Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)

Today, many attribute the box office failure of Alfred Hitchcock's 1949 opus Under Capricorn to it not being a thriller. That, obviously, is true, but the stiff-upper-lipped love triangle is nevertheless mysterious. Set in colonial Australia, Under Capricorn moves through a world of ex-convicts, where people cut off any attempt to suss out the crimes that sent other people there, lest someone eventually come question them, too. And because the characters must sit in isolation of each other, gestures of concern and caring get interpreted as secretive, self-serving actions, while manipulative ones are dismissed as nurturing.

Though it opens with a series of largely static, talky takes, Under Capricorn rapidly establishes itself as not only a Hitchcock film but one of his most immediately identifiable. The long-take structure he used as an ingenious formal experiment in Rope is here subsumed into a florid melodrama, constantly emphasizes the freedom and restrictions of movement within the tucked-away, Gothic house where most of the action takes place and embodying the stiff mannerisms of the strict, willfully oblivious social codes that dictate behavior among the characters.

The initial stiffness of the camera matches the ostentatious decorum new governor's arrival, an occasion he treats with all the pomp and circumstance of the position but the general population views with disinterest. The action shifts to the governor's cousin, Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), a brash young man who clearly shares more with the more laid-back Australian colonists than his uncle's stuffy ways. He soon learns of the locals' reticence to discuss private matters, even when he learns he has an acquaintance on the continent. Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten), an ex-con turned thriving businessman, meets Charles and, in the process of courting the governor's cousin for business reasons, learns that the Irish lad knew his wife, Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman), a woman who has fallen into debilitating alcoholism. Looking to cheer her up and perhaps snap her out of her insular stupor, Sam invites Charles to his house.

What follows is a rigidly controlled melodrama that intertwines Hitchcock's sense of cold mastery with the bottlenecked passion of restrained emotion. Ingrid Bergman's entrance instantly shifts the mood of the film, her elegant entrance belying the swirling agony rolling off her in waves. The dry period construction remains, but suddenly Hitchcock begins delving into it with his graceful long takes and clever framing. When Henrietta sits down, clearly drunk to the point of incoherence, Hitchcock frames her between two lit candles, illuminating her and visualizing the burning moods within her. When Hitch reverses to show Cotten, farther away, the look of barely hidden agony and shame on his face gives those flames an entirely different meaning, far more somber and wasting. Cotten looks consumed by grief from the moment Bergman enters the screen, and as that pain finally morphs into frustrated fury as his wife does not return to him. Worse still, the tether Charles provides to happier times draws Henrietta closer to the newcomer as Sam finds himself forced to choose between his wife's happiness and his own.

Hitchcock slyly incorporates some of his more usual tropes into this drama: when Charles arrives at the Flusky home, no one answers the front door, so he roams around the side as the camera tracks in one take, stopping at a window and looking in as the maids viciously fight over accusations of their criminal pasts. Effectively, Hitch gets to have his voyeuristic moment (spying on a catfight, no less) even while the movie is still locked in its more starched initial mode. Echoing Rebecca, a dark secret tugs at this married couple, and a deranged, jealous maid (here played to marvelously sinister effect by Margaret Leighton) who pretends to help the wife but has her ulterior motives. The house itself looks, on the outside, like a Hanover version of some Gothic castle on a barren Transylvanian hill, a mood Hitchcock would later mine for the family home overlooking the Bates motel.

These are not plot elements Hitchcock shies away from, and he even emphasizes the sinister air in the climax when he uses chiaroscuro lighting for the reveal of the reason for Henrietta's self-medicated sorrow. Yet Hitchcock channels all of this into the emotions of the story, which only become more rending as the movie progresses. When Henrietta comes clean to Charles, the camera stays back to look at her over Charles' shoulder, not only avoiding the cheap impact of a close-up monologue but letting us see her in terms of how the characters' perception of her shifts with the confession. After demonstrating that his capacity for manipulating audiences could be used in much more heartrending terms with his masterpiece Notorious, Hitchcock softens the savagery if not the sadness. And by showing Charles in the frame as Bergman has her deflated monologue, he reminds the audience that everything in this film, its secrets, revelations and emotional fulfillment, is secondary to the manner a person is perceived by others, and that even with someone she loves, Henrietta will never have the freedom of expressing something without being judged for it.

