Inglourious Basterds

Glib yet deeply felt, absurd yet surprisingly reasoned, Inglourious Basterds might be the most confounding movie Quentin Tarantino has made yet. Through the sheer power of cinema, Tarantino attempts to overthrow the Third Reich. And regardless of whether or not he succeeds in this mad endeavor, we can be certain of one thing: insanity on that level can’t help but be entertaining to watch.

Brad Pitt plays Lt. Aldo Raine, a jocose Tennessee soldier who leads the titular Basterds, a Jewish squad engaging in guerrilla warfare against the Germans, their sole purpose being to instill terror in Nazi hearts. Raine is nicknamed Aldo the Apache due to his demand that each of his soldiers bring him one hundred Nazi scalps—and if you think that line merely a joke brace yourself for a bit of gruesome corpse mutilation. But lest you cringe at the thought of two and a half hours of gore porn, note that the action in this film is actually scarcer than you would think. Tarantino builds the story around a series of tense life-or-death conversations as characters attempt to call the bluffs of their opponents, but when the violence comes it is in sudden bursts of lavish grisliness.

Even though he gets top billing—and the movie trailers get a lot of mileage out of his Nazi killing speeches—Pitt is really more comic relief than lead player in this tale (a typical highlight of this role comes when he pretends to be an Italian stuntman in order to sneak into a Nazi film premiere, wearing a look of dyspeptic agony while speaking bad Italian with an undisguised Appalachian accent). More central to Tarantino’s intentions is Shoshanna Dreyfus (played by French actress Melanie Laurent), a young Jewish woman who narrowly escapes when the Nazis gun down her family in a farmhouse. Four years after her escape, she hides in plain sight in Vichy France as the proprietress of a Parisian film theatre passed on to her by her deceased aunt and uncle.

A German war hero becomes infatuated with Shoshanna and convinces Joseph Goebbels to premiere an important propaganda film at her theatre, unwittingly offering Shoshanna an opportunity for revenge on the Nazis. She schemes to lock all the officials in the Third Reich in her theatre—even Hitler will be in attendance—and set fire to the highly flammable nitrate film stock, using the power of film quite literally to end Nazi tyranny. At the same time, the Basterds are involved in something called “Operation Kino”—led by a handsome, swashbuckling film critic, which is how you know this is fiction, ha-ha—where they intend to sneak explosives into the movie premiere and assassinate the attendant Nazi officials.

But stealing the show from Laurent and Pitt is Christoph Waltz’s performance as Colonel Landa, or “the Jew Hunter,” as he is otherwise known. For a film riddled with farcically over-the-top Nazis—Hitler is a red-faced, ranting loon, more clownish than fearsome—Landa is a surprisingly chilling character, performed with grace and intelligent by Waltz. Eerily calm even in the middle of murder, he is more frightening than all the other Nazis combined because he is actually portrayed as a sensible man aware of his actions, as opposed to a delirious, hate-filled lunatic. As he observes at one point, he is simply a detective, and given the nature of his society, this means he looks for Jews. He is not only devoid of morality, but conscious of this lack and unapologetic for his self-serving cruelty.

Despite the occasional Landa-induced shudder of dread, Inglourious Basterds is quite obviously a comical, often absurd film, engaged in an act of creative hubris that begs for scolding. What are you thinking, Tarantino, by trying to rewrite history using nothing more than your own all-consuming love of cinema? But I can’t really deny this film. It sticks in the gut. It refuses to go away. Tarantino’s films tend to offer ephemeral pleasures at best, his plot digressions and convolutions easily reduced to a series of slick, ain’t-it-cool moments that rarely linger in the mind after the film is finished. Everything dissipates under the harsh light of the theatre lobby, and Tarantino’s precariously constructed movie-mad fantasies are blasted apart once the real world begins to barge its way back in to our lives.

By contrast, this knowingly ridiculous and cartoonish assault on the very idea of the Second World War is too outrageous to ignore or dismiss. Hitler doesn’t die in the bunker here, you see—he is gunned down by two Jewish soldiers while the leaders of the Third Reich burn to death in a movie theatre. Understandably, the film’s replacement of historical fact with revenge fantasies can provoke some agonized audience responses, particularly among some Jewish critics who are rightly queasy about the risks inherent in Tarantino’s approach. Do we really need images of Jews carving swastikas into Nazi foreheads, just as Nazis would have carved the Star of David onto their Jewish victims? By pursuing this revenge fantasy to such extreme limits, doesn’t Tarantino risk turning the victim into another victimizer?

