I watched a DVD of this which is part of a Hitchcock boxed set released in 2008 (or even 2009) called THE PREMIERE COLLECTION. This DVD contains a radio dramatization from the time of the movie's release. This radio broadcast has Joseph Cotton in the Gregory Peck role and he plays it with wit and subtlety. This drove home to me my idea that Peck was a poor choice for this role. While neither he nor Joseph Cotton is an Englishman, as one would expect an English barrister to be, Cotton's radio acting here has more depth. I can believe he would become enamored of the exotic lady on trial. Peck has virtually one expression throughout, and I didn't buy, for a minute, that he couldn't help falling for his client. He did a masterful job as a lawyer in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD fifteen years later, when he played a wooden figure who's heart is in his integrity. In THE PARADINE CASE, we're supposed to believe this solemn-looking figure has a weakness. It doesn't work. Hitchcock has his moments here, of course, as he does even in lesser pictures such as this. The moment where Louis Jourdan, greeting Gregory Peck, goes into a darkened doorway, is classic Hitchcock. A figure emerges from the doorway immediately after Jourdan disappears into it. You think at first he's come back out, but the footsteps we hear and the figure we eventually see are that of a maid. It's not merely one person being mistaken for another, it's a gender switch designed to make the audience uncomfortable. That Jourdan physically resembles Peck makes the audience see them as logical candidates for the defendant's affections. (Of course, Hitch wouldn't have been able to make Joseph Cotton look like the suave Jourdan. I have no idea if he'd considered Cotton for the movie, but the fact that he was in the radio play makes me think it was a possibility.) Hitchcock does well with the icy relationship between the characters played by Charles Laughton and Ethel Barrymore. Hitchcock always has some comic relief, but these two actors provide dark comedy. Apparently, Ethel Barrymore had a speech which was cut. I don't know if Hitchcock wanted to cut it or not. He was at the mercy of Selznick, who seems to have intruded a lot in this project. Look for lots of shots with people sitting next to lamps. Think of the various lamps and that light bulb in PSYCHO and you can see Hitchcock was, as usual, developing motifs which had been in his mind a long time.
Review of The Paradine Case
