“No good can come of that”: the only time Alfred Hitchcock put an actor before himself
In 1949, Alfred Hitchcock did something he’d never done before, and would never do again. When casting his follow-up to 1948’s Rope, which fared poorly at the box office and polarised critics, the ‘Master of Suspense’ wanted to stack the deck in his favour by reuniting with Ingrid Bergman, the star of two of his greatest works, Spellbound and Notorious.
However, there was one problem with Hitchcock’s desire to work with Bergman again: he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the movie he wanted her to star in. Indeed, Under Capricorn, a costume drama set in 1800s Australia had always seemed an odd choice for Hitchcock. For one thing, the film wasn’t a thriller; instead, it was a story about a love triangle between a convict turned wealthy landowner, his agoraphobic wife, and a kind-hearted cousin of Sydney’s governor.
Indeed, perhaps Hitchcock’s mild interest in the project was predicated on the elements of James Bridie’s screenplay that were, shall we say, thriller-adjacent. The film did feature hints that the landowner may have murdered his brother-in-law in the past, and the plot has a ‘wrong man’ element when it is revealed that the agoraphobic wife actually committed that crime, but her husband took the fall for her.
Whatever the case, Hitchcock’s muted interest in the project may have manifested itself on film because he was once again met with a box office flop and a critical shrug. In 1955, when interviewed by the famed French movie magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, the celebrated auteur spoke in the third person to admit, “That was Hitchcock disarmed in the hands of the actor. No good can come of that.”
What exactly did this mean? Well, according to Hitchcock, he reversed his usual approach to casting for Under Capricorn, and it wasn’t something he would ever repeat. “The film was done more or less for the benefit of Ingrid Bergman,” he claimed. “That was a case of trying to find a subject to suit the star, which I don’t believe in. So it was really a compromise.”
Does this assertion line up with other interviews in which an arrogant Hitchcock indicated that he was curious to see if he could convince Bergman to star in any old movie, just because he was directing it? Not really, but then again, Hitchcock had a nasty habit of saying fairly disparaging things about his leading ladies. This time, Bergman fell victim to his blaming her for changing his entire artistic approach, even while admitting the whole thing was his idea in the first place.
Amusingly, even in later years, when Under Capricorn underwent a critical reappraisal and was deemed one of his underrated gems, Hitchcock still didn’t buy it. French filmmaking legend François Truffaut even told him that the film was “beautiful,” but he couldn’t get over the fact that it bombed at the box office. To Hitchcock, the money made by any film was the most significant indicator of its quality, and if something struggled to attract audiences, he had messed up somewhere along the way.
Ultimately, though, perhaps this one might be a cut-and-dry case of Hitchcock leaving his wheelhouse, only to quickly realise he missed its comforts and hated making historical dramas. “Of course, the bad thing for me was that it was a costume picture, which to me have no appeal,” he drily noted. “Because I’ve never been very good at it, and to me, no one in a costume picture ever goes to the toilet.”