Valid concerns, I believe, and ones that should not be taken lightly, even though some people will simply sigh wearily at the prospect of such moralizing ruining our good and bloody fun. It’s just a movie, they cry out, pouting at the prospect of someone questioning their right to enjoy watching a person having his face smashed in with a baseball bat. And yet, in this case, I think the “it’s just a movie” defense might actually be correctly applied.

Tarantino really doesn’t care about World War Two as historical fact. Let’s be clear on that. But note that many of the more genteel, respectable war films—just roll that combination of terms on your tongue and see how you like the taste—are equally capable of pulling their own dodgy alterations to history, all of which can be forgiven as long as the film maintains an aura of self-serious piety. In other words, both Saving Private Ryan and Inglourious Basterds are bullshit, but at least Tarantino’s film is funny.

This may well prove to be the future of World War Two movies. As that era recedes further into history, the war becomes less a lived memory and more a cultural commodity. It’s a genre, complete with its own tropes and themes (and as Tarantino proves with his various allusions, it can be easily conflated with other genres like the western, which also referred to real history before becoming fodder for modern mythology). Tarantino’s primary experience with Nazis probably lies in the video store, not the library, and so it isn’t surprising that he does not treat them as a complex convergence of various social, political, and economic factors in German society. No, Nazis are just what you shoot when playing Call of Duty. Inglourious Basterds is really a World War Two movie for this generation.

Knowing the Second World War primarily through the cinema, Tarantino has quite naturally made a film that is more about war movies than the actual war itself. Inglourious Basterds is about the image of the Second World War in our imaginations, and images are something Tarantino sees no reason to tremble before. In his world, cinema is everything and vice versa, which allows him to pose this guileless, naïve, yet difficult question: if we are truly free in our imaginations, why persist in envisioning persecution?

District 9

With its lack of name stars and exotic pedigree, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 feels more like late-summer counter-programming than just another blockbuster epic. Certainly, the fact that it lacks a Burger King tie-in and doesn’t begin with the depressing note, “Based on the Hasbro toys,” is enough to make District 9 appear downright mature and thoughtful when compared with the rest of the movies crowding the multiplex at the moment.

The film’s premise is even a bit of a novelty. An alien ship appears above Johannesburg (that’s right, screw you, New York, Paris, London—it’s time for the rest of the world to get in on the alien invasion action), but instead of unleashing doom upon the puny Earthlings, it just floats like a heavy cloud until a search party enters and discovers a malnourished race of anthropomorphic bug-things henceforth known derogatorily as Prawns. The creatures are shipped to the planet’s surface and put into overcrowded slum camps, managed by a corporation with the laughably ominous name Multi-National United.

Yes, this is a different spin on the usual first-contact story, but it’s hard to give credit for cleverness when you consider the idea’s unimaginative execution. Perhaps the reason no one has attempted this idea before is because it actually doesn’t make a lot of sense—how could an alien race travel across the galaxy and yet find themselves enslaved by humanity’s inferior technology? Blomkamp throws in a vague explanation about how the alien leaders might have died due to some disease, leaving only the unorganized worker drones, but considering the aliens can still control their ship and use their weapons, this sounds suspiciously like a half-assed justification for the apartheid allegory which is really the film’s hook.

In that case, it’s a wonder that the film actually has so little to say about racism or apartheid. If there's a purpose to all of this, it lies in the transformation of the film’s protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe, a bumbling white bureaucrat cheerfully in denial over the suffering his actions are causing to these creatures. After being placed in charge of emptying out the titular slum of District 9 and transferring the aliens to District 10 (basically a concentration camp, he later admits), events force van der Merwe to sympathize with the Prawns as he is pushed closer to their plight.

Still, if Blomkamp is attempting some sort of homily on racial understanding, then he would have been wise to avoid dubious caricatures like the band of voodoo-loving tribal Nigerian gangsters—all overplayed with leering menace—who contribute a bit of stock villainy to the proceedings, collecting alien weaponry in the slums while dealing cat food to the Prawns (the substance is the equivalent of crack in these intergalactic ghettos). For that matter, there is hardly much more complexity in the portrayal of the alien creatures, most of whom are treated disdainfully as dim-witted, self-defeating savages. At one point, we even see a Prawn wearing a beanie, just so we don’t confuse him with Einstein, I suppose.

