- Revisiting more contemporary and modern critical appreciation
- Alfred Hitchcock goes south – of the equator, to deliver mixed results
- Costume drama split the critics but all agreed on its technical excellence
- But its intrinsic beauty couldn’t deflect box office failure and outsider status
Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.
Under Capricorn: Writing on a Classic, Pt 2: More writing; Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Home video

Caricatured: Michael Wilding, Joseph Cotten and Ingrid Bergman in promo paper sculpture art by Jacques Kapralik
Under Capricorn is fortunate in having a number of exploitable angles that can be used to parlay sturdy initial grosses. On the long pull through all situations, though, boxoffice will be spotty. Ingrid Bergman name will be a potent help, and there are Technicolor, Joseph Cotten and Alfred Hitchcock as added lures to get ticket sales going, even though it doesn’t appear likely momentum will be maintained in the general market.
It is overlong and talky, with scant measure of the Hitchcock thriller tricks that could have sharpened general reception. A moody melodrama, full of long speeches and obvious movement, it uses up one hour and 56 minutes in developing a story that would have had more impact had not Hitchcock dwelt so tediously on expanded single scenes. He gives it some air of expectancy, but this flavor eventually becomes buried in the slow resolution of tangled human relationships into a happy ending.
Essentially, plot concerns a gentlewoman who marries below her station in life, becomes a dipso but eventually finds happiness. The tortuous emotional gamut through which Miss Bergman runs lends itself to exploitation angles that will attract the femme ticket buyers. It is the latter that will give Capricorn its best reception. Miss Bergman’s scenes have her own particular brand of thesping magic. On their own, they glow, but when combined with the other lengthy sequences the effect is dulled. Time of the plot is 1831, in Sydney, N.S.W., during that period when a convict, after serving his time, could start life anew with a clean slate. Such a man is Joseph Cotten, former groom and now Miss Bergman’s husband. Cotten has become a man of wealth, but is not accepted socially.

Bergman and Wilding (alt)
That fact, along with his past crime—the killing of his wife’s brother, a deed committed by Miss Bergman but for which he took the blame—are the motives stressed as causing the wife’s addiction to the bottle. However, the finale rushes in to place the blame for all the unhappiness on the shoulders of a jealous housekeeper, who fosters the emotional play in the hopes she will catch Cotten. In an opening sequence, Hitchcock plants fact that Australian aborigines shrink the heads of their victims. One hundred minutes later he uses a mummified head as the single shocker in the footage. It will cause a round of horrified gasps. In between, he is just as obvious in the development, resulting in a regrettable lack of the anticipated Hitchcock subtleties.
A key character in the events that put Miss Bergman back on the road to happiness is played by Michael Wilding, a name in British films. He is seen as a dashing young Irishman whose interest in the dipso helps to straighten her out. He will be liked. Margaret Leighton does the housekeeper, an unrelieved heavy so obvious that the other characters should have seen through her. Cecil Parker does nice work as the governor of Australia and there are capable performances by such Britishers as Denis O’Dea and Jack Watling, among others.
Photography is another example of Hitchcock’s bent for an extremely mobile camera, playing long scenes in one take, but the moving camera is not a substitute for the dramatic movement that would have come with crisper story-telling. Color lensing by Jack Cardiff is beautiful; the Richard Addinsell score, directed by Louis Levy, is in keeping with the mood, and the settings and art direction smartly frame the Helen Simpson novel, scripted by James Bridie from an adaptation by Hume Cronyn. – Brog, Variety
Under Capricorn – Jacques Rivette

