Under Capricorn

Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949) is unusual in his work in that the mystery at its center is a presumed marital mismatch.

Bright colors: Michael Wilding and Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Georgian costume melodrama Under Capricorn (1949).

Audiences didn’t go for it. Rather than corpses, shadows, and ironic jeux d’images, the film is a bright costume melodrama told in long takes that feature dialogue and acting; it is in Technicolor (Rope the year before was Hitchcock’s first); and it is set in Australia long before Australia was “cool”. Imagine a later Douglas Sirk or Vincente Minelli picture without the elaborate Hollywood studio sets (Hitchcock shot Under Capricorn in MGM British Studios in postwar England), and without Hitchcock’s characteristic expressionist vocabulary, lighting, and camerawork. It’s just not what Hitchcock does!

Mr. Flusky (Joseph Cotten) and his wife are unambiguous in their feelings toward one another while others follow their prejudices in Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949).

In this story, a marriage of social unequals stands in for criminal mischief. But no less than in Hitchcock’s murder mysteries, society looks where its prejudices point rather than at where the evidence leads. Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten) is a self-made colonial landowner, a former convict transported from Ireland; his wife Henrietta [Hettie] Considine (Ingrid Bergman) is his former Irish master’s daughter. As far as the British class system goes, society’s doors are closed to this couple and apart from colorful gossip no more need be said of their ill-favored match.

Millie and Danny: Margaret Leighton’s Millie in Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949) recalls Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers a decade before in Rebecca.

Under Capricorn’s plot recalls Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) with its malevolent “Danny” Danvers devoted to her mistress. Here Flusky’s housekeeper Millie (Margaret Leighton), operating as mistress of his house and nurse of madame, is unrequitedly devoted to Flusky. By the way, Bergman was the one originally “gaslighted” in George Cukor’s famous 1944 film; Cotten was the cop.

The new governor (Cecil Parker) arrives in Sydney, New South Wales, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949).

The story opens with the arrival in 1831 Sydney, New South Wales, of the colony’s new governor (Cecil Parker) accompanied by his younger second cousin Charles Adare (Michael Wilding). Adare, an Anglo-Irish dandy, has little going for him professionally or financially, besides his sense of entitlement. In short order he meets the gruff Flusky. Each from the west of Ireland senses a “bumping into bygones” with a dim, long-ago recognition of the other’s name. Intrigued by the social reputation and gossip surrounding Flusky, Adare accepts his invitation to dine at his home despite several warnings—and his cousin’s orders.

Hitchcock’s camera approaches and explores the Flusky household in a ten-minute take in Under Capricorn (1949), the second color film in which he experimented with the technique.

The audience is introduced to the Flusky household in the evening from Adare’s point of view in a ten-minute take (TMT). This is a single continuous shot made using a complete reel of 35mm sound film (at a standard length of 1000ft/305m at 24 frames per second, this runs actually about 11 minutes). Hitchcock experimented with this technique in Rope the year before, an 80-minute film composed almost entirely of TMTs spliced literally back-to-back. In this TMT, the camera tracks Adare’s approach to the front door of the Flusky house; and then outside the house looking in from the veranda, following inside voices to activity in the kitchen; it then follows Adare into the kitchen to meet Flusky, Millie, and Flusky’s secretary Winter (Jack Watling); and then Flusky brings Adare back through the inside of the house Adare has just surveilled from the veranda to a reception room where he is introduced to the other dinner guests making apologies for their wives; the camera follows this group to the dinner table. The TMT ends after Mrs. Flusky appears unannounced and takes a seat at the table. Adare—and the audience—have the complete picture.

What sweeter, more irresistible music than a damsel in distress? Ingrid Bergman and Michael Wilding in Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn.

Mrs. Flusky appears in turn lovely, watchful, alarmed, nervous, self-involved, distracted, pathetic: the full range of faces and feelings a masterful actor like Bergman projects to capture viewers no less than the narrative point of view. What sweeter, more irresistible music can there be to a Shelleyan soul like Adare than a damsel in distress, better yet a former genteel acquaintance?

Hettie Flusky’s reflection is Ingrid Bergman’s extraordinary face in an impromptu mirror in Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949).

Viewers see Under Capricorn’s dénouement through Hettie Flusky’s (Ingrid Bergman) eyes.

