New Picture

The Paradine Case (Selznick) stars Gregory Peck as a gifted, happily married English lawyer who falls in love with the client he is defending. Mrs. Paradine (Valli) is accused of poisoning her blind husband, and Lawyer Peck recklessly sets out to pin the crime on the dead husband's valet (Louis Jourdan). In his infatuation for his client, he is incapable of imagining that she may be guilty. In his jealousy, he suspects an affair between the valet and the accused lady. Making a headlong effort to defend her, he brings on a suicide and his own virtual ruin.

This tale is put on film with the high polish, the intelligence, and the mastery of tension that are to be expected of Director Alfred Hitchcock. But Robert Hichens' basic story is so intricate in plot and pattern--there are four interlocking triangles, and hints of two more--that only an inspired talent for drama and for characterization could have saved it from obvious artificiality. No such talent is in evidence; nor has Producer David O. Selznick improved matters in his screen play. The only characters who come sharply to life are the barrister's wife (Ann Todd) and her confidante (Joan Tetzel); some of the others are acted with solid skill (by Charles Laughton, Charles Coburn, Ethel Barrymore), but they remain lay figures--interested but lifeless participants in a rigid, theatrical dance.

One expects, in a Hitchcock movie, a few moments as shockingly vivid as a fire alarm. There are no such moments here. There are many clever little shots-in-the-arm that are unrelated to the story. Innumerable tricks of lighting and mood are moderately effective but irrelevant.

It is hard to figure who is at fault, or why, in the case of the much heralded Italian newcomer, Valli. Her beauty, or better-than-beauty, has an almost reptilian fascination; she is, indeed, the most fatale-looking femme since Garbo. But it remains an open question whether she can act. Hitchcock, keeping her nearly motionless, plies her with one slow, cold, lambent close-up after another. Some of these close-ups function forcefully in the storytelling; but too many are as nonfunctional as her frequent changes of hairdo. It looks as if Hitchcock, one of the smartest directors of women in the business, had been required, in Valli's case, merely to glamorize a new Selznick star. Newcomer Jourdan does respectably by his limited chance--which is to look handsome and intense.

Gregory Peck turns in the first performance that may trouble his well-wishers. Although he has worked exceedingly hard to become an Englishman (he studied a recording of an Anthony Eden speech), he remains unmistakably American in appearance and bearing. A tremendously cagey and accomplished actor might conceivably have made a convincing character out of this attorney, in spite of the inadequacies of the script. Peck is not yet cagey or accomplished enough. He carries his trial scenes with considerable style; and he comes close to some first-rate acting in his difficult crack-up scene. But his lawyer is never one of the most brilliant in England, as the story claims; the role is not brilliantly conceived or written, and Peck, for all his virtues, is not a brilliant man.

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