UNDER CAPRICORN

As a Hitchcock completist it was inevitable that one day I would get around to seeing this 1949 flop, a costumer set in 1830s Australia which is more of a romantic melodrama than the thriller which audiences would have been expecting.

What we have here is not so much as a love triangle as a love rectangle.

In one corner we have Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten) who came to Australia as a convict, but is now a rich landowner who has something of a chip on his shoulder about not being accepted by local high society.  He started off life in Ireland as a humble stable lad who eloped with his employer's daughter, Henrietta, and then shot dead one of her brothers.

In another we have his wife, Lady Henrietta Flusky (Ingrid Bergman) who has stuck with him despite his murdering her brother, but who is struggling with a severe alcohol problem.

In another there is the newly arrived Hon. Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), the charming but indolent second cousin of the local Governor of New South Wales (Cecil Parker in typically fine form).  Charles and Henrietta know each other dimly from childhood days, so Charles takes it upon himself to try to get Henrietta off the bottle and back in charge of the Flusky household.  In so doing he starts to fall in love with her.

Finally there is the villain of the piece, housekeeper Millie (Margaret Leighton) who is devoted to Sam.  As the film progresses we get to discover the degree to which she will go in order to drive a wedge between her master and mistress.

The film's main problem is that it is too talky and too slow.  For a fair bit of running time in the middle not much is happening other than moody Sam trying not to listen to Millie pointing out the amount of time Charles is spending with Henrietta.  

The drama eventually springs into life when Sam gate-crashes a ball Charles has taken Henrietta to.  This leads to the best scene in the film when Henrietta confesses the truth to Charles, that she was the one who killed her brother, and that Sam confessed to the crime to save her imprisonment and disgrace.  Bergman is in fine emoting form here, revealing to Charles the depth of her love for Sam. 

After that, Sam accidentally shoots Charles, which as an ex-convict means he might be going back on the chain gang, leading to Henrietta confessing to her brother's murder, which puts her at risk of being sent back home to Ireland to be tried.

It's all good dramatic stuff (if a bit late) and then (100 minutes in, as one contemporary critic noted) we finally get a thriller element as Millie decides this might be a good moment to finish off Henrietta with an overdose of a sleeping draught.  Jack Cardiff lights Bergman's face beautifully as she lies in bed surreptitiously watching Millie prepare the drink. 

Thankfully Millie is sent packing, Sam does the noble and loving thing by not supporting Henrietta's confession, Charles does the decent thing by confirming that his shooting was an accident, and then returning to Ireland, so that Sam and Henrietta can resurrect their marriage.

All the performances are decent, and Hitchcock deploys some long takes effectively to create a claustrophobic atmosphere.

Later Hitchcock criticised the casting of Cotten, but I thought he did a good job of portraying Sam as someone who is not a very good judge of character or very aware of what is going on around him.  

No, it’s the story itself, or maybe the screenplay, that is the main problem.  And I don't think Hitchcock himself is on top of his game, especially in the climactic scene where Millie is finally exposed for what she is, which is nowhere as dramatically satisfying as it should be.

Having said that, maybe because my expectations going into this had been quite low, I came away from this supposed turkey thinking that it wasn’t as awful as I had feared.

RATING: x Curb Your Enthusiasm