Way back in September 2019, I was invited to participate in a symposium, organised by Prof. Charles Barr and Dr Stéphane Duckett, celebrating the 70th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s much maligned, Australian-set melodrama, Under Capricorn (1949).
Tasked with offering a perspective on the film’s Australian connections, I presented a paper entitled ‘An international production but ‘not much Australian’: authenticity and Australianness in Under Capricorn’, and I’m pleased to say that an extended and revised version of that paper has now been published as part of a special dossier on the film, Under Capricorn: 70 Years On, published by Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism (open access).
The article explores a range of perspectives on the ‘Australianess’ of the film, which was shot in UK studios and on location in California, expanding out to consider the various settler colonial implications of this melodrama set in 1830s New South Wales.
You can read my article, and the rest of the contributions to Under Capricorn: 70 Years On on the website of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, or via the PDF below:
Dr Stephen Morgan 