The Paradine Case (Hitchcock, 1947): Regent Street Cinema, 1pm
This excellent melodrama was one of my five picks for the Guardian of underrated
Alfred Hitchcock
films when the BFI did a complete retrospective devoted to the director. not to be missed this summer. You can read my thoughts on the
quintet of movies via the web here and this is what I had to say about The Paradine Case:
Hitchcock's rough-cut of The Paradine Case, with which producer David Selznick tinkered
extensively in post-production, was lost in a flood in the 1980s.
That's a shame as its restoration would surely have revived interest in a
film now almost wholly neglected but which has at its core themes the
director was to return to with such devastating effect in Vertigo. In no
other Hitchcock film, bar that 1958 masterpiece, is the central male
character so undermined as he is here, with Gregory Peck as a barrister
who ends up destroying the object of his obsession, the woman he is
supposed to be defending on a charge of murder. Peck's wife's plea to
him to win the case, despite her knowledge of his love for her rival,
and her protestation that "if she dies you are lost to me forever"
undercuts the notional happy ending here in a film darkened even more by
Charles Laughton's scene-stealing role as the grotesque judge, Lord
Horfield.
Slant review:
It's easy for a cinephile or film critic to recognize the accomplished
audacity of, say, the shower scene from Psycho. But The Paradine Case
revels in the quiet brilliance that defines Hitchcock's cinema: its
geometrically fluid rendering of power. The film's first act might've
been regarded as exposition by a conventional director and tossed off in
a series of over-the-shoulder shots that would live or die by the
actors' performances. For Hitchcock, such scenes are at the core of his
very subject, as The Paradine Case is a study of neurosis, in which a
murder trial comes to stand as a pretense for influential men and women
to argue their statuses vis-à-vis each other. Hitchcock utilizes faces
as pivot points throughout The Paradine Case, most famously when a
witness's entrance into a courtroom is staged entirely from behind a
close-up of Paradine's head. This witness will prove to have a great
deal of meaning to Paradine, which is clouded in a fog of class, sexual
instinct, and romantic longing. The film is concerned with how class
dwarfs our sexuality, conditioning men to resent an inability to procure
women to whom they feel their station entitles them. This stifled
hunger runs throughout Hitchcock's filmography as his master theme: In
his comedies and light thrillers, sex and its corresponding acceptance
are freely experienced by goodlooking and charismatic people; in his
existential thrillers, these are forbidden fruits to the emasculated
male protagonists. In The Paradine Case, men and women talk almost
entirely of sex via legal euphemisms-conversations which Hitchcock
frames in tableaux that evoke the ebb and flow of one-upmanship,
dramatizing a series of checks and checkmates as women grapple for the
agency that men cruelly deny them.
Chuck Bowen (full review here).
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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