Word: capricorn
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Under Capricorn realizes the best romantic trends of late forties and early fifties Hitchcock. It's an example of the change to dramas with few characters, and to a style which makes their relations almost tangible. The love-relations between Under Capricorn's characters become sweeping camera movements attached mainly to Ingrid Bergman...
...does his subject balance his frightening formal control and let the characters seem real individuals. Hitchcock's audience-manipulation, involving an attitude of superiority toward his viewers, generates the unpleasant feeling that his characters merely illustrate a narrow moral design-Hitchcock's. Only in Shadow of a Doubt, Under Capricorn, and Psycho do they act as whole people. These works, which realize the best tendencies of their period of Hitchcock, transcend his usual limitations by enlisting a more sympathetic audience identification with the characters. They feel unlike other Hitchcock...
...Shadow of a Doubt moral interplay was expressed in cross-cutting between characters. In Under Capricorn moral interplay becomes a complex flow of all the characters' emotions to a single climax and resolution. The graceful motion, deep color tonalities, rich settings unite with the characters' moral paralyses. One is completely involved in their struggles to overcome paralysis. The spaces and movements of the film are integrated as the characters' attempts to fufill their desires, now a theme beyond the person of any one character, become a part of the whole romantic setting...
...Under Capricorn rises above most previous Hitchcock largely because it deals with neurosis and obsession. The advent of these themes in Hollywood during the late forties and fifties led to masterpieces from most of America's greatest directors: Hawks's Red River. Sirk's Written on the Wind. Ford's The Searchers, most of Ray. Frank Borzage is especially illuminating. His extremely strong, even deterministic way of shooting people's actions had always outweighed the romantic and sentimental conception of personality beneath his plots. The addition of an obsession with murder to a desperate love in Moonrise...
...Tibetan Book of the Dead under his arm is looking strained. Out on the street the narrator tried to remember when he had had such an intense religious experience before, and thinks of the time he "was introduced to the Viennese School of Fantastic Realism. I was with a Capricorn-Aries in his meditation room. I asked him if he had any... examples of this school of art." The shrink points to a bare wall and says yes, "It is called the Door to nowhere...