The Bells of St. Mary's

 The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)

Starring Bing Crosby, Ingrid Bergman, and Henry Travers

Directed by Leo McCary

Written by Dudley Nichols

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating:  C

Gaslight

Gaslight (1944)

Starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Mae Whitty, and Angela Lansbury

Directed by George Cukor

Written by John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, and John L. Balderston

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating:  B

Hitchcock Month - Under Capricorn

Under Capricorn (1949)

Starring Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Michael Wilding, and Margaret Leighton

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Under Capricorn is widely regarded as Hitchcock's biggest failure.  His Ishtar, Battlefield Earth, or Waterworld, if you will (on a significantly lesser budget).  While the film certainly isn't good, it isn't the worst I've seen from him over the past month.  What makes Hitchcock "Hitchcock" is his masterful way of combining technique and story to create something both visually appealing and thrillingly entertaining.  In Under Capricorn, the technique is present (and all too blatantly obvious as I'll discuss), but the story is a chore to schlep through.

Made a year after Rope where Hitchcock utilized ten-minute long takes to make his movie appear to be a seamless single shot, Under Capricorn employs a similar technique.  While not a "seamless" shot, the film is made up of scenes that are unedited long takes as well.  Not being confined to a single apartment as in Rope, it would have been impossible for Hitch to film this film in a "single" take.  However, nearly every scene is just a long shot.  And, I must say, the technique is showcased with a bit more elegance in Under Capricorn than in Rope.  Hitch moves the camera around to beautiful effect in some scenes, moving from room to room, up stairs, and in and out of windows.  It's actually fairly neat to watch...but I found myself only caring about the technique and not the stuffy costume-drama story in the slightest.  Rather than find a balance, Hitch relied much too heavily on his camera rather than successfully mining the script for any type of emotional resonance.

And it certainly is the screenplay that fails here.  It really makes me wonder why in the world Hitch chose to shoot this one as it is rather unlike anything in Hitch's oeuvre (which may very well be the reason he chose to shoot it).  The story is a love quadrangle that begins with hardened criminal Samson Flusky (Joseph Cotten) who was transported from Great Britain to Australia because he killed a man.  The man he happened to kill was his wife's brother, but, for reasons that we don't learn until nearly three-quarters of the way through the movie, his wife Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman who's laughably playing an Irish lass with her standard German accent) travels to Australia with him.  Flusky served his time and he's now living in a lavish estate with Henrietta who has essentially withered away into a forlorn alcoholic.  

The third member of the quadrangle is Irishman Charles Adare (Michael Wilding) who arrives in Australia to see the new land.  He meets up with Flusky by accident and, when he is welcomed into the Flusky estate, Charles realizes he knew Henrietta when they were young.  Charles is upset that Henrietta is in such a depressed state and he is determined to get her out of her funk which he does with much success.  Needless to say, this doesn't sit too well with Flusky's maid, Milly (Margaret Leighton) who is in love with Flusky and is worried that if Henrietta gets better her chances of being with Flusky will be thwarted.

Aah...soap opera drama!  In and of itself, I'd be okay with a story like the above, but the problem is that Under Capricorn is entirely too talky and ostentatious to be the least bit interesting.  The film itself is caught in a Catch-22 situation -- if Hitch didn't film in long takes, it may have placed more emphasis on the story, but the film, as it stands now, would have a complete bore without the long takes adding something moderately interesting.

I also think I've come to the determination that Ingrid Bergman is a very overrated actress.  Although I'm still harboring fond memories of Notorious and think that I perhaps graded that flick a bit too harshly, Bergman was the off-putting part of that film for me.  She just seems incredibly cold as I also witnessed in the horrible Spellbound.  In Under Capricorn, her character is admittedly silly, but she is also overacting to the nth degree.  

The star of the flick to me is actually Margaret Leighton as the devious housekeeper Milly.  Reminiscent of the evil maid Mrs. Danvers in Hitch's Rebecca, on the outside Milly is the ideal servant, but underneath the façade, she harbors her own motives and will stop at nothing to get her way.  Whenever Milly was onscreen, Under Capricorn seemed to come to life.

It's no surprise that Under Capricorn is not a widely known film.  The dvd was produced by some chintzy company I've never heard of before (you know it's bad when your studio, Warner Bros., doesn't even want to distribute a dvd).  While there's some minor moments of intrigue, it's much more of a drama.  Unfortunately, there's just a throwaway story here that doesn't have enough gravitas to work.

The RyMickey Rating:  C-

Hitchcock Month - Spellbound

Spellbound (1945)

Starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

This will be film number twenty-one of the Hitchcock month-long fest and it is the most dated and melodramatic by far.  I'm not a fan of psychobabble and this film is full of it, trying to muster up some suspense by talking about psychoanalytical theories.  It just falls completely flat and very badly so.  It never drew me in from frame one and even moreso than Lifeboat (which I can at least appreciate for the concept), Spellbound is the worst Hitchcock film I've seen thus far.

