Plot
Maddalena Anna Paradine (Alida Valli) is a very beautiful and enigmatic young foreign woman living in London who is accused of poisoning her older, blind husband, a retired military man. It is not clear at first whether perhaps she is a grateful and devoted wife who has been falsely accused, or whether she is in fact a calculating and ruthless femme fatale.
Mrs. Paradine hires Anthony Keane (Gregory Peck), a brilliant and successful barrister, to defend her in court. Although Keane has been happily married for 11 years, he instantly becomes deeply infatuated with this exotic, mysterious, and fascinating client. Keane's kind-hearted wife Gay (Ann Todd) sees his infatuation, and although her husband offers to get off the case, she presses him to continue. She knows that a guilty verdict, followed by Paradine's hanging, will mean that she will lose her husband emotionally forever. The only way that she can regain her husband's love and devotion is if he is able to obtain a "not guilty" verdict for Mrs. Paradine.
Meanwhile Keane himself starts to focus his legal efforts on Colonel Paradine's mysterious servant, Andre Latour (Louis Jourdan). Consciously or unconsciously, Keane sees Latour as a suitable scapegoat on whom he can pin the crime of murder, but this strategy backfires. After Keane has pressured Latour in court, hoping to trigger an angry outburst, word comes that Latour has killed himself. Anna Paradine is coldly furious that Keane has destroyed Latour, who was in fact her lover. On the witness stand she tells Keane she hates him, and that he has killed the only person she loved. She goes so far as to say that she murdered her husband in order to be with Latour.
Keane is overwhelmed, physically, intellectually and emotionally. Attempting to sum up, he improvises a brief and faltering speech, admitting how poorly he has handled the case, but cannot continue speaking and has to leave the court. He goes home to his wife feeling that his career is in ruins, but she gives him hope for the future.
Read more about this topic: The Paradine Case
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)