I’ve always liked courtroom movies, and while this isn’t my favorite—that would be Anatomy of a Murder, one of the very best movies of America’s greatest screen actor—this is an entirely fun romp.
Witness is adapted from a long running stageplay by Agatha Christie, and like much of her work, is full of twists and turns. Plotting was Christie’s strong suit; characterization not so much, which is why movies taken from her works are often superior to her novels. Margaret Rutherford’s robust (to say the least) Miss Marple brought a sense of life and full to her four movies that added a joyful aspect to Christie’s often ingenius plots.
Elderly, sardonic, cranky but yet sharp-witted Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Charles Laughton) is in poor health. Hectored by the bossy yet implacably cheerful and talkable live-in nurse Miss Plimsoll (Laughton’s wife and former Bride of Frankenstein Elsa Lancaster), Robarts seems bound for a horrifying but inevitable staid retirement. However, he is pulled into the seemingly hopeless murder case of Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power in his last film; he died shortly after at the age of 44).
Vole is kind of an amiable loser, married and apparently quite devoted to his German expatriate wife Christine (Marlene Dietrich). Even so, he started hanging out with an older, lonely spinster. He maintains the relationship was entirely innocent, and that he certainly had no designs on her. Yet she has been murdered, and subsequently it is learned she had recently changed her will to leave him her sizable estate. Vole maintains that he was unaware of this, but things are looking grim.
Nor is Sir Wilfred cheered any by the chilly Christine, who proves to be a Teutonic iceberg. So unsympathetic is she that he decides not to put her on the stand—the prosecution can’t call her, as a wife is immune from testifying against her husband—a fact that throws Vole into a near panic. She is, sadly, the only alibi he has.
Although the case against Vole is almost purely circumstantial, it’s yet strong, and the wily Sir Wilfred is hard pressed to sway the jury. Then disaster strikes when the prosecution calls a surprise witness…
Witness for the Prosecution is just a grand, fun film of the sort Hollywood seems incapable of making anymore. It was a huge hit, and earned tons of Oscar nominations, including twin Best Acting noms for Laughton and Lancaster, Best Director for Billy Wilder, Best Editing, and Best Picture. That year nearly all the big awards, however, went to David Lean’s epic The Bridge Over the River Kwai. Still, watching a movie like this definitely makes one nostalgic for a better era of movies.
Although bascially a suspense murder movie, this plays with the tongue in cheek attitude exemplified by Brit Alfred Hitchcock. Suitably, the acting is kept theatrical and larger than life. Laughton in particular was an actor who delighted in opening the throttle, and here he’s a sheer delight as he roars and grimaces him way through a very juicy role. His Sir Wilfred seems an obvious model for the similarly rumpled , bombastic yet crafty Rumpole, featured in a series of books by John Mortimer and brought to life in a long-running TV series by Leo McKern.
Aside from the array of stars (Lancaster, Powers, Dietrich), the film features a grand roster of great British character actors, including John Williams, Ian Wolfe, Henry Daniell and Una O’Connor (a co-star of Ms. Lancaster’s in The Bride of Frankenstein.)
Humorously, an extended flashback was added wherein Vole met Christine in post-war Germany, purely for an excuse to show Dietrich to sign one a cabaret song* in her trademark trousers (fairly daring for a woman back then), which further get torn during a brawl to reveal one of her famous gams. This otherwise extraneous sequence apparently added nearly $100,000 to the budget, a pretty major sum back in those days. I doubt I’m alone in finding Dietrich’s flashes of skin and actual charisma far more sexually alluring than all of Madonna’s nudity and frenetic mock-screwing in the hilarious Body of Evidence.
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