Under Capricorn

 An atypical Hitchcock film, Under Capricorn (1949) is an operatic, gothic melodrama.  There is no suspense and Hitchcock's trademark effects are limited to some impressively complex tracking shots, several of which seem to be unmotivated and pointless. Ingrid Bergman is very good, playing against type, as a half-crazed alcoholic and the technicolor has a particularly bronzed appearance -- fleshtones are radiant in a sort of golden, metallic light, perhaps, meant to simulate the glaring sun in Australia where this Victorian period picture is set.  The picture has very peculiar sexual undercurrents and focuses perversely on class or caste distinctions.  It's a fairly nasty piece of work with a distinctly sado-masochistic edge:  convicts on leave from their prisons are treated as slaves and routinely beaten.  Ingrid Bergman signifies her dominion over her house-slaves by burning the whip with which they are flogged, showing that she will rule for force of will and not violence.  Because of the extremely melodramatic imagery and a bravura soliloquy by Bergman's character, the film's roots in trauma aren't readily dismissed and, so, the picture's supposedly happy ending feels seriously compromised -- too much bad stuff has happened for it to all be blithely overlooked in the final scene.  

An Irishman, as signified by his emerald green jacket, disembarks in Sydney, Australia where his pompous cousin is the Royal Governor.  (The opening scene is an inert piece of pageantry featuring dull speeches and brilliant red coats on the soldiers.)  The Irishman, Adair, comes from declining nobility and so he has journeyed to Australia to make his fortune.  Although he is warned about the man (and his gothic mansion), Adair falls under the sway of Flusky, also an Irishman, although from the lower class -- he was a groom at an estate in West Ireland before being transported to Australia for an alleged murder.  Flusky, played in a soft, opaque manner by Joseph Cotten, who is really too pretty for the part, is married to Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman).  Henrietta is a hopeless drunk who sometimes suffers from the DT's.  Although Adair, who has been engaged by Flusky as an accomplice in a strawman real estate transaction (this is a classic MacGuffin, a plot device that goes nowhere but is merely designed as an opportunity for the two men to interact) has been told to stay away from the allegedly sinister self-made man, he, nonetheless, goes to Flusky's foreboding mansion on the seashore.  There, all the neighbors have been invited to a dinner party but no women appear -- they are all snubbing Henrietta who is notorious for a number of reasons.  At the dinner party, Henrietta enters, extremely drunk, disheveled and barefoot, with red-ringed eyes.  (Bergman's repertoire doesn't really include this sort of role and so she is a very beautiful and elegant drunk notwithstanding the plot that requires something more slatternly in the role).  Staggering upstairs on the arm of Adair, whom she recognizes from the Old Country, she claims to see a rat on her bed and Adair has to discharge his derringer to send the hallucination scurrying -- "it's a pink rat," one of the men at the soiree observes.  Flusky engages Adair to squire Henrietta in the hope of drying her out.  It's obvious that this will result in cuckoldry and Flusky's motives here seem to be both perverse and complicated -- it's as if he wants Adair to make love to his desperately unhappy wife.  When Henrietta locks herself in her room, Adair climbs up the side of the mansion in an impressive feat of agility (both for the character and the tracking camera) and, essentially, makes love to her while Flusky sulks downstairs.  Flusky's maid, Nelly, also a low-class ex-convict is in love with her master and she conspires to keep Henrietta drunk all the time so she can flirt with her boss.  Nelly stirs up trouble in the already fraught household and, when Adair takes Henrietta to the royal ball (hosted by his bombastic cousin), Flusky makes a surprise appearance, denounces all of the "nobs"and "swells", and drags his wife, who is the belle of the ball, back to the remote villa by the sea.  Adair follows, there's a fight, and Flusky's prize mare gets lamed by the Adair's incompetence as a horseman.  After Flusky has to shoot the horse, he's enraged, confronts Adair and Henrietta and there's a struggle over the gun -- Adair gets accidentally shot, an enormous problem for Flusky who, as an ex-convict, can be transported back to jail for any subsequent crime that he has committed.  As it turns out, the main motivation for Flusky's rage is not his wife's relationship with Adair, which he has after all perversely encouraged -- it's the fact that Flusky (and his girl Friday, Nelly) are low class peasants with criminal background while Adair and Henrietta fancy themselves nobility (at least this is Flusky's perception).  The relationship between the principles turns out to be very complex, as revealed by a long monologue spoken as an aria by Henrietta.  (I won't detail the revelations in that monologue but it suffices to say that all of the characters, except for Adair, have very complicated and torturous back stories.)  Nelly, who sees that Henrietta may reconcile with Flusky, since Adair is now wounded and out of the picture, decides to intervene.  She starts pouring booze into the alcoholic Henrietta and plots to poison her.  In an instance of overkill, Nelly also is gaslighting Henrietta with a shrunken head, driving her into a frenzy of terror that is attributed, wrongly, to an another instance of delirium tremens.  Flusky figures out what is going on, just in the nick of time, and rescues Henrietta from the torments inflicted on her by the pathetic Nelly.  Adair recovers from his wound.  After some legal complications, Adair returns to Ireland, wiser and sadder, and Flusky is reconciled with Henrietta.  (The hapless and rather sympathetic Nelly is just forgotten.).  How exactly Flusky and Henrietta are going to be able to repair their shattered marriage, afflicted by booze and betrayals of various kinds, seems to be an open question as the film concludes, ostensibly with a happy ending.  

The acting is excellent.  The speeches and monologues are over-the-top, although this is typical for an overwrought "women's picture" of this sort.  Hitchcock seems to direct with kid-gloves and his ordinary perversity isn't incidental to the movie, but, in fact, at its center, on full display in the masochistic behavior shown by Flusky. (This seems to make Hitchcock a little shy and reticent in his direction.)  Class distinctions, not lust, are the center of the movie.  It's intriguing enough, but only a few grades above mediocre, elevated mostly by the bizarre love-triangle at its core.  There's one very elaborate tracking shot, following as Adair walks through a mansion where his cousin resides -- the camera dutifully follows him up some stairs and through several doors that the protagonist opens, tracking him to -- where?  A bathroom in which his middle-aged cousin is washing in a tub while dictating his orders to a male secretary.  It's a strange anti-climax to a very, very elaborate shot and seems to be in the movie simply because Hitch was bored with the plot and needed to spice things up with a bit of virtuoso camerawork.