Deep Cuts: With a Screenplay by the Producer

If I was Gregory Peck, any time I thought back on my two films with Alfred Hitchcock, I think I'd be a little cheesed off. One of the great actors stars of his generation, working with a filmmaker with more than his fair share of masterpieces to his name, Peck nevertheless found himself appearing in two of Hitchcock's semi-duds. The first of those collaborations, Spellbound, is hardly forgettable, but it survives in most people's memory primarily due to the astonishing dream sequence, put together by Hitchcock and Salvador Dali. It's all wonky bicylce wheels and bird shadows and giant scissors, and it's a wonder to behold, but even that sequence is badly marred when seen in the context of the entire film, because each bizarre image is later ruthlessly explained to the audience in one of that movie's many instances of tedious psychobabble. In explaining the dream, Hitchcock and company render it strangely meaningless.
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The Paradine Case, the second and last film Peck made with Hitchcock, is not so much forgotten as never bothered with. It occupies space in an interesting limbo, of a sort that every great filmmaker as prolific as Hitchcock has in their cosmos, with Under Capricorn and The Wrong Man and I Confess, movies that nobody seems to truly dislike, but which nobody ever talks about, either (for the record, I love The Wrong Man). Coming to The Paradine Case, as I did, after many years as a Hitchcock fan who has seen the majority of his films, is an interesting, but frustrating, experience. One hopes the movie will be an unjustly ignored gem, of course, but what I found was a film that was not that, but was actually very close to it, and the ways in which it evades greatness, and even very goodness, are exasperating.

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The story, briefly is this: Peck plays Anthony Keane, a highly successful defense attorney, or whatever they call those in England, and a decent man, happily married to Gay (Ann Todd). He is called in by friend and colleague Sir Simon Flaquer (Charles Coburn) to take the case of Maddalena Paradine (Alida Valli), who has recently been arrested and charged with the murder of her blind husband. During his subsequent work on the case, Keane finds himself falling in love with Maddalena, and developing a theory -- which he seems ready to find evidence to support, come hell or high water -- that Andre Latour (Louis Jordan), the dead man's valet, is the real killer. In the course of this story, we will also meet Flaquer's daughter Judy (Joan Tetzel), who is quite dubious regarding Keane's motives and state of mind; the petty, cruel, and lascivious Lord Thomas Horfield (Charles Laughton), who is presiding over the murder trial; and Lady Sophie (Ethel Barrymore), Lord Thomas's much abused wife.

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So that's the groundwork. As a plot, it's really pretty standard-issue, in some ways, but the side characters, particularly the Horfields, add a great deal of color, both in Laughton and Barrymore's performances, which are typically wonderful, and in the off-plot, but not entirely off-theme, digressions they offer. Barrymore is not just terrific, but heartbreaking, as an old woman whose mind is slipping, not necessarily only due to old age, but possibly due to a lifetime of meekly accepting her husband's cruelty. This cruelty, as played loathsomely by Laughton, is not merely casual but also premeditated. Their scenes together are all the more effective for being infrequent, and their contrast with what turns out, unexpectedly, to be the story's main focus -- the relationship between Keane and his wife -- serves to highlight many of the film's missteps.

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See, there's an awful lot of off-the-hook-getting when it comes to Anthony Keane. His wife -- and Simon Flacquer, and Judy Flacquer, and pretty much everybody else -- clue in pretty quickly that he's fallen hard for his client, and while they do sort of judge him for it, and rightly so, they seem to want to give him all sorts of outs. For one thing, when Gay finally confronts him with her knowledge, she tells him that she prays that he's able to get Maddalena off scott free. Not prove her innocent, necessarily -- this seems to be, at best, a secondary concern -- but just set her free, because if she hangs for murder, then Keane will be in love with her forever. If she's free to roam the earth as a tangible, flawed, possibly even murderous, human being, then maybe ol' Keane will eventually come around and go back to loving his perfectly wonderful wife again. Considering Keane's boneheaded emotional transparency, and the utter hash he eventually makes of his case at trial, it's hard for me to see why everybody's so hellbent on giving this guy such a long leash.

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That's maybe a pure story problem, or a character problem. For a problem more directly tied to filmmaking, we have to turn to Maddalena herself, and ask "What the Christ does he see in her??" It's not that Alida Valli isn't beautiful, because she very clearly is. The problem is that she's barely in the movie. Maddalena is purely a supporting character, not just compared to Keane, but to Gay, as well, and when she and Kean do interact, and while it's clear that Peck is playing a deepening inatuation, it's in no way clear why, other than that's what the script says to do. There is no real moment between the two of them. Maddalena is an ice queen, rude and distant, even mildly combative. Keane loves her because there's no movie if he doesn't.

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The best chunk of The Paradine Case is located in the last forty minutes or so, which I've long held is the best place to put the best part of your movie. This forty minutes, of course, involves the trial itself. The downside of this section is that the details of the case, of the murder, aren't very compelling. The upside is that not only is this when we finally get our one true Hitchcock flourish -- when Latour is called to the stand, and he passes by Maddalena in the dock; it's an extraordinary shot -- but we see how close to making a sort of upper-crust English, by way of Hollywood, film noir Hitchock was with this movie -- it certainly has the look throughout. To put it bluntly, Keane fucks up badly, and he pays for it. Peck plays his moment of crumble brilliantly, and for a while there I thought, for all its flaws, The Paradine Case was going to be something of a classical tragedy, as so many film noirs are. And that's sort of what we end up with, except there's one more moment of that goddamn off-the-hook-getting with Keane, and the last scene of the movie almost makes light of how badly he's made a mess of things.

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Along with being the last film Hitchock made with Peck, it was also the last film he made with David O. Selznick, who, by the way, gets a somewhat elaborate screenwriting credit on The Paradine Case as well (see this post's title). Not only did Selznick poke his nose in there, but took a hatchet to the edit, too. So, properly, the final product could in some ways be more accurately called a David O. Selznick film than an Alfred Hitchcock film, although it's highly doubtful that a full and unambiguous David O. Selznick film would have looked this good. In any case, Hitchcock was about to make Rope, and shortly thereafter enter into the amazing work he did in the 1950s. Let Selznick have his bottle, I suppose, but it's still hard not to crave that excellent version of The Paradine Case that's buried in the one we have.