The film is sunk by this lack of insight and imagination. Surely a more rich and complicated world than what Blomkamp creates can be derived from such a loaded premise. Instead, we get a flat and underdeveloped protagonist surrounded by peripheral characters so generic as to be almost unnoticeable. A consortium of sinister scientists, soldiers, government agents, and businessmen all shuffle through the narrative like a listless line of bogeymen too familiar to be frightening anymore. And by the end, the film has settled into a monotonous pattern of chase-fight-chase-fight that could suck the life out of any half-decent concept. It’s hard to develop a vivid cinematic world when you have to stop everything intermittently for some hot and heavy robo-suit combat, you know?

Perhaps it’s because we’ve all been beaten down by the onslaught of recent summer blockbusters that this weak movie appears so promising at first glance. Maybe critics—who for the most part have been fairly generous in their praise of District 9—are just happy to see some a major summer movie that actually draws on reality, instead of a fifteen-year-old boy’s fantasies of same. But with a pack of clichés threatening to carry the whole story off into the ether, real history is ultimately the only thing tethering this film to the ground. Unfortunately, Blomkamp brings up these references to apartheid not necessarily because he wants to speak to this subject, but rather because they lend an aura of significance to a story that otherwise has none. Yes, acknowledging the real world is a good thing, but the more important part is actually living in it.

The Hurt Locker

You almost begin to pray for explosions. Not out of malice or sheer bloodlust—you just want an end to the maddening tension that permeates every moment. And once in a while, there is the release of an explosion or some gunfire or even a few punches to the gut exchanged in the midst of some drunken macho horseplay. But again and again you return to that same nerve-rattling tension, that same suspended moment. There’s always the knowledge that you’ll be dead the moment you hit the ground, but for every second you’re in the air, you might as well be immortal.

The Hurt Locker, a steely-eyed new film directed by Kathryn Bigelow from a well-observed script from Mark Boal, is all about the addiction of war as an experience, examining the heavy psychological toll exacted by continual exposure to your own imminent death. This is war as a state of mind. You carry it with you wherever you go.

Set during 2004 in Iraq, the film narrows its focus to a single Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit. After losing their team leader during a mission, JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) find themselves saddled with Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner), an arrogant veteran EOD soldier who claims to have defused more than 800 bombs. Reckless in his confidence, James exposes his teammates to unnecessary risks without a second thought. He simply acts—effectively, as it typically turns out, but with little regard for safety.

Some of the conflicts that arise in the group as a result of James’ brash behaviour might seem familiar at first: Eldridge is a brittle, inexperienced soldier, crumbling under the constant strain, while Sanborn clings to regulations and rules as a bulwark against James’ more impulsive methods. But Sanborn’s by-the-book demeanor masks incredible anxiety and fear, and James’ cocksure attitude is similarly a façade of sorts. Even though initial appearances make it seem James is just an arrogant young twerp on a short march to the grave, it soon becomes evident that he is not only a good soldier, but also one who cares for his comrades, despite his recklessness.

In many ways, in fact, he is held up as an exemplary soldier (his superiors make much of his impressive record), and that is ultimately what makes his character so pitiable. As he excels at war, so he fails at domesticity. During one of the few scenes that occur outside of Iraq, we see him standing in a grocery store, staring at a daunting wall of cereal boxes, hesitating. Where is the bold confidence of the soldier who defuses a bomb in the still-smoldering wreckage of a car, unconcerned with the likelihood of his own death? When James tries to describe his relationship with the mother of his son, there is a helplessness and confusion that suggests war is, like any other drug, an escape from the bewildering problems of normal life.

Many of these concerns are more general and not tied to any specific conflict, but by limiting itself to this one group of soldiers the film provides some interesting insights into the Iraq war. For the EOD unit, everyone and everything is a potential threat. When they walk into a bomb scene, each scrap of litter potentially hides an IED, and each onlooker possibly holds the detonator. And if you have to treat all Iraqi citizens like enemies, is it any wonder when so many turn out to be exactly that? At one point, a standoff ensues when a taxi bursts through a military barricade onto a bomb scene. As Will points his gun at the head of the driver, the two stare in a sudden and inexplicable test of wills. Is this man really hoping to attack the American military? Or, merely frustrated by the sight of the army, did he choose to defy their presence and carry on with his normal route, only to find a gun aiming between his eyes? After he backs down, soldiers yank him out of his car and drag him away. “If he wasn’t an insurgent,” Will jokes, “he is now.”

