The "Paradine" Letters: An exchange with The Self Styled Siren, Part One

This is the first of a four-part dialogue. The next installment will appear at Self Styled Siren on Friday, May 1. 

Alida Valli in The Paradine Case, Alfred Hitchcock, 1947.

Dear Farran,

I'm taking you seriously as to the idea we discussed the other morning, at a delightful-as-usual breakfast at Court Street Grocers. The idea being to rejuvenate our respective blogs with an epistolary exchange about Alfred Hitchcock's 1947 picture The Paradine Case.  

(By the way, you see what I did there, with the totes adorbes allusion to our social relationship and our exemplary taste in local food emporiums? I was going for a Korean-tacos-while-watching-Schindler's List effect, which seems to be the thing in arts writing these days. OK, I'll stop now.)

As I mentioned, to you and in a blog post elsewhere, since my mom died I've gone on an enormous Hitchcock jag, for sentimental reasons and maybe other reasons as well. The supplement on the Criterion Collection disc of Truffaut's Le peau douce, a video essay by our friend Kent Jones on the book Hitchcock/Truffaut and its effect on Hitchcock's reputation, a preface of sorts I believe to Kent's feature-length documentary on the subject, certainly stirred up something in my critical consciousness prior to the personal catastrophe that set me on a cinematic sentimental journey of sorts. In any event, my companion in this latest round of Hitchcock studies was a used paperback of a translation of Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol's 1957 book Hitchcock, subtitled The First Forty-Four Films.

The book has a lot to recommend it, not just because Rohmer and Chabrol were astute critics. It’s really fascinating to read a Hitchcock study that ends with The Wrong Man: that is, before at least three Really Significant Canonical works (Vertigo, North By Northwest, and Psycho) and two Significant Pieces of Expressive Esoterica (The Birds and Marnie) (and these are my own categories of course). So the argument that Rohmer and Chabrol make to establish Hitchcock as a major film artist seems peculiarly circumscribed to readers who have the entirety of Hitch’s career to take into account. There’s also the matter of the Catholic conservative perspective of the writers, which leads to them privileging I Confess and The Wrong Man in ways a lot of contemporary critics won’t or wouldn’t.

In terms of formal analysis, they treat The Paradine Case, Rope, and Under Capricorn as pretty much a trilogy, and not just because they’re, you know, subsequent films. Each of the pictures represent a variation on a singular formal perspective, that is, each of the films is a sort of long-take laboratory. The first one, the one we’re most occupied with, The Paradine Case, ran into some trouble in this respect because its producer, David O. Selznick, who also adapted the film’s scenario, was not very big on the long take at all. Here’s Leonard Leff in his book Hitchcock & Selznick, about a day on The Paradine Case shoot: “One day, looking ahead to the fluidity of his Transatlantic pictures, Hitchcock prepared an elaborate tracking shot of [Gregory] Peck and [Ann] Todd. While grips frantically pulled away furniture to make a path, the probing camera followed the actors through a long and arduous take. Todd called the shot ‘frightening,’ but Selznick had the last word: ‘Theatrical.’ Appearing on the set, he ordered the sequence filmed conventionally. Hitchcock unwillingly obliged.” 

And so it went, apparently. Still, Hitchcock was able to pull off at least two memorable shots in this vein: the final God’s-eye view of the courtroom, with Gregory Peck’s shattered character, the barrister Keane, nearly staggering out, which shot inspired rapturous praise from Rohmer and Chabrol; and the famous-but-not-famous-enough shot of murder defendant Madame Paradine (Alida Valli) sitting in her courtroom box as witness and lover Latour (Louis Jourdan) enters the courtroom, and the camera tracks his long walk behind and then in front of her. “We had to do that in two takes. The camera is on Alida Valli’s face, and in the background you see Louis Jourdan coming down to the witness box,” Hitchcock recalled to François Truffaut. “First, I photographed the scene without her; the camera panned him all around, at a two-hundred degree turn, from the door to the witness box. Then, I photographed her in the foreground; we sat her in front of the screen, on a twisting stool, so that we might have the revolving effect, and when the camera went off her to go back to Louis Jourdan, she was pulled off the screen. It was quite complicated, but it was very interesting to work that out.”

