The "Paradine" Letters, Part 3

  “As if she could smell him…” M. Paradine (Alida Valli) senses the pres­ence of Latour (Louis Jourdan)

Dear Farran,

Well thank you for send­ing me a nice slow Vertigo pitch across the plate. Your point is inter­est­ing and, I think, val­id. But, giv­en the struc­ture of the extant film—it rather is a shame we’ll nev­er be able to see the longer cuts—one has to look at Paradine side­ways to get to that con­clu­sion. But I like, any­way. It’s inter­est­ing too, that, dur­ing this par­tic­u­lar peri­od, the mid-to-late 40s (and for me, Hitchcock at the ABSOLUTE “height of his powers” is the stretch start­ing with ‘43’s Shadow of a Doubt and end­ing with ‘60’s Psycho), we find Hitchcock’s viewer-identification/sympathy strategies tilted to the female char­ac­ters, e.g. Ingrid Bergman in both Notorious and Under Capricorn, Ann Todd to a some­what less­er extent (strictly in terms of screen time, at least) here.

While it’s abso­lutely a stretch to call Hitchcock a fem­in­ist film­maker, I think there’s still a lot of room to do some crit­ic­al dig­ging on his depic­tions of women. (Robin Wood’s chapter on Hitchcock and Bergman in his Hitchcock’s Films Revisited is a good start.)  Someone, it occurs to me, could get a nice paper out of the way Hitchcock used his own daugh­ter, Patricia, in his films. As you’ve poin­ted out else­where, in The Paradine Case, the not-well-known-enough Joan Tetzel plays a sar­cast­ic young woman affect­ing to be jaded bey­ond her years, an anti­cip­a­tion of Patricia’s snarky senator’s‑younger-daughter in 1951’s Strangers on a Train. 

In any event, your altern­at­ive read­ing of the movie under­scores an almost entirely irre­fut­able truth about what makes Hitchcock a great film­maker. He con­ceived Paradine Case as a way to tell a story that related to his own fears/neuroses: that is, the tale of a good man’s sexu­al humi­li­ation at the hands of a (Hitchcock’s words) “nym­pho­ma­ni­ac” and a “clod.” He did not get that, largely due to Selznick’s hand. But, as you demon­strate, he didn’t get noth­ing, either. Even when Hitchcock’s expli­cit plans fail, his instinct does not, nor does his artistry.

One thing I’m increas­ingly fas­cin­ated by is what I hes­it­ate to call the movie’s Pirandellian dimen­sion. Hitchcock fam­ously insisted that the pro­duc­tion design recre­ated the actu­al interi­or of the Old Bailey to a very pre­cise degree. This is very much the theatre in which a “real” drama is played. The main act­ors, or course, are in cos­tume, as they are dur­ing a form­al din­ner party at the movie’s begin­ning. It’s at this lat­ter scene that Hitchcock meant to estab­lish a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter dynam­ic. At this affair, the sight of Ann Todd’s bare shoulder elec­tri­fies Charles Laughton’s Judge Horfield. Hitchcock estab­lishes this in a bravura feat of both shoot­ing and edit­ing. He begins with a medi­um close-up of Laughton enter­ing the party, and then speedily dol­lies in on the actor/character as some­thing catches his atten­tion. He then cuts on motion to a medi­um shot of Todd, and this shot itself is already dolly­ing in fast (this was all done before the zoom lens as we know it was developed) to Todd’s shoulder, and once the cam­era rests on a close-up of the shoulder, the scene cuts back to Laughton’s reac­tion. We get the pic­ture as surely as get­ting hit by a light­ning bolt. Then Laughton makes his inten­tions known and brazenly comes on to Todd’s Mrs. Keane. Her refus­al to play along is ostens­ibly what leads to Horfield’s dis­missive, con­temp­tu­ous treat­ment of Gregory Peck’s Keane in court, but this isn’t fol­lowed through with the strength of this ini­tial impetus. I sus­pect this theme was diluted in the film’s trimming.

Something not like the Kuleshov Effect: Charles Laughton fix­ates on Ann Todd. 