The Hurt Locker represents something seemingly contradictory: an intelligent action film. We’re so used to seeing action filmmaking as purely mindless diversion that it’s startling to see a director of such intelligence committed to the cause. Yes, this film is visceral and exciting, but it’s also attentive to the consequences—both physical and psychological—of its violence. At this time of year, you could walk into any multiplex and stumble across countless imagined disaster scenarios, with buildings bursting into computer-generated rubble left and right while corpses fall like rain drops. Action is a dirty word in these cases, signifying films in which violence and carnage is envisioned as a child’s game. Bigelow prefers to describe her films as “experiential,” which only makes clear the divide between her and the mainstream of action filmmaking. In a film like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, you feel distanced from the action, but in The Hurt Locker, everything feels intensely immediate. You pray for that explosion to come and relieve the tension because this is happening not just to James, but also to you, and like that soldier, you can taste that same seductively self-annihilating adrenalin.

It’s tempting to see Bigelow’s film as a corrective to these mainstream action movies, even though that does a disservice to the complexity of her intentions and methods. When I think back to the first explosion in the film, I don’t think of the blast itself, but rather gravel rising in slow motion or rust shaking off of an abandoned car. Such images capture the brute force of the blast in a way that is not only more poetic, but also more tangible and meaningful, than the usual cliché of sending some debris flying at the camera. Who needs IMAX when you actually have a good director?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

The shape of things breaks open, cracks like a glass bottle and only light comes out, light and the awful sound of voices, distorted beyond recognition into guttural howls. An explosion crackles in my ear and the light flickers, that supple and mysterious light that bends with the sound into the shape of a spectrogram of one long scream. Something is becoming, but it remains formless, only light and screams and that crackling in my ear. I look, but I see nothing.

Oh my god, I think, I’ve gone blind.

It’s an hour into Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and I’ve gone blind. I’m staring at the screen, but I can’t see anything. Everything has descended into chaos, and even though my brain is gamely trying to process the visual incoherence of two giant walking scrap-yards smashing into each other, my eyes have given up. I panic.

I’m sure this all sounds like melodrama for the purposes of taking cheap shots at Michael Bay’s latest monstrosity, but I assure you the panic was real. I’ve never walked out of a movie before, but I came perilously close in this case, if only because I was momentarily terrified at the thought of exposing myself to another hour and a half of a movie that my body seemed to be physically rejecting.

Never before have I been so grateful for Bay’s grating comic sensibility as I was here. Those prattling, obnoxious scenes of forced wackiness and sitcom one-liners are as soothing to the ear as a dentist drill to your back molars, but visually they refresh like eye drops when compared to the onslaught of the action sequences. At the very least, they allowed my eyes to come back into focus and let me brace myself for the next wave of optic insanity. Whoever coined the phrase “Non-stop thrill ride!” should be shot out of a cannon. Into a burning building. While the sun explodes. This is the world you, anonymous jackass, have wrought.

How do you write sensibly about a movie that lays siege to your very senses? How do you critically review a punch to your own face? How does one assess, without resorting to hyperbole or hysterics, a movie that instead of offering us a new way of seeing the world rather provides a new way of going blind? The movie’s style is so pulverizing (and the content so incoherent) that you can really only appreciate it on the most basic sensory level as two and a half hours of varying shades of colour and alternations between loud and louder. This is stimulation that will leave you numb, a movie to end all movies. You’ll become so wearied with constant excitement that you'll be left bored. Um, two thumbs down for the bright boom-boom?

If it seems like I’m ignoring the plot, I assure you that would be quite impossible, as one can no more ignore the plot of Transformers: ROTF than you can ignore God, Sasquatch, and other mythical creatures. Allow me a quick summary for the curious and the damned: a bunch of things are blown up on a computer somewhere in California while Megan Fox runs in slow motion in a tank top and Michael Bay lights a cigar with a hundred dollar bill. The end.

