The movements of actors and camera required precision blocking, with assistants quietly rolling furniture out of the way. In a theatre, projection reels could hold 20 minutes of film before a reel change made it necessary to switch to the second projector (gosh, this sound prehistoric), so Hitchcock disguised the mid-reel cut via brief close-ups of an actor’s back, thus presenting the illusion of an unbroken 20-minute shot. In the stagebound Rope, Hitchcock had amused himself by staging the action in unbroken ten-minute shots, which was as much film as a 35mm camera could hold. Hitchcock decided to modify a practice from his previous film. In Hitchcock’s film, the lighting and painted backdrops are similarly eye-popping.Įven more glorious is the second experimental element, which explains why no less than an unheard-of four camera operators are listed. These are films that glory in the artificiality of their Technicolor.
#Capricorn one movie length series#
This time he employed the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who’d been dazzling the world with his work for a series of films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), which won him an Oscar, and The Red Shoes (1948), a Best Picture nominee. The first was Technicolor, for this was his second color movie after Rope (1948). Hitchcock experimented with at least two elements in Under Capricorn. Even so, it was possible to grasp something of its faded glory, which we now see clearly and creamily in this 4K digital restoration. This film was dismissed on its release as a talky costume drama and a warmed-over Rebecca, and in the home video era, it has floated around in lousy prints painful to the eye and ear, as though crunched into the mud by a horse and carriage. Fortunately, that never stopped him from experimenting. When he interviewed Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut called Under Capricorn a beautiful movie, as it is, but Hitchcock tended to be locked into a commercial view that the box office decided which of his films were failures. That’s why this Blu-ray of Under Capricorn (1949) is among the most important digital restorations of the year. Well, there’s another example, combining both these descriptions, that’s among the director’s most unseen and disregarded movies, yet on most days I think it’s easily in his top ten. If asked to name a Hitchcock movie where Ingrid Bergman plays a put-upon wife suffering a breakdown, your mind might leap to Notorious (1946). In a strange way, it’s well worth a remake.If you were asked to name an Alfred Hitchcock movie about a big gothic mansion inhabited by a fragile wife, an imperious husband and a sinister housekeeper, you’d probably go straight to Rebecca, his Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1940. He needn’t have worried, the set-up is strong enough, a truly original focus for a thriller - for a while the astronauts are unaware they haven’t gone to Mars! Employing composer Jerry Goldsmith, who delivers one of his most stirring scores helps no end, as does a hilarious cameo from Telly Savalas as a crop-dusting pilot who Gould ropes into his rescue mission. Simpson, who gets to drink from a dead snake, tells you just what era this film harkens from.ĭirector Peter Hyams, a hack himself who veers between the outright crap and expertly handled B-movies like this, plays around with some loopy helicopter shots in search of a resonant style. That they are played by James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O.J. The second half is pure chase movie, a race against time as the trio of heroic spaceman escape their desert prison and are gradually hunted down. As he pieces together the factual anomalies, tipped off by his soon-to-die insider buddy Robert Walden, and dodges various attempts on his life (the most immediate form of verification) the film spins into life. It is he, one of the seventies great unrecognised joys, who gives the film its ironic fizz, as if it is almost parodying the seriousness of the eras moody suspicions. Get over that and it’s a whole lot of fun watching Hal Halbrook’s - who played supergrass Deep Throat in All The President’s Men - wicked scheming unravel thanks to the gutsy work of Elliot Gould’s tatty hack. Shadowy political trickery is one thing, fabricating an entire NASA mission is near impossible to credit. Certainly, you have to forgive the whacking great lumps of far-fetchedness. An excellent, if forgotten, late seventies conspiracy thriller which takes the existent fable of the faked moon landing and runs with it.
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