The shot is magnificent both from a technical point of view—I wonder it you’d actually need to do it as a composite now, given certain advances in technology that we can maybe talk about later—and a pictorial design point of view, and, most important, it registers emotionally. As Hitchcock noted, “We wanted to give the impression that she senses his presence […] that she can actually feel him behind her, as if she could smell him.” Yes, we do get that. The Paradine Case gets pooh-poohed by a lot of self-proclaimed Hitchcock fans because, the murder element aside, it’s more of a melodrama than a thriller. Ostensibly what they used to call “a woman’s picture.” Boiled down, it’s the story of a good man (Peck’s Keane) who falls in love with his client (Valli), which wreaks havoc on his marriage to a good woman (Todd). Complicating factors include Charles Laughton’s judge, who has a weird sick thing for Keane’s wife, and of course Jourdan as Madame Paradine’s paramour.  But hell—I think it’s pretty top-flight melodrama, in the Hitchcock mode (which is quite different but equally as cinematically and emotionally astute as the Sirk mode): swift, sharply written, involving, emotionally potent. I think another reason the movie gets short shrift is that there’s a tendency to take Hitchcock himself too much at his word. Rohmer and Chabrol note that Selznick chose the film’s actors (and indeed he did!) and “insisted on Louis Jourdan for the groom, whereas the director would have preferred a ‘clod’.” Sounds as if the fellas agree. Hitchcock amplified this to Truffaut, after grousing that Peck couldn’t “properly represent an English lawyer.” Hitchcock calls the casting of Jourdan the film’s worst flaw. “After all,” he says, “the story of The Paradine Case is about the degradation of a gentleman who becomes enamored of his client, a woman who is not only a murderess, but also a nymphomaniac. And that degradation reaches its climactic point when he’s forced to confront the heroine with one of her lovers, who is a groom. But the groom should have been a manure-smelling stable hand, a man who really reeked of manure.” 

Whoa! There’s a lot to unpack there. It’s like he wanted to make the long-form version of Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” Hitchcock’s own sexual idiosyncrasies/insecurities as expressed/implied here aren’t HUGELY unusual, particularly when you take into account the nearly inherent sexism of men of his generation and nationality. But for a director who did so many amazing things with his actresses and his female characters, he definitely had, in this case, a huge blind spot. I think Jourdan is fine here and I know you do too; I think Hitchcock, in his desire to indulge his own paranoia about pretty women walking around with gorillas on his street, underestimates the erotic appeal of the smooth, which Jourdan most definitely represents. Maybe this is where I should get off and let you do some talking…

GK

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Self Styled Siren reply. Stay tuned for Part Three, at this site, on the morning of Monday, May 4. Thanks, as ever, for reading. 

Comments

[D Cairns]

Great piece.

I think Hitchcock's point about Jourdan has not been quite disproven though. Of course it's perfectly reasonable that Valli could be attracted to Jourdan. What Hitch seems to have wanted was a moment when Peck meets the lover and is disgusted by him, and hence with himself for having been tempted by a woman who would sleep with a guy like that. The scene he ends up with plays quite differently with two extremely handsome men.

I'm not sure Hitchcock is displaying any dated assumptions at all -- it seems to me that for a believable emotional reaction for Peck, what he had in mind could have been effective.

[Stephen Whitty]

Thanks for this, Glenn (and Farran).

I just re-watched "Paradine" as part of a tiny-advance/huge-workload book project, and found much to -- well, not like, but be interested in. Still, to me it's clearly such a Selznick picture, as compared to a Hitchcock one. The tempestuous Valli seems so much more of a Selznick "type" (like Vivien Leigh or Jennifer Jones, as least as he tried to make her over for "Duel in the Sun.") And Hitchcock hated courtroom dramas -- almost every other movie he made, he cut away from trial scenes, rather than taking up screentime with them.

Agree with D. Cairns above, though. The movie, it seems to me, is about the power and utter incomprehensibility of sexual attraction, and obsession. What on earth did Ethel Barrymore ever see in Charles Laughton? (To a lesser degree, what did Gregory Peck see in the rather pallid, self-martyring Ann Todd?) So I think that casting, as Hitchcock suggested, Robert Newton -- by then long removed from his sexy "Jamaica Inn" shape and fully in his boozy "Odd Man Out" phase -- would have made the theme, and the drama, more powerful.

Put more powerfully -- who CAN'T understand Alida Valli cheating on her bitter, blind old husband with Louis Jourdan? (Especially when Lee Garmes lights him like Dietrich?) But with a bit of rough trade -- ah, that's a different, more complicated tale. (It's, to reference a writer Hitchcock adapted previously, like Somerset Maugham -- "Of Human Bondage" becomes just a trite melodrama if Mildred isn't plain and scrawny and crude and awful. That Philip is besotted with SUCH an unworthy character is what helps make the book so powerful.)