The more elaborate summary—the one addresses the heart of the film, such as it is—requires a bit more of a straight face, so let’s see if I can do this without being too snide. Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is about to go off to college. His impossibly dumb parents are struggling with the prospect of an empty nest, his mother weeping all over the place while his dad puts on a brave face and acts tough. Sam makes plans to maintain a long-distance relationship with his impossibly hot girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox), while his just plain impossible alien robot car is undergoing a bit of separation anxiety because Sam has sent it scampering back to its own kind like a wayward dog. Meanwhile, good alien robots fight bad alien robots, a perfectly fine pyramid is wrecked, and for good measure, there’s an attempt to destroy the sun.

The great unwitting joke of the film is that Transformers: ROTF is actually a tender coming-of-age story about Sam becoming a man—no, really—but this ostensible human foundation for the robotic carnage is largely forgotten amidst the explosions and aforementioned slo-mo shots of Megan Fox, to say nothing of the inordinate amounts of time spent on a dog-humping motif and the unpleasant (and now infamous) sambobots. Indeed, one could go on and on about the various incidental stupidities that dust the movie like little turd sprinkles on a big shit cake. When the long-buried emotional arc suddenly resurfaces during the climactic battle in Egypt, it’s hard not to laugh out loud at the movie’s self-deluding conception of itself. You mean this isn’t about tits and explosions, after all? I reiterate: two thumbs down for the bright boom-boom.

But of course it’s laughable that Bay's absurd demolition zone of a movie could actually be a plausible coming-of-age story. How could any movie that aims no higher than the sensibility of a fifteen-year-old boy really say anything about maturity or responsibility? And why does it even try? One of the most puzzling things about Michael Bay is how he makes such unrelentingly shallow movies while still attempting to add moments of emotional uplift amidst the sterile CGI carnage. Unfortunately, with such uniformly obnoxious, unlikable characters, any attempt to create touching or inspirational moments feels like cruel mockery. Good things do happen to shallow jerks like these people. As for the rest of us, we get Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Empire of the Sun

And, once again, Steven Spielberg blows it. Based on a novel by J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun shows China during World War II from the perspective of an adolescent—by which I mean Jim, the young protagonist of the film, although Spielberg’s outlook is scarcely more mature than the boy’s.

Ballard’s novel is a fascinating piece of work: a thinly fictionalized analysis of the author’s actual childhood experiences, it uses a detached third-person narrative voice to describe the often horrific experiences of Jim as he loses his parents in the chaos of the Japanese attack on Shanghai and spends the bulk of the war in prison camps. It’s a harrowing story, and one made all the more powerful by Ballard’s clear-eyed depiction of it. There are plenty of obviously maudlin notes that could be played in the story of a child enduring such suffering, but Ballard never stoops to that level.

Ah, but that’s precisely the sort of song Spielberg likes to sing. Where Ballard refuses to tell his audience what to feel or think, Spielberg is all too happy to jump into the breach and lead us along to all of the facile sentiment that lays buried in the novel. The score by John Williams is particularly oppressive in this regard, and it fairly molests the audience—the swelling strings and angelic choir paw viewers in advance of every predictable grab for the heartstrings. If you treat the score as an alarm and fast-forward whenever it kicks in, you might actually have a more enjoyable experience of the film than I did. At the very least, you won’t feel so cheap and used.

Spielberg is actually reasonably faithful to Ballard’s basic story, although many details are altered, sometimes with little obvious justification. Character names, for example, are changed seemingly at random, with Ransome and Vincent in the novel becoming Rawlins and Victor in the film (I hate to quibble over small things, but the fact that someone felt such innocuous details needed to be changed in the first place makes me wonder if some studio head or marketing flunky felt audiences would be more sympathetic to someone named Mrs. Victor instead of Mrs. Vincent. Given the film’s many pandering moments, it only makes sense that the filmmakers’ condescension towards their audience would extend towards the choice of character names).

But the film’s main sin in alteration lies in showing Jim’s reunion with his parents, which the novel smartly avoids. The moment is too overloaded with emotion for Ballard’s restrained rendition of his story, and he actually pushes Jim’s parents into the background after the war in order to suggest the great distance between Jim and his childhood after his wartime experiences. “For all their affection for him,” Ballard writes, “they seemed older and far away.” The loss of childhood is depicted ambiguously in the novel, as Ballard surely knows we all grow up sometime, albeit rarely in such dire situations as he experienced.

