What makes it different from others?

Really Surprised!

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I'm crazy about Alida Valli. I'd seen every film she's ever done except "The Paradine Case" until today that is. Today I met Mrs Paradine for the first time. Strangely enough it doesn't feel like Hitchcock it feels more like Carol Reed the director who gave her a major International hit with "The Third Man" a couple of years later. I fell in love with Alida Valli in the 1954 Luchino Visconti's tragic romantic epic "Senso". Now having seen "The Paradine Case" I see a glimpse of the woman in "Senso" where her actions, are also atrocious but govern by love. A love who will only lead to tragedy. Visconti showed us an Alida Valli that other than a great beauty was also a great actress. Hitchcock introduced her as VALLI in this film, a gimmick with very short legs. Here she plays the widow of a blind man that "allegedly" she killed. The casting of Gregory Peck is a major problem, maybe not for the box office in 1947, but it certainly detrimental to the suspension of disbelief, so needed in a thriller. Charles Laughton is superb in his few, short scenes. I wonder if Hitchcock himself was the inspiration for his role. A judge, a lascivious man with an roving eye for young pretty women. Ethel Barrymore plays his wife, to absolute perfection. Then, Louis Jourdan, beautiful of course, Charles Coburn, Ann Todd but, it is Alida Valli who gives this film that extra something. Considered a "minor" Hitchcock by most but not by me. 9/10

THE PARADINE CASE is an interesting but slightly contrived Hitchcock film fraught with sexual tension. I enjoyed most of this film but it could have used better editing and lesser number of characters. The film has some truly strange characters for eg. the wife who longs for her lawyer husband to save her sexual rival in court so that they can fight fairly over the man. ANN TODD and ALIDA VALLI are smoking hot, the two of them even look alike. Hitchcock knew how to select beautiful women for his movies.CHARLES LAUGHTON provides some comic relief during the intense court proceedings.

While I don't consider any of Alfred Hitchcock's films truly terrible- then again there may be some bias as he is my favourite director- I do think there are some disappointments in his resume. And unfortunately The Paradine Case, while not a disaster in any shape or form, is one of them. As always with Hitchcock's films The Paradine Case is well made, everything is very slick and evocatively shot. Some of the shots are really inspired, the beginning with Alida Valli being arrested was the standout while the shot introducing Louis Jourdan is quite innovative Hitchcock's direction is good and thoughtful enough, if not quite as involved as it usually is, I think how the story is dealt with is part of why and studio interference being another factor. The music is memorable and ominous, but never obvious. And a vast majority of the cast are very good. Coming off best is Charles Laughton, who literally chews the scenery and it was a shrewd, somewhat malevolent and gleefully hammy performance of a truly beastly character indeed.Alida Valli is beautiful and mysterious, very magnetic to watch, if perhaps rather cold for some viewers. Ethel Barrymore has very little to do and was deserving of a better developed subplot and character, but this is an example of a support performance in this position that makes the most of what they have, Barrymore did very well in that respect. The scene between her and Laughton at the end is indeed chilling. Charles Coburn is nicely understated in one of the more fleshed-out roles of the film, Louis Jourdan makes a promising debut while Leo G. Caroll and Joan Tretzel are equally fine. Ann Todd gives a loyal and deeply felt performance, but like Barrymore is given little to do in a role that is somewhat of a cliché.I personally however found Gregory Peck miscast in the lead role. I do like Peck especially in To Kill a Mockingbird, but here in stiff and remote form I don't think I've seen him this uncomfortable before. His British accent doesn't convince at all either. There are other problems with The Paradine Case though too. The story and script are the main culprits. The story feels much too thin and stretched out, which made the film feel overlong, and the turgid pacing makes it even duller. The script is a mix of overly-melodramatic soap opera and too-wordy courtroom scenes. Everything just felt stilted and overwrought, the courtroom scenes especially could have been so intriguing but the unbelievable dialogue just let things significantly. The characters are not particularly well drawn, the most interesting are Valli's and especially Laughton's, while if Todd and Barrymore hadn't done as well as they had their characters would have made no impression whatsoever.Overall, a disappointing Hitchcock, considering the cast and how good so many of Hitchcock's other films are, but hardly a film so bad that you prefer to forget it ever existed. 6/10 Bethany Cox

"The Paradine Case" is a dull, stiff melodrama by Alfred Hitchcock. Based on a novel by Robert Hichens, the film was produced by David O. Selznick, a man who delighted in churning out overproduced prestige pictures. Fresh off the failure of "Duel in the Sun", Selznick exerted an unusual amount of control on "The Paradine Case", his fingers strangling all life out of the picture. He even credited himself with writing the film's script. Hitchcock hated the film.Part murder mystery, part legal thriller, the film stars a wooden Gregory Pack as Anthony Keane, a defence attorney tasked with defending Anna Paradine, a woman accused of poisoning her blind husband. Hitchcock wanted Laurence Olivier for Peck's role, but Selznick disagreed. Selznick wanted Greta Garbo for Paradine's role – she was to come out of retirement – but those plans collapsed.The film's mostly a stagey melodrama, but several scenes allow Hitchcock to flex his muscles. A last act courtroom is imaginatively prowled by The Master's camera, and a sequence in a bedroom recalls Lila Crane's exploration of Norman Bates' bedroom in "Psycho". There are some loose connections to Hitch's other films – Peck's infatuated with and idealises women, as Hitchcock's male leads oft do, and a suicide is brushed aside like a certain Miss Lonelyheart in "Rear Window" – but this is otherwise a routine picture.Most of Hitchcock's films have weird, psycho-sexual stuff going on in between frames. Not so much "The Paradine Case", though it does have a defence attorney whose entire defence functions as a kind of projection of his own feelings toward his client. Peck essentially wills Anna into innocence in order to justify his own feelings toward her, jealously removes prospective lovers from her reach so that he may woo her himself. Even when Anna eventually admits to murder, we're never sure if she's telling the truth or is merely confessing so as to scar her attorney; we can't take her admission at face value. And like the characters in Hitchcock's "Notorious", selfish behaviour is constantly being rationalised as being selfless, characters helping others only in so far it benefits them, resulting in all kinds of weird power relationships.In typical Selznick fashion, the film looks garish, overly ornate and tackily expensive. This is a vulgar looking picture, in contrast to the sleek, pop-modernism/pop-Expressionism of Hitchcock's best films.6/10 - For Hitchcock completists only.