THE PARADINE CASE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 488, 29 October 1948, Page 24

THE PARADINE CASE

(Selznick) HOUGH The Paradine Case is packed with big names (Ann Todd, Gregory Peck, Charles Laughton, Ethel Barrymore), and with names which Mr. Selznick no doubt hopes will soon be big (Valli, Louis Jourdan), I bought my ticket because Alfre* Hitchcock was the director, and I suppose a good many other filmgoers did likewise. I suppose, too, that (like me) a few of them were a little disappointed, for this is not Mr. Hitchcock at his best. Indeed, unless one knew in advance that he was the director it would be difficult to identify his hand at work, for it reveals itself in minor incidental details rather than in broad or continuing effects, and the details have now been often enough reproduced by faithful copyists. But it is pleasant to find the small touches that one expected-the old preoccupation with perspective, the occasional odd angle or foreshortened shot, the sudden visual shock or the magnifi-

cation of the relevant detail-even if The Paradine Case can hardly be called a director’s picture. For that matter, it is a little difficult to decide just Whose picture it is. Among *the players the camera dwells longest and most lovingly on the sombre beauty of Signorina Valli, Mr. Selznick’s new Italian importation, but she has _ not much to do save look beautiful (a task which she discharges without undue effort), and very little at all to say. What she does say, she says well. Her voice is low-pitched and pleasant to listen to and her enunciation is clear, but her acting (so far as she is permitted to act) at times carries restraint to the point of immobility. Gregory Peck, as a brilliant young member of the English Bar, struggles gamely but unsuccessfully with a part quite unsuited to him. Or so, I thought -though I am prepared to, admit that my view may have been coloured by involuntary recollections of FPeck’s Bad Boy in Mr. Seiznick’s immediately preceding opus. Peck has a good voice and (when he likes) a good presence and bearing, but he is not convincing as an intellectual type and I doubt if he is an actor in the full sense.

The players whom I found most entertaining were those nearer the perimeter of the action. Laughton, who rolis his lines round his tongue as if they were a good brandy (there is, incidentally, a delightful shot of him taken through a balloon-glass), is amusing to look at in a half-wig, and as entertaining as ever-though his part is a scurrilous libel on the Bench. Ethel Barrymore, who is cast as the judge's wife, has only a few moments before the camera, but manages to cram a good deal into them, and Louis Jourdan makes a promising start. But it is Ann Todd, as Gregory Peck’s wife, who really contrives to bring her part alive. I can’t say that I have any favourite actresses, and if I had Ann Todd would not be one of them, but at least one must admit that she is an actress. It is"from the setting of the film, however, rather’ than from any individual excellence in the characterisations that the real drama is derived. From the first scene, when Mrs. Paradine is arrested in her own drawin-room on the charge that she "did administer poison to Richard Patrick Irvine Paradine and did murder him," to the last act in the

High Court of the Old Bailey, the characters are all directly or indirectly involved in the inexorable processes of The Law. Not quite so inexorable or so impersonal a Law as that of Odd Man Out-The Paradine Case is melodrama, not tragedy-but one which has its own dignity and its own unmistakably dramatic atmosphere. Hitchcock has made the most of this atmosphere in his shots of police station watch-houses, cells, and those drab, bare rooms attached to courts and prisons in which counsel meet their clients or their witnesses. There is a certain amount of obvious dramatic capital made out of the contrast between the luxury of Mrs. Paradine’s home and the austerity of her surroundings while she awaits trial, but there are also many neat contrasts drawn between Mrs. Paradine herself and her involuntary milieu. If there are any faults in these sequences they are faults which one has come to expect — and to make some allowance for-in American films of English life. The London taxis are the very embodiment of tootle-and-bustle, the police station chargeroom is just a shade too bleak and _ foreboding, the police matrons a little too granite-faced -the minor characters, in fact, are rather determinedly English. But what I enjoyed most about the film (and on the whole I did enjoy it) was its straightforwardness. Apart from