But in Spielberg’s world, the threatened loss of childhood is merely a bit of dramatic conflict to set up a joyful third-act resolution, and the ending is a retreat from the darkness of the story—a retreat that applies on both a personal and a political level. In a telling departure from the novel, the word “Communist” is never uttered once during the film. The civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists that arose from the ashes of WWII in China is completely cut out of Spielberg’s version of the story. Instead, we are left with Jim safe and secure in his mother's arms as he returns to a childhood innocence thought lost, while the film cheerfully embraces its own holiday from history.

Taken

Filled with the concussive editing and sterile hyperstylization that is typical of contemporary action films, director Pierre Morel’s Taken is a brisk, relentless, and entirely generic thriller that passes by so quickly one can easily miss its many flaws. Liam Neeson lends some gravitas to a great deal of horseshit in the role of Bryan, a former government agent whose 17-year-old daughter is kidnapped in Paris. Naturally, he does precisely what any sensible father-slash-retired-secret-agent would do—he flies to France and proceeds to beat and/or kill every person even remotely related to the crime (he also leaves a swath of unaided victims who lack their own ass-kicking covert op daddies to rescue them). And while dad is busy torturing suspects with jumper cables, daughter is swallowed up into a sex-slave ring run by Albanians, her virginity menaced by—wait for it—an Arab sheikh. With a harem. Oh, those dirty, nasty brown-skinned Others!

Revenge excuses all manner of violence, and the film's xenophobic tone lends a bitter taste to what would otherwise be a merely bland tale of redemption for a failed father. Ironically, the mysterious government job that kept Bryan apart from his daughter when she was growing up and led to the dissolution of his marriage has also given him the skills necessary to become the implacable superdad that the film venerates. The moral of the story: “Daddy’s too busy to play now sweetie, but you’ll thank me later when you’re older.” The film is a validation for manipulative and emotionally distant fathers everywhere, with Bryan’s patriarchal failings magically transformed (okay, not magic, just lots of fast cutting and people being shot in the head) into parental fitness.

Incidentally, the film makes an excellent Father’s Day gift.

Under Capricorn

Under Capricorn has always had a tough time finding a place in Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre, not fitting in with the psychological thrillers or high-spirited adventures for which he is best known. Even Rope—his 1948 murder drama employing a comparable long-take style of filming—has been granted more attention as a “problem picture,” while most people prefer to politely overlook the supposed failure of Under Capricorn.

To be fair, Under Capricorn is actually an easy film to pass by based on description alone. A period romance set in 1830s Australia as directed by Alfred Hitchcock: was anyone clamoring for this? As subject matter, this is pretty suspect terrain for any director (19th century Australia hardly seems ripe for weepy dramas filled with flouncy dresses and embroidered hankies and all that), but for someone as acidic as Hitchcock a disastrous outcome seems a foregone conclusion.

But the lure of this film proved too much for me and I had to give in, regardless of the dubious concept and seemingly ill-conceived marriage of subject and director (but then again, ill-conceived marriages are Hitchcock’s normal terrain, aren’t they?). Luckily, the film can be downloaded from Archive.org’s mammoth collection of public domain films, and in a decent quality version no less (although you can watch it in streaming video at the bottom of this post, I recommend downloading the 1.3 gigabyte MP4 file, which is of a higher quality). No harm in trying something for free, right?

As I discovered, Under Capricorn is far better than its reputation would lead one to believe. Even if it doesn’t possess the queasy, obsessive power of something like Vertigo, the film is so masterfully conceived and executed that it stands with the best of Hitchcock’s work. The genteel tone of the film at first feels peculiar for a director so fond of the perverse and violent in human nature, but there is a powerful tale of poisoned passion buried within the restrained romantic anguish. The pitfalls of marriage are a running theme that reoccurs throughout Hitchcock’s films—sometimes as the main subject, and sometimes as a side gag, but almost always present in some form. Under Capricorn proves to be one of his definitive depictions of marital hell.

The film begins with Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), cousin to the newly appointed governor of the colony, landing in Australia in the hopes of making some sort of fortune for himself. Opportunity comes in the form of Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten), a local landowner and man of wealth who approaches Adare with a business proposition. Flusky invites the newcomer to a dinner party at his mansion, and a rather tense evening ensues: the wives of all of the other guests are conspicuously absent, as is Lady Henrietta, Flusky’s own wife, until she suddenly appears, drunk and confused and in bare feet.

