Last night, I watched Under Capricorn for the second time. The first time, decades ago, involved a cruddy VHS tape that did nothing to argue against the movie’s reputation as one of Hitchcock’s big flops. This time, I was watching a DVD that, while not claiming to be the product of serious restoration, was as agreeable, printwise, as any new movie. I enjoyed it. This enjoyment had a strong “meta” quality to it; I should not recommend Under Capricorn to anyone except, perhaps, fans of melodrama, because that’s what Under Capricorn is — and that’s why Hitchcock aficionados dislike it so much. To the true admirer of Hitchcock, his aficionados tend to reduce him to a genre filmmaker, and to scold him when he fails to produce a “Hitchcock” movie. They’re like the the fans who like Woody Allen’s “earlier, funnier” pictures. Hitchcock and Allen are, however, such consummate auteurs that even the movies that fail to thrill cannot be dismissed as failures, because each is an interesting experiment.

Under Capricorn was the second of two pictures inspired by some itch of Hitchcock’s to claim the power of stage performances for the movies. A master of montage, Hitchcock set this mastery aside for Rope and Under Capricorn, indulging instead in prolonged takes. Under Capricorn is the less rigorous experiment; in addition to its long scenes, there are plenty of conventional shots/countershots, the most basic grammar of filmed dialogue. But the camera covers much more ground in Under Capricorn, following characters through doorways and up climbing vines. To make this happen, sets had to be constructed to fly apart at the camera’s advance, and the mechanical noise of the production was such that almost all dialogue had to be re-recorded directly after filming. These technical challenges were Hitchcock’s principle interest in the making of Under Capricorn, and if the resulting film is short on appeal, it is nevertheless an indispensable rehearsal of techniques that would make Rear Window the astounding (and very dramatic) success that it is.

In any case, it is not the sophisticated camera work that makes Under Capricorn unpopular. It is the form of the story, which dates from the previous century, when “suspense” was a feature of “melodrama,” much like romantic scenery and bad weather. Hitchcock became famous for reversing this relationship: he expressed drama in terms of suspense. Suspense is a function of the asymmetry of information. The audience knows something that a character does not — but this is not to say that the audience knows everything. In Vertigo, for example, we learn that Judy Barton was impersonating Madeleine Elster long before Scottie Ferguson does, but this just changes the nature of our suspense, for now what we don’t know is how Scottie is going to respond when he finds out — not to mention the consequences of this response. No one has ever surpassed Hitchcock’s agility at shuffling the asymmetries while never allowing the tension dissipate. Nineteenth-century melodrama, however, used suspense to punctuate “dramatic” scenes, as in “drama” as it’s used by young people today. A better word would be “emotional.” When Devlin rescues Alicia from her bedridden imprisonment at the end of Notorious, the love scene in the foreground is quite conventionally melodramatic in structure (if cooled down to modern temperatures by Cary Grant), but it remains firmly encased in a format of suspense, because the resolution of the romantic confusion between the lovers simply releases us to worry all the more about how they’re going to get out of the house, and it’s that clever escape that we really remember. There are no such escapes in Under Capricorn.

Interestingly, Hitchcock forwent a signal opportunity for suspense in Under Capricorn by opting for its opposite, surprise, at the dénouement. Complete surprises are rare in Hitchcock. (Max de Winter’s confession that he hated Rebecca is the most successful.) He could not help himself from spoiling this one by heavily foreshadowing, in the most melodramatic ways, the evil designs of Milly, the housekeeper so wonderfully acted by Margaret Leighton. Leighton is great fun to watch; she does everything but wink at the audience while she pours honeyed lies into her employer’s ear. We know that she’s up to no good, but this is expectation, not suspense. We don’t know until the moment of surprise that she has been poisoning Lady Hattie and torturing her by placing shrunken heads under the bedclothes. And because of all that foreshadowing, we’re not really surprised. So it’s a double letdown. We didn’t know what the troubled Flusky couple was going to discover, and we aren’t all that shocked when we find out. The miscalculation is colossal, but it is colossally instructive.

Ingrid Bergman’s face is one of cinema’s icons, thanks largely to the photography in Casablanca, which inspired the saying that “the camera loved her.” As a generation of theatre actors had to find out during the early years of film, camera-love is the most understated kind of love in the world — the better to make room for the flood of audience-love. Every word that an actor speaks costs him an iota of his appeal, because it marks his distance from the viewer who seeks only to meld with him. This is why film killed talky melodramas. In a stage performance, it is very exciting to watch two characters go after each other with hammer and tongs; that’s why Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is revived so often. On film, such excess is embarrassing, not powerful. (The Mike Nichols film of the play succeeds as a reality show: it’s understood that we’re witnessing scenes from the Taylor-Burton marriage, not a play.) Narration belongs to the camera, not to the character.

