Alida Valli @ 100: Star of The Third Man, Suspiria, and Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case

by Brent Calderwood

Alida Valli, who was born 100 years ago today in Pola, Italy (now part of Croatia), became a legend of Italian cinema in classics ranging in style from Luchino Visconti’s operatic epic Senso to Dario Argento’s supernatural slasher Suspiria. In a career that spanned 68 years, international directors were repeatedly drawn to her dark, inscrutable beauty and haunted green eyes. She's still admired by film lovers worldwide for three noir-tinged movies she made while abroad: The Third Man opposite Orson Welles (where she gets one of the most famous screen exits in history), Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case, and the French horror film Eyes Without a Face.  

In 1947, producer David O. Selznick invited Valli to Hollywood, hoping to repeat the success he’d had with two of his other European “discoveries,” Ingrid Bergman and Vivien Leigh. He gave her the full star treatment, even briefly abbreviating her name to the one-word “Valli” à la “Garbo” and having Hitchcock helm her first American picture...

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What's streaming from 1947?

We're having a 1947 sidebar party for the next two weeks as we build towards the Smackdown.

One of the great f***over moments in our world of sophisticated search technology is the lack of interest in content providers giving us extensive search options. Over the years we've watched the capacity to search by film year dwindle until its practically non-existent across the web. Netflix used to have it (many years ago) when they were a DVD company. Hulu has never cared about such things. Amazon Prime still sorta has time-interest searches but makes them very difficult to find and has altered their once somewhat easy "by decade" search into a clunkier system; they now only allow you to differentiate decades once you've hit 1960. This makes self-curated spontaneous movie-watches difficult if, say, you'd like to investigate a particular film year. And, you guessed it, that's something we here at TFE like to do. Criterion Channel, at least and bless them, has a way to search by exact year.

But, as ever, we're here to help. If you'd like to indulge in the 1947 film year before we reach the next Supporting Actress Smackdown here are a dozen noteworthy movies that are currently available to stream for free...

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