heavy side. We know that Hitchcock had a very dark sense of humour but we find little of that characteristic humour here. I don't know if he did fully appreciated the dry and ironic humour of a comedy of inversions but the vestiges of that structure are still detectable in the product he delivered to the market-place and which was so decisively rejected. It is as if he has placed a great slab of red meat on top of a lemon water-ice and that red meat is Ingrid Bergman.
Hitchcock was besotted with Bergman and the script and direction seem to have been adjusted to give more heft and weight to her part. Her great operatic performance is of course the main reason for seeing the film but the part wasn't originally anything like so grand. To match her, he cast Joe Cotten, another weighty actor, having wanted Burt Lancaster originally. The result is that only Cecil Parker properly inhabits the toy-town world of ironic comedy while Michael Wilding is required to straddle two worlds - as a silly fop and romantic lead. The minor parts of clergyman, doctor and banker retain some of their ironic unsuitability but we are inclined to miss it in a piece so freighted with dark and heavy material. It was almost as if a pair of international Verdi singers were to be introduced into a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, bringing their own material with them. Considered as a sharp little sorbet that acquired a great big slice of rare Bergman in a kitchen with too many cooks, Under Capricorn can be seen as a strange confection indeed. Hitch got his star, she got a juicy rôle and audiences ever since have struggled to finish the dish.
In the heyday of the Hollywood studio-system, stars were cast as the conveyor-belt kept rolling. Refuse too many proffered parts and even major stars could find themselves suspended. Rewrites were common enough but it wasn't until the twilight of the studios that the stars came into their own as the makers or breakers of projects. According to William Goldman, a star today has to have everything. Coming at the transitional period when directors were forming their own production companies, Hitchcock made Rope entirely according to his own recipe. Under Capricorn involved compromise to lure the star and it unbalanced what was always a fragile property. It is known that Hitchcock had bought an option on the story when it was new. It is not hard to imagine him rifling through old properties to find a part for his favourite star. Dazzled by the jewel, he gave less than full attention to its setting and maybe missed the ironic intent. The conflicts of writers, actors, styles and novel filming techniques serve to make Under Capricorn a fascinating work. Like Henrietta herself the resulting movie is introspective, perverse, riddled with conflicts, deeply flawed, infuriating and often silly. It is also very beautiful and demands rescuing from a neglect which once threatened to be terminal.
Under Capricorn is an usually rich and suggestive film. The mythic material seems too close to the surface to have been properly digested. Yet the whole film can be seen as a system of exchanges and inversions, by no means all of which have yet been uncovered. This underworld of signs and gestures is a subject that might be expected to lend itself to noir treatment but Under Capricorn is inverted noir. Few scenes are intended to take place at night and those that do have the house illuminated from within like a fairy palace or by the flashes of lightning outside the bedroom window at the climax. Hitchcock's position on the margins of noir in some pictures is much discussed but here - as in Rope - we have dark materials treated to the strong illumination of Technicolor. On Black Narcissus and A Matter of Life and Death, Jack Cardiff had battled and prevailed over Natalie Kalmus for the right to desaturate the garish palette associated with the system. It was the one aspect of the film of Black Narcissus which Rumer Godden appreciated, marvelling at the way the cinematography had suggested the altitude of the convent. Under Capricorn still circulates mainly in poor prints which cause skin tones to appear green but the Claudean sunset glow of Cardiff's colour scheme can still just be discerned.
Some viewers have called it the film in which Hitchcock is least himself. Often this goes with some gesture towards other films it is assumed to belong with, such as Gainsborough costumers or Douglas Sirk melodramas. Yet it really does not belong with them and nobody has proposed any model for it in the cinema of the time in America or Europe. Its experimental nature has taken us way beyond the Hitchcock persona and fingerprints. The closest we get to the methods of Under Capricorn are the historical melodramas of Luchino Visconti. A full appreciation of Senso, made just five years after Capricorn, is overdue and must await the general availability of the restored version by Rotunno. The Leopard, released in 1963, would seem to mark the apogee of the Marxist drama of class-eclipse laid out in sunset raptures, however its extra length and width accommodate the demands of spectacle and sometimes violent action which Hitchcock disdained. If we are looking for the familiar profile of the mischievous dark humourist, it can be seen mainly in the grand guignol of the shrunken head. However, the searching Hitchcock, the dandy-aesthete Hitchcock, the challenging Hitchcock, the technically-curious Hitchcock are all well in evidence.