In Under Capricorn, Ingrid Bergman, at the center of the longest scene in the film, circles a long dining-room table and tells the story of Lady Hattie’s love affair with and marriage to a groom in her father’s stables, Sam Flusky (played by Joseph Cotten, who does not appear in this scene). At one point, she stands beyond her costar, Michael Wilding (playing Hattie’s childhood friend, Adare), and raises her hands in a gesticulation of looking into beautiful distances; the composition is as camp as Canova. Bergman is unsuited for the business, but it’s hard to think of anyone who might have carried it off. Again, however, the mistake is enlightening. And it doesn’t make us forget how radiant Bergman is at the Governor’s ball, in the immediately preceding scene. Aside from the arm-waving, she is always lovely and sympathetic.

What I found genuinely annoying about Under Capricorn was the soundtrack. I haven’t come across any other complaints about Richard Addinsell’s score, but it’s wrong in at least two ways. First, there probably oughtn’t to be background music at all — just as there isn’t in Rope. Stage plays don’t have background music — not during the action, anyway. If you want to know why, just watch Under Capricorn. All the dramatic encounters are underlined by background music. Worse, it is a very simpering kind of music, a blarney of Irish-sounding motifs that makes one wonder if someone thought that Under Capricorn could be saved by making it sound like Gone With the Wind. If the film is ever restored, I hope that the disc offers the option of blocking this music.

Patrick McGilligan writes that such humor as can be found in Under Capricorn owes to Michael Wilding’s performance, but, I say, let’s not overlook Cecil Parker, a great English character actor who probably wouldn’t have appeared in this film if it had been made in Hollywood and not at Elstree. Parker plays the Governor of Australia, newly appointed at the beginning of the film (Wilding’s Adare is his black-sheep cousin, brought along in family desperation), and he invests his role with an irresolute pomposity that suggests Margaret Rutherford and Marion Lorne. The leathers and the feathers of his imperial get-up make his fatuousness funny to watch.

There is a wonderful Sargent painting at the Museum that I like to take visitors to see, Alpine Pool. If you stand back, you see a pool of clear water and the rocks at its bottom. As you walk up to the painting very slowly, there comes a moment when the whole picture breaks down into an assemblage of abstract brush-strokes. Come closer, and you will see “how it is done” — how Sargent works the illusion. Watching Hitchcock’s movies offers a similarly bracing shock, although it works over time, not distance. As you watch them, he teaches you how to watch them, and he gradually empties your head of expectations as you learn to trust that, whatever he does, it will be interesting on the how-to level.

***

As long as we’re talking about melodrama, permit me to repeat my judgment of Gone With the Wind: it is a screwball comedy embalmed in a battlefield epic. I’ll take Mr and Mrs Smith any day.

In today’s Business Section, I came across one of those pieces that makes the Times look more like a publicity machine than a newspaper. The publicity is rarely focused on a single company’s new product — that would be transparent. Instead, it calls attention to new developments in a field. But there is a hopeful, prospective quality to these “developments” — which is to say that they haven’t actually developed yet.

“New Habits Transform Software,” by Quentin Hardy, prints the following statement, by Bret Taylor, “one of the best-regarded young software designers in Silicon Valley.”

“The way people use things is fundamentally changing,” said Bret Taylor, chief executive of Quip, a start-up offering document-writing software that focuses more on mobile than desktop work.

You can tell that the air is thin by the fact that this claim, both grandiose and obvious, has a paragraph to itself. The point of the story is that it is going to be easier to write documents collaboratively and on the fly, via mobile devices. I’m afraid that I don’t find any “transformation” in this news. What I was looking for, when I swallowed the bait in the title, was news about improved automation. For example: What I want is an app that will allow me to right-click on a photograph, make a selection between the two image sizes that I use at my sites, and — done. Something that would save me the trouble of “saving as” — assigning a new name to a copy of the original image. The app would know how to name it, because I follow a protocol about names that it could easily learn. A second right-click would ask me whether I wanted to PhotoShop the image. Eventually, it would insert the uploaded image’s file name into the draft of the pertinent Daily Blague entry. This wonderful app would cross many software borders to execute its commands, but in doing so it would finally realize the promise of desktop computing: true automation. Anything that I’m doing by rote, day after day, ought to be done by a machine.