In any event, my point is that all of the main char­ac­ters of the movie, save Laughton’s, are severely cir­cum­scribed by the form­al­it­ies of their envir­on­ment. Formalities that are so exact­ing that one can mis­take this movie for a peri­od piece. But it is not: its London fea­tures elec­tri­city and double-decker buses, and an estab­lish­ing shot of the Old Bailey exter­i­or shows it under­go­ing post-Blitz recon­struc­tion. In any event, the only reas­on Laughton’s char­ac­ter is not sim­il­arly cir­cum­scribed is because of his power. He lit­er­ally IS the law here. Everyone else is toil­ing under what the kids nowadays call “the dom­in­ant ideo­logy,” and play­ing their roles with­in its hier­archy. There’s a def­in­ite sad­ness about this state of affairs expressed in the film. It’s not as if Hitchcock is going full Ford Madox Ford in bemoan­ing sexu­al repres­sion (“Is there any ter­restri­al para­dise where, amidst the whis­per­ing of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shad­ows and in cool­ness?”, as we remem­ber from The Good Soldier), but there’s more than an implic­a­tion of a sim­il­ar sen­ti­ment. It comes across most def­in­itely in the exchanges between Joan Tetzel’s Judy and Charles Coburn’s Simon, father-and-daughter side­line observ­ers of the whole sorry business.

The ornate set­tings in which Laughton/Horfield plays with unabashed free range (it must be said though that Hitchcock gets a far more con­trolled per­form­ance out of Laughton here than he did in Jamaica Inn, in which Laughton’s super-glazed ham­ming is delight­ful non­ethe­less) are a stark con­trast to the dingy con­fines of the pris­on where Valli’s Maddalena Paradine dwells through most of the film. If you’ll for­give me, in more sweep­ing philo­soph­ic­al terms, the dif­fer­ence is to me remin­is­cent of the red pill/blue pill worlds of The Matrix. No, really. Hitchcock’s inten­tion was dif­fer­ent, but not, ulti­mately, in polit­ic­al terms, THAT dif­fer­ent: “What inter­ested me in this pic­ture was to take a per­son like Mrs. Paradine, to put her in the hands of the police, to have her sub­mit to all their form­al­it­ies, and to say to her maid, as she was leav­ing her home between the two inspect­ors, ‘I don’t think I shall be back for din­ner.’ And then to show her spend­ing the night in a cell, from which, in fact, she will nev­er emerge. […]It may be an expres­sion of my own fear, but I’ve always felt the drama of a situ­ation in which a nor­mal per­son is sud­denly deprived of free­dom and incarcerated […]”

As Leff relates, this mode of con­trast did not please the movie’s pro­du­cer: “At least three scenes between Valli and Peck occurred in a spare five by six con­fer­ence room at Halloway Prison. […] Hitchcock often put his act­ors in con­fined places to make them (and the audi­ence) sweat. The stark scenes in this vir­tu­ally unfur­nished room—the anti­thes­is of the mahogany-and-marble home of Maddalena Paradine—adumbrate the doc­u­ment­ary style of The Wrong Man. Valli and Peck worked on the set for nine days, pro­du­cing foot­age remark­able for its sever­ity. Selznick mean­while badgered Hitchcock to leave the gangster-in-a-cell style to oth­er, less­er stu­di­os […]” As astute as Selznick could be, he did not have much of an appre­ci­ation for mise-en-scène at times.

I feel bad for self-proclaimed Hitchcock nuts who pooh-pooh this pic­ture, or any oth­er non-thriller Hitchcock. (It’s true that I lean more to Robin Wood’s side than Rohmer and Chabrol’s on Mr. and Mrs. Smith; while Rohmer and Chabrol are cor­rect in identi­fy­ing that film’s most Hitchcockian scene, said scene is also bor­der­line grot­esque, and Wood is right in nail­ing down the film’s defin­ing weak­ness, which is that Norman Krasna’s script is a bor­der­line crass rehash of The Awful Truth.) Because no mat­ter what the mater­i­al, Hitchcock’s always invent­ing, stretch­ing, test­ing, film lan­guage itself, which is nev­er not inter­est­ing. As Rohmer and Chabrol state at the con­clu­sion of their book, “In Hitchcock’s work form does not embel­lish con­tent, it cre­ates it.” And it’s almost always a kick to watch that mir­acle take place before one’s eyes. Don’t you think?

GK

This is the third of a four-part series. See part one below; part two here; and I’ll update when part four appears at the Siren’s blog tomor­row, and maybe I’ll put up a kind of post-game show when we’re done…

UPDATE: The Siren’s thrill­ing (it really is!) con­clu­sion to this exchange is now pos­ted, here.