Serge Lutens – arguably the most influential maître parfumeur of the past 30 years and a sophisticated storyteller – once described Feminite du bois, the fragrance that in 1992 began to turn him into a legend, with these words: “Let’s say it’s a judge who falls in love with the criminal.” That line has always made me think of The Paradine Case – not only because of a love that lingers between a locked cell and a courtroom (here it’s the lawyer who falls for his lady criminal, the judge is just a lusty gaze on a bare shoulder), but because this is a film where the sense of smell, the scent of the beloved body, governs the pivotal moment. “When Louis Jourdan is called to testify, he enters the courtroom and has to pass behind Alida Valli. She has her back to him, but I wanted to give the impression that she senses him – not that she guesses he’s there, but that she actually smells him,” Hitchcock told Truffaut. A bold olfactory staging, perhaps a Lady Chatterley-like fantasy, which doesn’t entirely succeed. Valli, whose nape and profile Hitchcock films with languid care, remains a splendid, gothic sealed case, and even in that moment we don’t feel her quiver; Jourdan is a reasonable object of desire, yet far from that idea of “a stable boy, reeking faintly of manure”. The Paradine Case has never been anyone’s favourite. Hitchcock made it reluctantly, out of contractual obligation. Producer David Selznick spent four million dollars (nowhere near recouped) to end up with a film that at times feels like a Rank or London Films production; the miscasting was notorious (though would Laurence Olivier really have done better than this Gregory Peck dazed by unrequited love?); James Agee wrote: “A lot of skill over a lot of nothing.” Yet it remains a pure Hitchcock film, a story of sad or hellish marriages: one already ended in murder, another continuing in its honest, loving melancholy, and a third, between the repellent Judge Charles Laughton and his wife, given over to a brilliant little sadistic stage play, where with just a few clipped words, a few pained glances, and a shattered glass, Ethel – of the great Barrymore family – earned an Oscar nomination.

Paola Cristalli