The Paradine Case was the last Hitchcock-Selznick collaboration, and from Leonard Leff’s description in Hitchcock and Selznick, it was the most troubled. After a long development process, Selznick wrote the shooting draft himself. What had been shot, to judge from the script, which is the size of a phone book, was two films, Hitchcock’s and Selznick’s. Not surprisingly, Hitchcock’s rough-cut ran three hours – after that it was up to the producer to create a release version. He preserved Hitchcock’s rough-cut, which was destroyed by a flood in the Selznick vaults in the 80s. He also preserved a fine grain – unfortunately without sound – of the next-to-last cut before he made his own final editing decisions. Besides a couple of missing scenes, the fine grain allows us to witness Selznick at work, and remarkably, every final decision that can be inferred from the comparison was bad.

Bill Krohn, in “Cinegrafie”, 17, 2004