In Under Capricorn, Hitchcock looks forward to the European art cinema of the sixties and backwards not so much to Hollywood or British costumers as to the German Kammerspiele of the UFA-Decla-Bioscop period. Shot almost entirely on studio sets packed with expressionist design, these pieces by Dreyer, Lang, Murnau and others were a quality product for a discerning market in the Weimar period. Placing the best actors in real spaces, they explored the mysteries of human relationships at close quarters and without violent action. Austere, intense and serious in tone, they were the cinema's highly civilized chamber music. However, by 1949, they were a quarter of a century past and the product of a defeated and dubious culture. It was clearly the wrong time to be reviving their philosophy but there is at least one striking example of Hitchcock casting an actor who had worked in the medium. That was Walter Slezak, the fleshy but seemingly amiable German Captain in Lifeboat, 1943. Slezak had ballooned in weight and lost the youthful good looks which had landed him the part of Mikhael in Dreyer's 1924 Kammerspiel. If Rope and Lifeboat contain allusions to the Nietzschian Superman and reminded audiences of recent atrocities in Europe, Under Capricorn harks back to a Germany which was concerned with the intimate and human.
The Kammerspiel genre has often been contrasted with expressionism, being concerned with the normal and conversational rather than the fantastic and extreme. Strictly the Kammerspiel was a silent film genre though the arrival of sound tended to impose practical conditions which to some extent mimicked the artistic constrictions of the genre. Under Capricorn is a study in morbid psychology and inclines more to the operatic than the conversational. It is really a hybrid with some very lumpy contrasts of acting styles. Bergman's stylized gestures and delivery in her big solo are about as far from conversational as can be gone without notating the actual pitches of the syllables. Hitchcock was famously wedded to the sound-stage as his laboratory, throughout his career, often neglecting location work in favour of process shots. In some movies this can disturb the illusion but Under Capricorn is not spoiled by its synthetic aspects: an exotic hothouse bloom, it could hardly have survived out of doors. It was to have successors from directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Ozu, Fassbinder and Dreyer himself, whose Gertrud of 1964 similarly trains its long unbroken gaze on flawed relationships, to the bafflement of a public seeking more visceral excitement.
Hitchcock has become the most written-about director because of his skill in making pictures which appeal to both the cognoscenti and the general public but he was goaded into pure artistic mode by an interviewer who asked him about his "tricks" - he complained that no one would ask a painter that sort of question. Under Capricorn is his most uncompromising film, his most experimental and probably his most demanding. Fans of the more public Hitchcock have complained of the painful duty of making themselves sit through it even once. Not in one viewing, perhaps not even in a dozen will its subtleties reveal themselves. Yet, as I hope to have suggested, it is a piece which relates - often ironically - to a wide range of literary and filmic formulae in order to deny them, frustrate them and question them. Though inward-looking in tone, it is not hermetic or secretive intentionally, though its characters may be. All we have to do is to try to answer the questions which Henrietta asks the servants in the kitchen as she burns the strap, "Did you see what I did just now? Do you know what it means?" The move from the past into the present tense is significant and I would like to think it indicates a better future for this beautiful and under-appreciated film.
Reading List:
ABC Website: Timeline of Australian History, 1940s
Australian Government Website: The Role of the Governor in New South Wales: 1788 - 1856
David Boyd: The Parted Eye, Spellbound and Psychoanalysis, a paper presented at the Alfred Hitchcock conference For the Love of Fear, convened by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, held from 31 March to 2 April 2000.
Michael Brooke: Gainsborough Melodrama, BFI ScreenOnline Website
Charlotte Chandler: "It's only a Movie," 2005
Commonwealth Heads of Government Website: History of the Commonwealth.
Commonwealth History Project Website: Background briefing: Australia in the post&endash;war period, Part A: Immigration policy
Bosley Crowther: Review of Under Capricorn, in New York Times, 9th September, 1949
Richard A. Harris, Michael S. Lasky: The Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock, extract online
J. F. Hooan: The Irish in Australia, 1887, online edition consulted.
James Morrison: Hitchcock's Ireland: The Performance of Irish Identity in Juno and the Paycock and Under Capricorn, North Carolina State University, 1999
Matt Murphy: The Truth About Eliza Donnithorne, online article, May 2004.
Christian Palmer & Mervyn L. Tano: Mokomokai: Commercialization & Desacralization, International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management Denver, Colorado, n. d.. but c 2001, viewed as online pdf document, July 2006
Douglas Pye: In and Around The Paradine Case: Control, Confession and the Claims of Marriage, in Rouge online magazine, 2004
François Truffaut: Hitchcock, conversation about Under Capricorn, viewed in online transcription
UK Parliament Website: House of Commons: Select Committee on Health: Third Report: The Welfare of Former British Child Migrants: Australia, 1998
David Widgery: Under Capricorn, a review of 2 books: Taming The Concrete Jungle; The Builders Labourers' Story by Pete Thomas, Australian Builders Labourers Federation & Black War by Clive Turnbull, Sun Books, From International Socialism, 1st series, No.91, September 1976, transcribed & marked up by Einde O'Callaghan for the Marxists' Internet Archive.