The visual storytelling in long takes focuses on Bergman’s extraordinary face and gestures. This is where the viewer must pay the closest attention, where most of the “evidence” is revealed. Alone and with others, husband and wife are unambiguous in their feelings toward one another throughout the narrative while other characters see what they want or think they are supposed to see. The rest of this often overlooked work we shall leave to the viewer to see.

No Hitchcock film is complete without a Real MacGuffin—a shrunken head rolls around in Under Capricorn (1949).

Under Capricorn 1949 U.K. (118 minutes) Transatlantic Pictures; Warner Brothers. Directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay by James Bridie, adapted by Hume Cronyn from the novel by Helen Simpson; cinematography by Jack Cardiff; editing by A. S. Bates; music by Richard Addinsell and Louis Levy; costumes by Roger Furse.

Teenage Wasteland

There is no place like high school where adults pretzel acts of teenage disobedience into disciplinary offenses with serious consequences.

Erik Babinsky (Jonas Dassler), Theo Lemke (Leonard Scheicher), Lena (Lena Klenke), Paul (Isaiah Michalski), Kurt Wächter (Tom Gramenz), and twins Klara and Regina Winkler (Nele and Nora Labisch) in class.

The high schoolers in Lars Kraumer’s The Silent Revolution (Das schweigende Klassenzimmer-2018) are not unlike their roughly contemporary peers in Peter Weir’s The Dead Poet’s Society (1989), only the stakes are much higher. Kraumer’s narrative, based on an actual story, is set in Stalinstadt, a postwar socialist showplace (now Eisenhüttenstadt) in Cold War East Germany. 

 

The action opens in November of 1956, five years before The Wall went up in Berlin. Kurt Wächter (Tom Gramenz) and Theo Lemke (Leonard Scheicher) are high school seniors and best friends. They lark over to the American Sector in Berlin on the pretext of visiting Kurt’s grandfather’s grave to see Liane, das Mädchen aus dem Urwald [Liana, Jungle Goddess] (1956) a movie notorious in its day for featuring a titillatingy topless teengirl Tarzan. They also see a newsreel reporting the uprising in Budapest, Hungary, against the Soviet occupation.  

In Berlin’s former American sector in November 1956, the boys saw “Liane, Jungle Goddess” along with a newsreel report of Hungarian students and civilians opposing Russian occupation.

Kurt and Theo share the Hungary news with their classmates. A group of them go with their classmate Paul (Isaiah Michalski) to visit Paul’s great uncle. Uncle Edgar (Michael Gwisdek), an elderly freethinker, lives in a tumbledown riverside farm and purportedly listens to RIAS (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor, the US radio station in Berlin during the Cold War). The kids follow Western reports of the Hungarian uprising several nights on RIAS at Uncle Edgar’s. They hear that Hungarian superstar footballer Ferenc Puskás was killed in the fighting. But as teenagers they also dance to Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and other current Western hits. 

Kurt Wächter (Tom Gramenz) tuning in the latest report on the Hungarian Revoluion on RIAS at Uncle Edgar’s in Lars Kraume’s (2018) Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution).

Right before Mr. Mosel’s (Rainer Reiners) first-period class the next morning, the kids vote on and agree to an opening two-minute “moment of silence” in sympathy with the Hungarians. These typical high school seniors at first feel strength in their solidarity. There is no question from one to the next that they are “good socialists”. They shoot amused, nervous glances at each other as they sustain their silent protest while Mr. Mosel blows his top in classic German style.  

The class in its moment of silence viewed from the blackboard in Lars Kraume’s (2018) Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution).

School principal Schwarz (Florian Lukas) wrestles with how to deal with the incident. He knows and likes these kids and recognizes that kids get up to things. But he is concerned about the political light the incident will put on him when his higher-ups find out. The school’s political officer (Daniel Krauss) reports the incident behind the principal’s back to District School Board Chair Frau Kessler (Jördis Treibel) and then to German Democratic Republic (GDR) Minister of Education Fritz Lange (Burghart Klaussner). Kessler comes first, and then she and Lange appear at the school in a ministerial black limousine to investigate and root out “counterrevolutionary activity”. 