Ingrid Bergman is psychoanalyst Dr. Constance Peterson who works at a mental hospital.  When the director of the hospital is forced into retirement, new director Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck) arrives and much too immediate to be believable, Constance and Anthony fall in love at first sight.  However, Constance soon begins to suspect that something is awry and sure enough she is correct.  It turns out that the man who is saying he is Anthony Edwardes is not Mr. Edwardes at all.  This impostor tells Constance that he believes he killed Edwardes, but his amnesia is not permitting him to remember anything, the least of which his own name.  Constance is certain he is not Edwardes' killer (because she couldn't fall in love with a killer) and she uses her psychoanalysis to dig deep into this nameless man's mind to determine what he really knows about the mystery behind Edwardes' murder.  If it all sounds convoluted and confusing while you were reading that, that's because it is.

Problem number one with the film is that it relies much too heavily on psychoanalysis as a plot device.  It's incredibly talky and the attempts at creating suspense are all done via Freudian dialog which just doesn't work.  The mysteries are solved by analyzing "Edwardes'" thoughts, not by uncovering physical clues, and it all just reeked of baloney to me.  Granted, I really despised my psychology classes in college so maybe it's just a bias on my part towards the entire concept of the film.

Still, it doesn't help that both Peck and Bergman are as about as exciting as watching paint dry.  Hitch, combined with a lukewarm script, can't cull anything out of these two.  All of the secondary characters are ridiculous caricatures as well. 

And it's not just the script and the actors that are a problem either.  The musical score by Miklós Rósza is painfully overbearing (how it won the Academy Award that year is beyond comprehension).  I rarely comment on scores unless they're excellent or awful and this one certainly falls into the latter category.

Spellbound is one of those movies that people who don't like old films can point to and say "See how corny and overwrought everything is from the music to the acting to the dialog?  How could you possibly like watching black-and-white films?"  Spellbound truly is full of every old-school film cliché. The only thing saving this from an 'F' is that I usually reserve that for films that are overtly offensive to me and while this doesn't quite hit that level (a Salvador Dali-inspired dream sequence is at least a little unique), it fails pretty miserably.

The RyMickey Rating:  D-

Hitchcock Month - Notorious

Notorious (1946)

Starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Although I'm not through even half of Hitchcock's repertoire at this point, Notorious may be the sexiest movie he ever made.  Granted, that's a 1940s version of sexy, but there's no denying that Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant make quite an alluring couple.  Her cold demeanor and his warm charm mesh quite well together on screen and combine to create a rather steamy romance in the midst of this espionage thriller set in the early 1940s.

After her father is convicted of being a Nazi spy, Alicia Huberman (Bergman) throws a party -- in part to drown her sorrow and in part because she's kind of a drunk.  A guest to the party invites T.R. Devlin (Grant) and Alicia and Devlin immediately have a romantic connection.  However, Alicia soon discovers that Devlin is an FBI agent who wants Alicia to infiltrate a group of Nazis who are now living in Rio di Janeiro, Brazil.  Initially angered, Alicia's love for Devlin and desire to "make up to America" for her father's wrongdoings compel her to agree to Devlin's request.

Unfortunately, complications arise as soon as Alicia's work begins.  Devlin's superiors decide that in order to best defeat this group of Germans, Alicia must seduce one of the men --Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), a friend of her father's.  With Alicia becoming a modern day Mata Hari, Devlin begins to get jealous and his relationship with Alicia becomes strained.  Giving away much more would be a disservice if you've never seen the film before, but, suffice it to say, Notorious is certainly a spy story, but it's also (and perhaps moreso) a love triangle, and the combination of the two creates a rather interesting film.

While I do like Ingrid Bergman as an actress, I can't help but think she's alway a little stoic and icy in her acting.  While that's the case here as well, her part requires that of her.  Alicia is caught between two loves -- a love for her man and a love for her country.  She is, for lack of a better term, whoring herself out.  The irony of it all is that she's doing this because of her love for Devlin.  This conundrum is explored quite well by both Bergman and the screenwriter and what could be a tricky unbelievable character is given motivations that are easily understandable.

Even though Cary Grant gets top billing on the poster, the film really belongs to Bergman.  That being said, while Grant definitely plays his charming self at times in Notorious, his character has a much darker side.  His Devlin has fallen (and fallen hard) for Alicia, but he must sacrifice her in order to fulfill his duties.  The audience can see the jealousy that is eating away at him and, considering Grant isn't necessarily all that well known for playing anything other than a romantic lead, he does a great job here.  [This actually may be my favorite Grant role that I've seen.]

To not mention Claude Rains here would be remiss.  Rains' Alex, the Nazi whom Alicia must seduce, is actually incredibly sympathetic.  He's a nice guy who's also fallen head over heels in love with Alicia.  Hitchcock has a way of crafting films in which you slowly begin to feel bad for the bad guy and he does that here to great effect.  Yes, we know that Alex is trying to do harm to the country, but by not making him the quintessential villain, Hitch plays with the audience a bit. 

All that said, I wasn't digging this movie much in the middle acts.  Something just wasn't clicking with me.  In retrospect, I think it was simply that I wasn't in the mood to watch it because looking back on it, I can't really think of anything I disliked.  Having said that, perhaps my rating below should be taken with a grain of salt.  I'd like to watch this one again in the near future to see if my feelings change for the better because I think they would.  Nevertheless, Notorious certainly has three of the most complicated and intriguing characters I've seen in Hitch's work to date and, I'd venture to guess that these may be the three most complicated and interesting characters in all of his oeuvre.

The RyMickey Rating:  B