The Paradine Case

I am a bit of a Hitchcock junkie, though I certainly don't love each and every movie. Until a few years ago, I had never seen The Paradine Case (1947), and I really enjoyed it. Alida Valli, Charles Laughton and Ethel Barrymore, Louis Jourdan in his first English-speaking role- what's not to love? Well, I saw it again last night and I'm rethinking my opinion. The screenplay tips you off fairly early who did it. Gregory Peck is the lead. I've always thought he was sort of wooden, but that's particularly true here. That's also true of Ann Todd who plays his long-suffering (oh, boy, does she suffer) wife. It's actually pretty unsatisfying. The most striking thing to me (which I remembered from the first time I saw it) was the establishing shots of London, still badly bombed.
IMDB tells me that Alida Valli's was born Alida Altenburger; she went into hiding to avoid being executed under Mussolini's government (she refused to perform in propaganda films); and her first husband was involved in a "drug, sex and murder scandal" with his mistress.
Also on the DVD was a Lux Radio Theatre version of "The Paradine Case" with Joseph Cotten playing the Peck role. Much better! Cotten and Valli had just returned from Vienna after shooting The Third Man, though it wasn't released in the US until 19489.

The 39 Steps

My friend Suzanne was in town this week, and on Wednesday night we saw The 39 Steps. It was absolutely delightful. Maria Aitken's direction of Patrick Barlow's adaptation of John Buchan's novel was fantastic. Sean Mahon plays Richard Hannay, Jill Paice plays the three women (Annabella Schmidt, Pamela and Margaret, and Jeffrey Kuhn and Arnie Burton play (brilliantly) everyone else. It is a relentlessly inventive and theatrical production- it never rests for a second. Despite the fact that I got around taking it myself, I wished that I was teaching a theatre history class so that I could show students how many traditions the director has pulled business from. My personal favorite moment was the shadow puppet chase scene, which features Hitchcock himself, and Sean Mahon's character riding the Loch Ness monster! Photos from the official website (link above) by Joan Marcus.

Strangers on a Train

Last night for the first time I saw "Strangers on a Train." I've seen a lot of Hitchcock, but not that one. It's truly wonderful. Based on Patricia Highsmith's first novel (which she wrote at Yaddo), the adaptation was by Whitfield Cook and the screenplay by Raymond Chandler (yea!) and Czenzi Ormonde. Highsmith wrote the Ripley novels later, but you can see the antecedents in this film, despite the changes the writers and Hitchcock made to the nivel.
The two leads are Farley Granger and Robert Walker. I've seen Robert Walker in "The Clock" and "Til the Clouds Roll By." Neither of them prepared me for this. He is absolutely amazing. He really seems like a psychopath you'd meet in real life; not some thriller schlock version of one. Unfortunately, "Strangers on a Train" was his second-to-last film.
Hitchcock's daughter Patricia plays a supporting role, the ingenue's murder-obsessed, bespectacled sister.
Photo credits: Wikipedia.