Under Capricorn reminded me of Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, in that a break in typical setting and subject matter for a director known for technical wizardry and active camerawork ultimately provides a different context that, if anything, clarifies key themes and stylistic tics. If Scorsese's film brought out his usual ideas of characters driven in spite of themselves to deprive themselves of happiness and calm, Hitchcock re-frames a mystery around a sense of proprietary confinement. A sense of doom hangs over the final act, not so much regarding the question of whether Milly will be able to get Sam for herself but the matter of the governor's response to admissions that clear some and incriminate others. The official's disgust over the whole thing suggests that whether the characters get themselves off with the truth or falsification, he merely wants them out of his social sphere where he need not dwell upon such distasteful matters. The steps he takes to ensure he does not have to hear anything more on the matter are not shocking, merely heartbreaking in their coldness and adherence to insipid appearances over human effect. For a director so often criticized for his own emotional remove, Under Capricorn almost seems like autocritique even as it utilizes Hitchcock's style to craft one of his cruelest, in terms of the connection one makes to the characters and the hope that engenders to see a happy ending. One of the finest examples of the master's genius.

Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)

The theme of duality runs indirectly through many Hitchcock films, with the ironic alignment of two individuals in his wrong-man thrillers and the fetished quasi-double (who is really just one person period) in Vertigo. In films such as Strangers on a Train and Psycho, however, that theme has come more prominently to the fore, examined in moral terms in the former and ludicrously psychosexual in the latter. Shadow of a Doubt, Hitch's 1943 thriller widely considered his first masterpiece, is the director's purest exploration into this minor theme. Featuring matched action and edits, suggestive character unity and clashing moralities, Shadow of a Doubt is one of the director's more immediately guessable mysteries even as it is one of his most surprising pictures.

Hitchcock establishes his darker tone instantly, opening on shots of urban decay in Philadelphia. And when his camera makes its way to a neighborhood where kids innocently play ball in the streets, the camera suddenly moves in a series of dissolves and low-angle Dutch shots upward into the no. 13 building nearby, finally moving inside an apartment where Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten), going by an alias, lies on his bed with liquor and money casually placed on the bed table. Cotten looks like a vampire, an image strengthened when the landlady arrives and closes his blinds, the darkness cause the man to rise with a jolt. The woman acts like a chiding mother, lovingly cleaning up the place and speaking to him sweetly without picking up on the harshness of his answering tone or properly paying attention to the implications of his littered alcohol and cash. She notes that two men came by looking for him earlier, and when she leaves, Charlie downs his last bit of whiskey and flees. Hitchcock was the master of paranoia, and the speed with which he undermines any expectation gives Shadow an edge that clearly announces the second stage of his career.

Shortly after this opening, Hitchcock begins mirroring shots and characters. Looking for a place to hide away, Charlie sends word to his family in Santa Rosa, California, and Hitchcock moves to that house using the same nearing dissolves to move inside the Newton home. Inside, he makes his way to the bedroom of Charlotte (Teresa Wright), who also goes by the name Charlie. Her introduction roughly matches her namesake uncle's, but some details reverse in the reflection. Where the landlady made a matronly figure, the well-meaning fool speaking to Young Charlie is her father, and where Uncle Charlie lounged in loose bills of cash, Young Charlie speaks of matters of the soul.