French 2018 restoration poster
Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten star in Under Capricorn, a lush Technicolor melodrama directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense. Cotten plays Sam Flusky, a native Briton banished to Australia for murder. Bergman is his wife, Henrietta, the disturbed sister of the man Flusky was convicted of killing. When a new governor arrives, he brings with him his cousin, Adare (Michael Wilding), an old friend of Henrietta’s, who sets out to help her conquer her demons and return her life to normal.
But there are complications: Is Henrietta going insane, or is someone trying to drive her mad? Is she merely an alcoholic, or is someone trying to poison her? No one but Hitchcock could handle these questions with such surefire tension, and the performances by Bergman, Cotten and the entire cast are excellent. Described by film critic David Thomson as “a rich account of emotional self-sacrifice,” [Biographical Dictionary of Film (1975–2014)] Under Capricorn is that rare film which captures the humanity of its characters while keeping the audience on the edge of their seats; in other words, it was directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Sweden’s greatest export since Garbo: Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982)
Under Capricorn marked Hitchcock’s final collaboration with Ingrid Bergman, the remarkable Swedish actress who was one of the great movie stars of the forties. Born in Stockholm in 1915, Bergman studied as a teenager at the Royal Dramatic Theatre and made her film debut at nineteen in Munkbrogreven (The Count of the Old Monk’s Bridge). Over the next few years she became Sweden’s biggest star, and after her brilliant performance in Intermezzo (1936), producer David Selznick decided to bring her to America for an English-language remake entitled Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939).
Billed as “Sweden’s greatest export since Garbo,” she was an instant hit, starring in such classics as Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), opposite Spencer Tracy, and Casablanca, opposite Humphrey Bogart. This latter film, perhaps the most beloved of all time, established her as the world’s foremost female movie star and led to starring roles in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Gaslight and her first film with Hitchcock, Spellbound.
A spine-tingling thriller in the classic Hitchcock mold, Spellbound features Bergman as a psychiatrist whose new colleague (played by Gregory Peck) turns out to be an amnesiac who may have murdered the man he’s pretending to be. Aside from Bergman’s exquisite performance, the element that most distinguished the film was a stunning dream sequence designed by artist Salvador Dalí. The following year, Hitchcock, Bergman and Cary Grant collaborated on what is arguably one of the greatest films of all time: Notorious. A brilliant psychological drama about a U.S. agent (Grant) who convinces the woman he loves (Bergman) to marry a Nazi spy (Claude Rains), the film offered Bergman her finest role since Casablanca, a tragic figure torn between love and duty, and her performance is remarkable.
She made only three more films in the forties: Arch of Triumph, Joan of Arc (both 1948) and Under Capricorn. Shortly after that final collaboration with Hitchcock, she left her dentist husband and her young daughter and ran off with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, shattering the wholesome image that studio publicity had worked so hard to build. (They married the following year, and among their offspring is Isabella Rossellini, the star of Blue Velvet [1986].) She spent the next several years in Italy with her husband, starring in his films, and was roundly criticized in America; on the floor of the U.S. Senate she was referred to as ‘Hollywood’s apostle of degradation” and “a free-love cultist.”
But in 1956 she made a remarkable comeback, winning a Best Actress Academy Award for her performance in her first English language film in seven years, Anastasia. Forgiven by the American public, her career boomed again, and she continued to work through the early eighties. Among her best films from the final three decades of her career were Murder on the Orient Express (which earned her another Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1974 [for 14 minutes of screen time!]) and her countryman Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata far which the Academy nominated her as Best Actress in 1978.
By the time of her death from cancer in 1982, her scandal was all but forgotten, and she was recognized for what she was, one of the cinema’s greatest actresses. In her best films we see a rare force, a combination of strength and vulnerability that Hitchcock in particular brought out. Such enduring qualities mark her as the rarest of rarities in Hollywood’s galaxy, a true star. — US Image LD/VHS/DVD: Jeff Schwager, co-author of The Writer’s Library (2020)
“I looked upon Bergman as a feather in my cap. We were making it with our own production company and all I could think about was: ‘Here I am, Hitchcock, the onetime English director, returning to London with the biggest star of the day.’ I was literally intoxicated at the thought of the cameras and flashbulbs that would be directed at Bergman and myself at the London airport.” – Hitchcock/Truffaut
London, 1948: Hitch and Bergman arrive | Alfred Happily Escorts Ingrid | Ingrid’s Last Look
Under Capricorn: Writing on a Classic, Pt 2: More writing; Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Home video
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This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.