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Best movie of this year hands down!

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

One of my all time favorites.

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

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

There was always subtext in Alfred Hitchcock's films, but "The Paradine Case" has subtext to spare.Successful London barrister, Anthony Keane (Gregory Peck), takes the case of Anna Paradine (Alida Valli) who is charged with murdering Colonel Paradine, her rich, blind husband. Although happily married, Keane becomes infatuated with his beautiful client and his judgment, his career and his marriage begin to unravel.On the surface this may have seemed like lesser Hitchcock; although sharply written there isn't much warmth in evidence. The edginess of the film comes in the uncomfortable way Keane obsesses over Mrs Paradine, which hurts his wife, Gay (Ann Todd). The casting of good-looking Louis Jordan is often cited as a weakness, but I think he was fine - Hitchcock and producer David O Selznick just hit a nerve with the whole thing.If ever there were two men who knew something about obsessing over beautiful women it was Selznick and Hitchcock.Selznick's adoration of his wife Jennifer Jones, beginning with cutting-in on her first marriage, is well known. Hitchcock famously obsessed over just about all of his leading ladies culminating in all that weird stuff with Tippi Hedren.Here, the main character's destructive obsession with a beautiful, duplicitous woman was a warm-up for Hitchcock's "Vertigo" made ten years later. The telling scene is when Keane first meets Mrs Paradine and observes that her blind husband didn't realise the sacrifice his wife had made in marrying him because he hadn't seen her - Anna Paradine knows she's got Anthony Keane hook, line and sinker.Although she wasn't one of his famous blondes, Hitchcock and cinematographer Lee Garmes went to town on her look. Alida Valli was stunning, and that haunting beauty was never captured more effectively than in this film.The cast is fabulous. If you are a Laughton fan this is one of his best. It's a delicious performance, but he is totally odious as Judge Tommy Horfield complete with cruel observations on the impermanence of beauty.This film is a class act from beginning to end and Franz Waxman's velvety score gives it a sumptuous quality.I think Hitchcock fans can watch his best films over and over; "Rear Window", "North by Northwest" and others - "The Paradine Case" is one I would add to the list.

Lesser known Hitchcock, his last for David O Selznick, their producer / director relationship having more or less broken down during its making to the point where the producer turned director himself for some scenes. The film though is still identifiably Hitchcock's but while it has its moments it unfortunately has more longueurs too.I can't recall too many Hitchcock courtroom dramas, maybe "I Confess" and "The Wrong Man" have similar scenes but not to the extent here where the last half hour or more is devoted to the lengthy trial of Alida Valli's Marguerita Paradine black widow character's trial for the murder of her blind husband. Despite recreating the Old Bailey in detail and Charles Laughton's excellent turn as the sleazy but still knowledgeable judge, somehow the climax fails to really grip, plus the last gasp twist is hardly revelatory.As others have said there's no explanation for Gregory Peck's American accent for his supposedly Englidh character, but you could say the same about Charles Coburn too. I too found it hard to understand just why an experienced lawyer like him should so easily fall for his good-looking but hardly magnetic female client. Perhaps if it was Garbo or Bergman, both rumoured participants originally, but I just don't get the allure of Miss Valli as portrayed here.The pacing of the film is slow with not a lot happening from scene to scene, a malaise which affected his other films of this period, like "Under Capricorn" and "Stage Fright". The acting is relatively weak too, Peck is surprisingly anaemic for a man apparently besotted with Mrs Paradine while Ann Todd as his wife is just too much the little woman at home who seems to demur to Peck's wishes after only the slightest protest.Yes there are some Hitchcockian moments with a few of the Master's trademark tracking shots, none better than the surprise, tension-breaking, on-high shot looking down as the defeated Peck leaves the courtroom, but in between it's really rather lumpy and dull. I felt the premise may have worked better if Valli did act more the femme fatale in leading Peck's character on, as in the end he's made to look rather foolish and shallow with his infatuation.So this wasn't the best Hitchcock I've ever seen, as this time when it was good, it was just good but when it was poor, it was pretty poor.

"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.