Since Adare is walking, those dollies seem like his subjective POV, but then he enters the shot from over his own shoulder, as it were, and the camera now follows him as he walks around the side of the house, peeking voyeuristically and Hitchcockianly into the succeeding rooms, each like its own stage set. It’s the scene that begins with the point of view of our footloose hero, Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), as he approaches the beautiful and unreal mansion of gruff Australian landowner Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten).Īt first, shots of Adare alternate with dollies forward to the front door. Personal note: When I gave a university lecture on the interaction of shots and cuts, I used the Odessa Steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) for the demonstration of editing, and for the demonstration of virtuoso staging within a single shot, I used an early sequence-shot from Under Capricorn. The material is no longer confined to a single set and consists of many scenes in many locations, yet Hitchcock chooses to stage most scenes either in a single shot, whether actual or cleverly fabricated, or else with a minimal use of editing, only cutting judiciously to make an emotional or narrational point, like a grandiloquent and elevated orator who knows exactly when to breathe and when to toss in a counterpoint of vulgar slang. Having proven (to himself, if no one else cared) that he could pull off such an extreme stylistic choice, Hitchcock now applied the principal of long elaborate takes to Under Capricorn, though less strictly. For students of photography and mise-en-scène, the results were jaw-dropping and riveting exercises in “pure cinema”. After all this work, the “average” viewer either didn’t notice or felt inexplicably uncomfortable and claustrophobic. The movements of actors and camera required precision blocking, with assistants quietly rolling furniture out of the way. In a theatre, projection reels could hold 20 minutes of film before a reel change made it necessary to switch to the second projector (gosh, this sound prehistoric), so Hitchcock disguised the mid-reel cut via brief close-ups of an actor’s back, thus presenting the illusion of an unbroken 20-minute shot. In the stagebound Rope, Hitchcock had amused himself by staging the action in unbroken ten-minute shots, which was as much film as a 35mm camera could hold. Hitchcock decided to modify a practice from his previous film. In Hitchcock’s film, the lighting and painted backdrops are similarly eye-popping.Įven more glorious is the second experimental element, which explains why no less than an unheard-of four camera operators are listed. These are films that glory in the artificiality of their Technicolor. This time he employed the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who’d been dazzling the world with his work for a series of films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), which won him an Oscar, and The Red Shoes (1948), a Best Picture nominee. The first was Technicolor, for this was his second color movie after Rope (1948). Hitchcock experimented with at least two elements in Under Capricorn. Even so, it was possible to grasp something of its faded glory, which we now see clearly and creamily in this 4K digital restoration. This film was dismissed on its release as a talky costume drama and a warmed-over Rebecca, and in the home video era, it has floated around in lousy prints painful to the eye and ear, as though crunched into the mud by a horse and carriage. Fortunately, that never stopped him from experimenting. When he interviewed Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut called Under Capricorn a beautiful movie, as it is, but Hitchcock tended to be locked into a commercial view that the box office decided which of his films were failures. That’s why this Blu-ray of Under Capricorn (1949) is among the most important digital restorations of the year. Well, there’s another example, combining both these descriptions, that’s among the director’s most unseen and disregarded movies, yet on most days I think it’s easily in his top ten. If asked to name a Hitchcock movie where Ingrid Bergman plays a put-upon wife suffering a breakdown, your mind might leap to Notorious (1946). If you were asked to name an Alfred Hitchcock movie about a big gothic mansion inhabited by a fragile wife, an imperious husband and a sinister housekeeper, you’d probably go straight to Rebecca, his Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1940.
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