Under Capricorn (1949)

(On Cable TV, June 2022) I thought I was done with director Alfred Hitchcock’s Hollywood filmography except for The Paradine Case, but as it turns out, I had overlooked all about 1949’s Under Capricorn. There are good reasons for that: Contrarily to much of Hitchcock’s filmography, it’s a brightly-coloured romantic melodrama set against the backdrop of 1931 Sydney as a frontier town. What’s more, it’s executed as a filmed stage play, with very few cuts and a marked emphasis on costume drama. The story eventually achieves a Hitchcockian velocity once a gun, an affair and attempted murder all come into play. Still, this isn’t Hitchcock as we know it: it’s almost entirely humourless, it’s too brightly lit, it’s a slower-than-slow burn and it seems dramatically at odds with the director’s strengths. It features two good actors (Joseph Cotton, but especially Ingrid Bergman) and it’s hard to fault a director for trying something different, but, in the end, Under Capricorn is almost a bore. It takes too long to get cracking, and doesn’t offer enough to Hitchcock for him to take advantage of new opportunities –and I say this having liked his equally atypical Mr. And Mrs. Smith a lot.