I’m not expecting anyone to design this app. But surely someone could create an app for designing such apps.

***

So, no automation. I continued reading about making word-processing easier on small devices. Also, this:

“Writing and editing has always been somewhat collaborative, but things are moving much faster now,” said Mathias Crawford, a researcher in human-computer interactions at Stanford University. “We are moving from persuasion based on rhetoric to persuasion based on tables and videos inserted into narrative text.”

Well, that sounds pretty rhetorical to me. The shift to “tables and videos” is simply a move to another kind of rhetoric. A lesser kind, I believe.

It has been a bitter year in several ways — more bittersweet than bitter, perhaps; I’m not rending garments here — and one of the persistent sharp notes has been a reflective comprehension of what it means to be neither collaborative nor mobile. I don’t work with other people, and my favorite mode of communication, aside from the essay, is the exchange of letters. I do not consider such correspondence “collaborative.” Although correspondence can have some of the effects (on a third-party reader) of a collaborative effort, as two writers work to refine the expression of ideas in an exchange of comments, it completely lacks a key element of collaboration, cooperation. I am not an intellectually cooperative person. What I do well I do best by myself.

And I am not a mobile person, which is perhaps why I’ve never been able to find a use for Twitter. Six or seven years ago, when using a computer on the go, wherever one happened to be in the world, was just beginning to be imaginable, I was as eager as anybody to do it. But my age got in the way. Just as mobile devices came on line and became more reliable, I found myself at home most of the time. When I did go out, I went out to see or to do something, not to write about it. The things that I went out to see or to do did not entail news flashes that I might forget, and on those rare occasions when something startling crossed my attention, I wrote it down in a small notebook (and usually forgot about it). Conversely, when I did set to writing, I more often than not wanted to consult my library. I am very much in the position of Michel de Montaigne, who worked in his tower room. Montaigne was a man of affairs, and very mobile in his day job. But he wrote in retirement. I believe that everyone does. Reading and writing are different activities only to the extent that they are not bridged by thinking, and thinking, for most human beings, requires freedom from disturbance.

I don’t see anything on the technological horizon that is going to alter that.

As for “tables and videos,” I don’t know whether to laugh (at the blithe naiveté of the statement, as though there were anything new about the use of media in business presentations) or to cry (at the difficulty of putting media to use in ways that are intellectually clear to the uninitiated). Reading about Condorcet recently, I stumbled on what I take to be a truth that can be stated simply: the sole object of political activity is to shape laws and conventions that conform to a social consensus about everyday commerce. I am not convinced that “commerce” is the best term for this statement, but it was the most immediately handy. I mean it to cover the full range of human transactions, including of course the purchase and sales of goods but also comprising the many illiquid agreements of everyday life, such as our mutual engagement not to drive through red lights. (And certain human transactions, regarded as private, are not to be subjected to political attention. They are to be covered by exclusion.) But, to restate the truth: Politics is the business of making our laws agree ever more fully with our expectations about daily life.

A simple statement, but the complexity of realizing it is discouraging. It’s not that we need to think of a new system for making politics do what it ought to do. The system that we have will work well enough, if enough people agree to put it to that use. No, the complexity lies in closing the gap between the profusion of abstruse conditional statements that fill our lawbooks, on the one hand, and the comprehension of normally intelligent citizens, on the other. Few of our laws are written with everybody in mind. That’s what has to change, and changing it poses extraordinary challenges to the ability to express ourselves clearly. To state the challenge baldly: the economic underpinnings of our laws on taxation and incorporation must be plainly understandable to citizens without higher education. Otherwise, what we have is government by the elite, for the elite. (And I hasten to note that I belong to the elite!)

Visuals might be very helpful here, but learning how to create them won’t be taught visually. I remember something that the late media critic Neil Postman said about the act of thinking: it makes for dull television. Uncertainty is fatal to visual expression. In order to instruct, a video must be sure of itself, and to make a video that is both sure of itself and honest requires a great deal of thinking on the part of its makers. This is what ars est celare artem means: (according to the Random House) “true art conceals the means by which it is achieved.”

And there is no getting round the need to make clear thinking easier for more people. The plethora of less-than-honest visuals out there makes the problem twice as difficult.