This movie is not easy to find, I had been looking for it for years. 'Under Capricorn' is one of Alfred Hitchcock's least succesful films both criticality and commercially. It was also the last of Hitch's films I had yet to see which was made after he came to America to work for David O. Selznick around 1939/1940.
I had wrongly rememberd it as being a film he was forced to make while under contract with Selznick, the two famously did not get along and had major creative disagreements. This movie is actually the second of two movies, the other being 'Rope' (1948), Hitch made for his own short lived production company Transatlantic Pictures, both movies (along with his next four) where released through Warner Brothers.
'Under Capricorn' does not fall under the directors expected milieu, at least mostly. Which lead me to wonder why he made it if he didn't have to. Well that question is answered in some special features on the DVD, the director was looking for another project to make with Ingrid Bergman, with whom he had previously worked on 'Spellbound' and 'Notorious'.
Based on a play adaption of a novel, and here further adapted (apparently unevenly) by actor and Hitchcock friend Hume Cronyn, 'Under Capricorn' is a lightly gothic love triangle set in 1830's Austrialia.
Micheal Wilding plays an Irish gentleman who comes to Australia with his cousian, the newly appointed colonial governer, in the hopes of making his fortune. There he discovers that Ingrid Bergman, a childhood friend of his sisters, is married to Jospeh Cotten, one of the wealthiest men in New South Wales and a former convict. Cotten takes to Wilding, makes him a buisness partner and has him move into his palatial home, hoping his presence will remind his depressed wife of happier times and cheer her up. What it ends up doing, among other things, is causing Wilding to fall for Bergman. There is also a subplot of family maid Margret Leighton trying to poison Bergman because she has fallen in love with Cotten. Interestingly more then a decade later Wilding and Leighton would marry in real life.
The film is bland and slow, an awkward fit for its director. Only his second movie in color (after Rope), Hitch was obsessed with long dolly shots in this film. The complexity of what the director was trying to do and his perfectionism about it, caused the films Oscar winning cinematographer Jack Cardiff to later note that it was the only film he ever worked on during which he actually broke down and cried.
This film about a Bergman centric love triangle, was not helped when around the time of its release an actual love triangle involving its star, her husband and the man who would become her second husband, leaked out into the press. Ingrid's public image was very much grounded in a sense of her virtue (she was perhaps most famous for playing a nun), and the scandle was even more poorly received then it might otherwise have been, even in what was still a rather puritanical time in America.
Not a money maker, in a 1960's interview on the DVD Hitchcock mentioned that he retained no rights to the movie, having lost them to a bank. A strange artifact of a film, it's not so much that 'Under Capricorn' is a "bad" movie, as it is a misguided one that simply fails to be much good.**
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