Good point about the long-takes trilogy. I wonder how much of that sprang directly from Hitchcock's advisory role on that Holocaust documentary after the war, in which he told the editors -- presciently, as it turned out -- that unless they used wider angles and long takes, people would find excuses to doubt the footage. It seems as if those long, long travelling takes weren't meant to be "theatrical" (as Selznick sneered) but documentarian: This is happening. This is real.

Interested in seeing how this conversation between you two smart people develops.

[Glenn Kenny]

Thanks, D. and Stephen. Just to be clear, my argument wasn't meant to suggest that what Hitchcock had in mind WOULD NOT have been effective. I imagine it would have been. I'm just saying that Jourdan is not ineffective, despite his having been forced on Hitchcock.

[D Cairns]

I actually love Jourdan in this. The sheer gorgeousness of these two guys in the same scene opens up a homoerotic potential the film obviously can't get into. I think the way it changes the dynamic threw Hitch, though, so although he's good in it, maybe he's not good FOR it, in the sense of failing to clarify Peck's emotional journey. but I think we understand each other.

[Farran Nehme]

Robin Wood wrote about Latour as coded gay, in his "dislike for women" and adoration of the dead Colonel Paradine. More later, obviously!

[george]

PARADINE CASE is one of the few Hitchcock films I've never seen (the others are UNDER CAPRICORN and WALTZES FROM VIENNA). His own bad-mouthing of PARADINE made it sound very uninteresting. Now I'll have to see it.

[partisan]

While talking about second rank/underrated works of great directors, as it happened I recently saw THE BIRDS and saw HOME FROM THE HILL for the first time. In my view it shows the difference between a truly great director and an extremely good one. The first half of HOME FROM THE HILL shows Minnelli at his best, and the movie benefits from a great performance from Robert Mitchum. This contrasts with THE BIRDS where Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor give striking performances notwithstanding not usually being considered in Mitchum's class as an actor. But the second half of HOME FROM THE HILL has two problems. First, there is the gender ideology of the movie, where Eleanor Parker's vindictive refusal to forgive Mitchum's infidelities is the cause of all the problems the family suffers in the movie. Parker doesn't begin to match Mitchum, and one suspects it was intended that way. (When Mitchum's character says he won't be judged, his air of authority evades the fact that if his conduct in questionable, why shouldn't he be judged? Whatever his own hang-ups, Hitchcock would not have been so indulgent.) Second, there are the string of circumstances involving George Hamilton, his girlfriend and the end of the movie which could be generously described as "contrived." It says something that Minnelli had to make do with this turn of events as best he could, while Hitchcock could take something arguably as implausible, such as deciding to kill someone in Chicago by hiring a crop duster, and turn it into a tour de force. Or taking something like the scheme at the core of VERTIGO and simply using it as a starting point for something much deeper and stranger.

[Monophylos]

D Cairns: "What Hitch seems to have wanted was a moment when Peck meets the lover and is disgusted by him, and hence with himself for having been tempted by a woman who would sleep with a guy like that. The scene he ends up with plays quite differently with two extremely handsome men."

It plays differently, yes, but I still think it plays well. Here's how I read it after watching the movie for the first time yesterday: Keane has constructed himself a fantasy in which a dark-haired beauty from the Continent with a shady past has given up all such allurements to settle down with a grey-haired gentleman to a life of selfless domesticity in the Lake District. Then suddenly his fantasy gets thrown back at him when he meets another dark-haired beauty from the Continent with a shady past: Latour. I think it's more interesting somehow that Keane meets a kind of male double of Mrs. Paradine. For one thing his character provokes something of the same uncertainty of response that Mrs. Paradine does: is he honorable or not? is his apparent sincerity real or fake? But it seems like Hitchcock wanted the groom to provoke only disgust.

And you have to admit this: if Hitchcock really didn't approve of casting Jourdan because he was too pretty, then why does he shoot Jourdan the way he does, emphasizing his good looks? The way he's introduced seems especially tailored for him: he's kept hidden in darkness until the moment Keane dramatically pulls aside a curtain to reveal a young and gorgeous Frenchman looking back at him. Hitchcock didn't *have* to do that. Maybe he figured that as long as he was stuck with Jourdan he might as well take advantage of his strengths rather than, say, try to roughen him up and make him look more like Hitchcock's idea of a smelly stable-boy.