Having known Henrietta when he was a child, Adare is distressed by the current state of the woman: an alcoholic mess hiding from the world in Flusky’s mansion. Adare—with the consent of Flusky—begins the difficult process of restoring her self-confidence. And as the enthusiastic Adare brings Henrietta back to life, Flusky watches anxiously, at first with hope for his wife’s recovery and then with jealousy as he sees her grow closer to the charming young man.

However, the relationship between Flusky and his wife is more complicated than just another aging marriage on the rocks. Flusky is a former stable boy who eloped with the aristocratic Henrietta back in Ireland; he was convicted of murdering her brother and has spent the years since his release cultivating a life as a respectable, wealthy citizen. This is a marriage built on sudden passion and death, and the pair are linked in a complicity far stronger—albeit more painful—than anything Adare can offer to Henrietta. The couple remains dedicated to each other, and yet, under the burden of the past, they find themselves unable to love each other even as they acknowledge that they cannot live apart. The same love that nourishes poisons as well.

This sounds rather harrowing, but the cobbled-together colonial gentility of the film’s atmosphere forces restraint upon the extreme emotions running through the story. Hitchcock’s depiction of these characters is carefully observed and humane as he ruefully addresses their plight without condescension or moralizing. Telling the story primarily through a series of carefully constructed, elegant long takes, Hitchcock achieves something quite moving—even lyrical—out of the sex-death perversity that runs through so much of his work.

As I watched the film, I thought back to Rope quite often. Made in 1949, Under Capricorn is very much an extension of the methods employed in the earlier film, but with greater refinement and intelligence. Rope is largely a gimmick—a fun and often intriguing one, but a gimmick all the same. The conceit was to make a film in a single shot, even though less than 10 minutes of film could be contained on a single reel. In order to accommodate his desire to make the film at least appear that it was done in a single take, Hitchcock engaged in some elaborate staging tricks that allowed him to switch the film mid-scene unnoticed. Unfortunately, this required many awkward close-ups of people’s backs and other distracting attempts to blank out the image and allow for the reels to be changed. The technique constantly calls attention to itself and never really meshes with the material as a result. Rope is a marvel of staging and timing, but Hitchcock is too pre-occupied with playing games to pay much attention to the particulars of the story.

By contrast, Under Capricorn is a work of nuance and maturity. Hitchcock discards the vain conceit of the single-take film, but he retains the intricate staging and lengthy shots he had mastered in Rope, making the earlier film seem now like a warm-up for this more judicious and thoughtful follow-up. Instead of serving as a distracting, self-conscious experiment in style, the long takes of this film elegantly draw out the emotional tensions between the characters.

In one particularly fine scene, Charles is taking down a message from Henrietta to include in a letter to his sister Diana. Henrietta stands over him and dictates a letter that explains how much she appreciates everything Charles has done for her; the moment glows with warmth and mutual feeling. The camera drifts away from the pair and slowly pans over the empty room as Henrietta’s voice continues to speak softly, a lulling music for this serene image. The searching eye of the camera finally settles on Sam, back turned, walking away down the hall.

There’s a kind of suspense here, albeit not the type Hitchcock fans are typically accustomed to expecting of the master. The pan over the empty room builds up a sense of peace that is broken by the sight of Sam walking away, and that disruption in the mood creates a subtle yet ominous chill in the midst of this delicate moment. In a single visually eloquent shot, Hitchcock uses physical space and camera movement to convey Sam’s increasing emotional isolation.

The easiest dismissal of this film is that it is “talky,” an argument which might make sense when coming from a blind person, but which otherwise I have little patience for. Listen less and watch more. If the film seems too windy to you, then put it on mute, because you’re missing the point. The talk is purely illustrative. As is the case with many a great film, the dialogue elaborates the story without being absolutely essential to the telling. All of the real action in this film occurs on the visual level, and even if you never heard a word spoken, the basic emotional truth would still come through loud and clear.

The quiet elegance of the letter scene is typical of Under Capricorn, which prizes small gestures and glances and the expressive capabilities of staging and camera movement. The film cultivates a tone of ominous tranquility, which is perfect for relaying this tale of murderous, torrid passion entering the late stages of its decay. One could possibly mistake this entropy for a sort of peace—but only if you don’t look too closely.