Review of The Paradine Case (1947) by Blake P — 17 Nov 2011

Even though most people don't always like this Hitchcock gem, "The Paradine Case" is still compelling, well acted, and never boring. Successful lawyer Anthony Keane (Peck) is assigned to an exotic client, Maddalena Paradine (Valli) a woman accused of killing her blind and much older husband.

The more he gets involved in the case however, Keane falls harder for his client which temporarily destroys his marriage (Todd) and trust in others. In the long run, however, Keane learns more about his client, and some of the facts may not be as pleasant as he thought.

"The Paradine Case" was Alfred Hitchcock's follow up to the extremely successful "Notorious", which starred Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. Yes, "The Paradine Case" is nowhere near as good, and is not as suspenseful as many of the other master's films, I admit that it is one of my favorite courtroom dramas.

It might fail as a romance film or even a drama, but the story itself is very compelling, and the screenwriters pull the complicated story off wonderfully. Obviously, the film was to be one of the "star-studded pictures" that were extremely popular in the day, and it does, and has some of the most popular actors of the time, like Gregory Peck, Charles Laughton, Charles Coburn, and Ethel Barrymore.

But in the long wrong, it's the cast of unknowns as the supporting players that make the film succeed. Valli, Ann Todd, and Louis Jordan had planned to make this movie popular with American audiences, but the film was a commercial failure and it didn't live up to what they had hoped.

Even so, they give the best performances in the film, and in every scene they're in they out-stage the actors that were so much bigger than them. "The Paradine Case" is definitely not one of Hitchcock's best films in terms of comparing, but it succeeds so well in the acting department that it's almost too hard to say this isn't a good film.