DVD of the Week: Under Capricorn

Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut that he made “Under Capricorn,” which I discuss in the clip above, largely because he could get Ingrid Bergman to star in it, and it shows. Hitchcock doesn’t have the reputation of being an actors’ director (he was reputed to have called actors cattle, and later commented, “I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle”), yet many actors delivered some of their finest performances in his movies. In this film, he grants Ingrid Bergman a wondrous spectrum of theatrical display and a garland of breathtakingly tender close-ups that betray his deep admiration for her artistry and exultation in her beauty, if not something even more intimate. If there’s something unusually chaste and delicate in his camera’s gaze at her, it’s not for the movie’s own lack of eroticism: the film is centered, as Hitchcock says, on a woman who “degraded herself for the sake of her love”; the tenderness with which he films her is tinged not with pity but with admiration, envy, and understanding.