Minister of Education Fritz Lange (Burghart Klaussner) tries to ferret out the "counter-revolutionary activity" from Eric Babinsky (Jonas Dassler) a presumed weak link, with FDJ-Sekretär Lange (Daniel Krause) and District School Board Chair Frau Kessler (Jördis Treibel).

Remember, this is high school girls and boys. This proto-Breakfast Club had parents to deal with. But unlike John Hughes’s Midwestern US suburban 1980s, these parents are raising families in a harshly unforgiving political climate. Stalin died in 1953 but de-Stalinization had yet to get underway. Kurt’s father Hans Wächter (Max Hopp) is chairman of the city council; Kurt’s maternal grandfather killed in the war had served in the Waffen SS. Theo’s father Hermann Lemke (Ronald Zehrfeld) is a steelworker who had an active role in the 1953 East German uprising against the Russians. Paul’s Uncle Edgar is gay and listens to RIAS. Theo’s girlfriend Lena (Lena Klenke) lives with her grandmother (Carmen-Maja Antoni) because her mother emigrated to Denmark. Erik (Jonas Dassler) reveres the beau idéal of his German communist father killed fighting Nazis during the war but lives with his mother (Bettina Hoppe) and stepfather (Götz Schubert), a parish priest. Kurt and Theo’s other dozen classmates have similar backgrounds. 

Hermann Lemke (Ronald Zehrfeld) and Theo (Leonard Scheicher) talk about life as they walk to the steel mill in Lars Kraume’s (2018) Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution).

The farther one gets from having been a self-dramatizing teenager can make it easy to forget how serious and self-absorbed we were, our relationships with friends and parents, and the bullies that school authorities can be. This drama rides on the quiver of threats authorities wield to turn or break the kids, and whether they—and their parents—stick up for one another together. In the Stasi conception of Marxist-Leninist “criticism and self-criticism”, everyone is compromised and there is zero incentive for a principled individual act. Kraume and his cast make this piece visceral, particularly in the person of Treibel’s Frau Kessler.  

District School Board Chair Frau Kessler (Jördis Treibel) turns up the volume to find answers in Lars Kraume’s (2018) Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution).

The outcome is worth waiting for. However, apart from the class, Kraume does not disclose how this affected the parents and other adults. 

 

The film was shot on location in Eisenhüttenstadt and Berlin and the sets are superb. The original story is told by Dietrich Garstka, one of the participants, in his book “The Silent Classroom”.  

Author Dietrich Garstka and his classmates, the original class in story behind  Lars Kraume’s 2018 film Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution).

Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution) 2018 Germany (111 minutes) Akzente Film/StudioCanal. Adapted for the screen and directed by Lars Kraume, based on the book by Dietrich Garstka; cinematography by Jens Harant; edited by Barbara Gies; production design by Olaf Schiefner; casting by Nessie Nesslauer; music by Christophe Kaser and Julian Maas.

Papa's Words Made Flesh

Casablanca director Michael Curtiz and screenwriter Ranald MacDougall’s The Breaking Point (1950) is notable for giving voice to Ernest Hemingway’s distinctive language and portraying Black characters equal with Whites. 

Notable for the time, first mate Wesley Park (Juano Hernandez) plays a responsible Black equal to protagonist Harry Morgan (John Garfield) in Michael Curtiz’s The Breaking Point (1950).

This is the second Warner Brothers film based on Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not,” less a novel than a pastiche of stories but the source of a pair of films as good as they are different from each other. 

The Warners’ first crack at the story is one of the great classics of Hollywood’s Golden Age. In the war years, screenwriters Jules Furthman and William Faulkner fashioned it for director Howard Hawks as a star vehicle for Humphrey Bogart and film-newcomer Lauren Bacall. Less concerned with the original story than cool for its day, Bogart’s “Steve” trades double entendres with Bacall’s “Slim”, Water Brennan’s lovable rummy first mate Eddie avoids bee bites, and Hoagy “Cricket” Carmichael takes Dooley “Sam” Wilson’s place at the piano in a drama is set in Vichy-ruled Martinique to get anti-Axis propaganda on the menu.

Hoagy “Cricket” Carmichael and film-newcomer Lauren “Slim” Bacall chew scenery in Warner Brothers’ first cool crack at Ernest Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not.”

