Billy Wilder (1957)
A voice over the closing credits – the voice, in effect, of United Artists, the studio behind Billy Wilder’s picture – asks the audience not to reveal the surprise ending to their friends. Sixty-three years on, the denouement of Witness for the Prosecution is rather common knowledge. The piece started life as Traitor’s Hands, an Agatha Christie short story first published in 1925. Nearly three decades later, its author turned the material into a successful stage play. This film version (with a screenplay by Larry Marcus, Wilder and Harry Kurnitz) soon followed. Witness has proved to be one of Christie’s most durably popular creations. Stage revivals include the London County Hall production that opened in 2017 and ran until this year’s theatre lockdown. There was a TV film in the early 1980s. The Witness for the Prosecution (the first definite article added to the title), the second of Sarah Phelps’s ‘dark’ reworkings of Christie stories, aired on BBC in late 2016.
It’s not giving too much away to say the film is all about acting, in more ways than one, and no surprise that the barrister protagonist, Sir Wilfrid Robarts QC, comes out on top twice over. He’s not only a wily, bravura performer in a court of law; he’s also played by the great Charles Laughton. After a recent heart attack, Sir Wilfrid defies doctor’s orders not to take on further criminal cases. In an Old Bailey trial, he defends Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), accused of the murder of a rich widow called Emily French (Norma Varden), who had recently changed her will to make Vole the chief beneficiary. In the courtroom scenes that occupy a sizeable chunk of the film’s running time (116 minutes), Laughton is an exemplary screen silk. Actors not infrequently interpret barristers’ supposed histrionic tendencies shallowly and unconvincingly. Laughton puts on a splendid show but his theatricality is thoroughly absorbed into the character he’s playing. He gives Sir Wilfrid a superbly credible professionalism. He never lets you forget this aging, ailing man thinks the Vole case is set to be his swansong, and is determined to go out on a high. He does wonderful bits of business with a monocle.
The quality of Laughton’s playing is epitomised in one of Sir Wilfrid’s most brilliant coups, as he cross-examines Mrs French’s housekeeper Janet MacKenzie (Una O’Connor in her final film role: she’s a vividly eccentric presence, though a seriously coarse actor). Janet claims she overheard an argument between her employer and Leonard Vole shortly before the murder. Sir Wilfrid drops his voice to confirm to the jury that Janet is deaf and couldn’t possibly have heard what was said on the other side of ‘a four-inch-thick oak door’. Laughton’s technical control is such that he doesn’t turn down the volume too obviously – not, at least, for a listener with reasonable hearing – yet the diminuendo decisively exposes Janet’s false evidence. This vocal dexterity is combined with an effortless variation of pace that no one else in the cast comes close to matching. The trial judge (Francis Compton) and prosecution counsel (Torin Thatcher) are adequate but their speech rhythms are very set. Proof that the habit isn’t simply a function of appearing in a court of law comes in Sir Wilfrid’s chambers, where his junior counsel (John Williams), his clerk (Ian Wolfe) and Vole’s solicitor (Henry Daniell) are similarly unvarying.
Laughton is highly entertaining in these ‘backstage’ sequences, though the portrait of Sir Wilfrid as an outrageous, irritable despot makes for pretty broad comedy. Still, Laughton is physically extraordinary and captures the character’s petulance: he often suggests an overgrown child – albeit one who smokes cigars whenever his eagle-eyed but exasperated nurse, Miss Plimsoll (Elsa Lanchester, busy but monotonous), isn’t looking. Marlene Dietrich plays the title role, Vole’s German wife Christine, who testifies against her husband. Dietrich isn’t in Laughton’s class as an actor but she’s an effulgent star. When Christine, in order to hand over crucial evidence to Sir Wilfrid, disguises herself under preposterously heavy make-up and a Cockney accent (that’s the idea anyway), the effect, thanks to Dietrich’s charisma, is beyond ridiculous – it’s truly bizarre. The post-verdict exchanges between her and Laughton in an otherwise deserted courtroom are effective – until they’re joined by others and the film’s finale turns breathlessly melodramatic.
Billy Wilder, with brief references to press coverage and public gallery reactions to the outcome, conveys a good sense of the contemporary murder trial as macabre entertainment for Londoners. Wilder regards English courtroom protocol and paraphernalia with an intrigued, amused outsider’s eye. But there are also creaky flashbacks and proceedings are jarringly Americanised by the presence of Tyrone Power in the dock. He’s terrible. He looks far too sleek and mature to pass for the boyish charmer/chancer that captivates Emily French. Even if Leonard Vole is putting on an act in the witness box, he can’t be meant to be as strenuously wooden as Power is. It wouldn’t be right, though, to end by disparaging bad acting in a film that features Charles Laughton in top form. This picture, with its overemphatic style, often shows its age. Laughton’s playing doesn’t. His talent transcends, and occasionally transforms, Witness for the Prosecution.
3 December 2020