This is but the first example of doubling and reflection, and soon the film suggests an outright psychic link between Young and Uncle Charlie when the girl's sudden thoughts about her uncle and her subsequent discovery of a telegram saying he will be coming to visit. Wright, who never looked more innocent, greets her uncle's arrival with pure elation, oblivious to just how sinister, angular and harsh Cotten's leering Uncle Charlie looks to her sweet, giddy energy. The contrast is so marked as to be perverse, which is exactly what Hitchcock wants. Where Young Charlie sees her oneness with her uncle as a charming example of spiritual fulfillment, both Cotten and Hitchcock depict Uncle Charlie as desiring a oneness of a more physical kind. When the uncle arrives, the father superstitiously asks him not to throw his hat on the bed, but Uncle Charlie barely waits for his brother-in-law to leave the room before chucking it on his niece's mattress. It's not only a moment of defiance and deliberate antagonism, it has the feel of a predator marking one's territory.

Though Hitchcock had been in America since 1940's Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent, but Shadow of a Doubt feels like his first resolutely "American" film, the first time the national backdrop became part of the story and part of the psychological framework of the themes. Undoubtedly, the director owed this to Thorton Wilder, that master of small-town America who wrote the film's original script. Of course, this being Hitchcock, Wilder's gift for finely observed portraits give way to rigid types that play with American clichés. This is quaint, small-town Americana, a place where the people are neither gibbering yokels nor refined intellectuals; the townsfolk are generally simple, a bit ignorant and if they do not seem as fresh-faced as Wright, that is only because Wright's radiance outshines all.

By setting up Santa Rosa as typical Americana, Hitchcock makes Uncle Charlie's arrival all the more unsettling. Cotten's vampiric shadow hangs over this movie, rage erupting behind his cold exterior in his attempts to keep his true identity from his family. Even Young Charlie cannot maintain her enthusiasm when her uncle shames her father at the bank where he works, loudly joking about embezzlement as co-workers begin to eye the hapless Joseph. When the two ostensible reporters make their way from Philadelphia to continue investigating Charlie, his niece must confront the truth of his character, a revelation long ago figured out by the audience. Her understanding allows the film to travel in even darker directions, such as a centerpiece scene of Cotten freezing over in cold fury at a dinner where he goes off on a calm but forceful rant about rich widows, his measured tone not even remotely masking the sadism of his words.

It's important to note that Hitchcock does not particularly structure this film as a mystery; Uncle Charlie's identity as the Merry Widow Murderer is obvious as soon as we learn that a serial killer is on the loose, and Cotten does nothing to disguise Charlie's true self. Instead, Hitchcock uses his clear evil as a bouncing-off point for his aesthetic duality. Hitch juxtaposes innocent with perverse, humble with arrogant, plain with preening. Wright's radiance illuminates even her low-lit scenes, while Cotten casts all into shadow. Hitchcock was always evoked emotion with ruthlessness, and the manner in which he upends Young Charlie's world is heartbreaking in its cruelty: the poor girl is so flabbergasted to see that her unity with her uncle is one of horrifically diametric opposites that she almost cannot see how Jack, the detective pursuing the killer, forms a reflection of her goodness, not its inverse like Uncle Charlie. Of course, it also wouldn't be a Hitchcock film without jokes, and the director here delights in gags involving twos. The best of which, surely, is the scene inside the 'Till Two club where doubles are ordered.

When the two detectives posing as reporters come to Santa Rosa, they con their way into the house by saying they want to do a story on a typical American family, to which the mother, Emma, ironically replies that she doesn't think they're typical. Yet the suggestion under Hitch's use of broad types and unforgiving humanity is that the twisted, Freudian incest of this family and the seedy elements lurking under pre-fab suburban cleanliness and conformity is common to all such towns. Hitchcock would only delve further into such perverse, paranoid matters after the war ended, but Shadow of a Doubt is not only his first major consolidation of such issues but one of his best. It shows a director in complete control of his look and tone; no wonder, then, that his trademark cameo in this feature is a shot of him at a bridge table literally holding all of the cards.