Curtiz and MacDougall’s postwar version used more of Hemingway’s novel but shifted the setting from the Caribbean to the postwar Pacific. Retitled The Breaking Point, the Warners’ second film opens in Newport, California, with its lead John Garfield reading an adaptation of the novel’s first paragraph in a voice-over. This establishes Hemingway’s stylistic cadences and repetitions in a more coherent narrative than the original as the cast navigate a series of Hemingway-like situations. Often mistaken for simplicity, Hemingway’s modernist style is easier to parody than copy. MacDougall has done a remarkable job adapting it for the screen.

John Garfield’s look and his characters’ attitudes made him an ideal Everyman for 1940s filmgoers.

Garfield’s Harry Morgan is one of his best roles and among the most authentic Hemingway characters on film. His look and his character’s attitudes made him an ideal Everyman for 1940s filmgoers the way Hemingway’s voice spoke for his generation. And notably here, where Morgan’s first mates had been semi-reliable rummy port rats, MacDougall and Curtiz make him a responsible Black equal, Wesley Park (Juano Hernandez), with a son the same age as Morgan’s two elementary school-age girls. Furthermore, the relationship MacDougall created between Park and his son Joseph (Hernandez’s actual son Juan) make for a small though poignantly Hemingwayesque father-and-son subplot.

Wesley Park (Juano Hernandez) sends his son Joseph (Juan Hernandez) to school with Connie (Donna Jo Boyce) and Amy Morgan (Sherry Jackson) in The Breaking Point (1950).

The Breaking Point tells the story of a one-time decorated World War II PT boat commander living his dream of running a fishing charter out of Newport on which he supports his wife Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter) and two small children. He owes money all around but gets by, aware that Lucy, who is devoted to him, would like to see him put the war behind him, sell his boat the Sea Queen, and settle down to domestic family life.

Ernest Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not” sets sail on film with Harry Morgan (John Garfield) taking Brannan (Ralph Dumke) and Leona Charles (Patricia Neal) on a fishing charter.

The action opens with Hannagan (Ralph Dumke), an American playboy, hiring the Sea Queen for a fishing trip. Hannagan shows up with his attractive and mercenary pickup Leona Charles (Patricia Neal) and the drama sets sail. Harry interests the sophisticated Leona. She looks on Hannagan less as a mate than a paying proposition but her aggressive flirtation Harry’s way goes nowhere—at first. And then Hannagan stiffs Morgan and Wesley the charter fee, flying back to the US leaving the boys and Leona busted flat in Ensenada, Mexico. A dodgy American lawyer, F. R. Duncan (Wallace Ford), turns up in an Ensenada cockfighting bar with a lucrative proposition for Harry that involves a Chinese “coyote” named Mr. Sing (Victor Sen Yung) who wants to traffic eight Chinese men into the US.

Shady lawyer F. R. Duncan (Wallace Ford) introduces Chinese human trafficker Mr. Sing (Victor Sen Yung) to Harry Morgan (John Garfield).

Aware that the scheme could mean serious jail time if caught, Harry tries to cut Wesley out to steer him clear of trouble. But both Wesley and Leona end up on the boat with Harry headed back to California. Without revealing spoilers, these ingredients set the narrative on its Hemingway course. Harry’s first inauspicious brush with a scheme for solving his money problems; his ongoing relationship with steady Wesley; sleazy Duncan, his clientele, and US authorities; lithe Leona who keeps turning up and Lucy his beloved and jealous wife, all make for enough challenge and conflict to sustain a proper Hemingway story.

Sophisticated Leona Charles (Patricia Neal) and jealous wife Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter) help make screenwriter Ranald MacDougall’s The Breaking Point (1950) a proper Hemingway story.

The movie climaxes in a mannered film noir-style heist involving a quartet of bow-tied gangsters in sharkskin and fedoras. 

The Breaking Point (1950) U.S. Warner Brothers/Criterion (97 minutes). Directed by Michael Curtiz; screenplay by Ranald MacDougall, based on Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 novel “To Have and Have Not”; cinematography by Ted D. McCord; editing by Alan Crosland Jr.; music by Max Steiner; produced by Jerry Wald.

Closing shot: a Black boy’s relationship with his father makes for a small but unusual and poignantly Hemingwayesque father-and-son subplot in The Breaking Point (1950).