The Paradine Case (1947)

Director Hitchcock and Producer Selznick's third collaboration, the rather conventional courtroom thriller The Paradine Case, based on a Robert H Hitchens book, may not soar to the heights that Rebecca and Spellbound did (their previous works together) but it is a grand and engrossing melodrama, so well-acted, directed, and staged that you can revel in it despite the ludicrousness of the central court case and despite the fact climactic scenes of Gregory Peck's lawyer's reckoning don't quite hit the nail on the head.

★★★★☆

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The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949)

There's a chase across the rooftops of Paris and a hair-raising scene in the high-up girders of the Eiffel Tower but not much else of interest in this 1949 Simenon book adaptation that has Charles Laughton's Maigret and the Paris police mostly just waiting and watching as the suspects in a murder investigation run around in circles.

★★★☆☆

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Witness For The Prosecution (1957)

Based on an Agatha Christie short story so clever she adapted it into a play so ingenious it was turned into a movie, this murder mystery starring Charles Laughton as a lawyer who takes on a murder case while convalescing is the sort of whodunnit you wish you could turn back time and discover for the first time again, but knowing the twists and turns of the plot is also a source of pleasure as is seeing everyone doing what they do so well, including Marlene Dietrich as a cool German singer and Tyrone Power as her husband and murder-accused.

★★★★★

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