Thriller Thursdays: Witness for the Prosecution - A twisted tale of love & revenge

Leonard Vole is arrested on suspicion of murdering an elderly lady he perchance gets acquainted with. He employs a razor-sharp but convalescing barrister as his defence attorney. He is confident his wife’s alibi will free him. But she appears instead as the witness for the prosecution. And the legal shenanigans begin

Intro: In our new weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

The pleasures of Witness for the Prosecution are myriad. It is quintessentially English, with its sardonic humour; it’s a courtroom drama full of gleeful guile, and the greasy guilty; it is twisted in pleasurable ways, and it is intelligent in ways that it doesn’t overestimate your IQ! And it recalls Dostoevsky’s famous regret — “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing”.

Agatha Christie might not be literature’s greatest giant, but she is a storytelling Goliath, with a stable of the most deliciously evil stories that one can possibly conceive. And with Witness for the Prosecution she sets an incredible template for the courtroom drama, which still stands as an unmatched pioneer.

Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power) is arrested for the murder of Emily French, a wealthy old woman. He had built an affable connection with her following a chance encounter at a hat shop and had got to sell her an eggbeater, which nobody else was buying. And they start meeting frequently unaware that he was a married man, Miss French makes him the principal heir in her will, thereby casting suspicion on Leonard. But he is confident of his alibi, as he had returned home much before the murder took place. His wife, Christine, agrees to testify. But as it emerges, she does so not in Leonard's defence but as a witness for the prosecution. And that's where the deviousness of this plot begins to unfold.

Whilst the story gravitates towards the machinations of the murder, the focus is on the barrister Sir Wilfrid Robarts. He’s played to rotund perfection by Charles Laughton. He is convalescing from a heart attack, “expelled (from the hospital) for conduct unbecoming  a cardiac patient”, and under the Hitlerian care of the bright chattering nurse Miss Plimsoll (Elsa Lanchester). He has epic battles with her to avoid her cloying care and to secretly sneak in cigars, brandy, and even work! The continuing thread of delight that their chemistry provides gives the backbone to the machinations of the court’s drama. Marlene Dietrich is Leonard’s German wife, Christine, an actress Leonard rescues from the devastation of the war. Her hauteur, iciness and composure make Lord Wilfrid grudgingly confess “You are a very remarkable woman, Mrs Vole.”

The delights of the film are illimitable, with even the smaller parts played to perfection. Janet. the housekeeper (Una O'Çonnor), with her astringent hatred for Leonard, because he “threw an eggbeater into the wheels of her Victorian household”, the tart who brings incriminating evidence, against Leonard himself. And with the anguish of seeing his wife coming into court with evidence against him. It’s a movie choc-o-bloc with stunning performances.

But towering above them all is Charles Laughton — hilarious, cunning, and clever — and maybe too-clever-for-himself. As Wilfrid he has got every tic and intonation down to perfection - you can almost see the machinery of his brain ticking, weighing, understanding, projecting, calculating!

But much more than anything else, embedded in this sumptuous black-&-white drama, are the noir concerns of trust, perfidy, and unreciprocated love. In a tale that makes use of instant karmic retribution, there’s an evil satisfaction in the comeuppance of the proceedings.

Billy Wilder, the director (of classics such as Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment et al), has added layers to this tale of egregious behaviour — life’s surprises and a courtroom’s twists are inextricably intertwined in ways that a carafe of cocoa turns to brandy, and the kick which follows is paradoxically both pleasurable and painful.

When the film released in 1957, all publicity material mentioned that the ending of the film should not be revealed. The film itself ends with that exhortation! Although originally published as a short story in 1925 with the title Traitor’s Hands by Agatha Christie, she renamed it Witness for the Prosecution when it was reprinted. Her play is based on this short story. When the film was released, Agatha Christie said it was the only movie adaptation based on her stories that she actually liked. However, she later also loved the adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express following its release in 1974.

Every courtroom drama of worth,  Anatomy of a Murder, Primal Fear, The Verdict, among others, owes its genesis to this brilliant film. Its pleasures don't diminish even in repeated viewings.

Trivia

• In order to show just one of Marlene Dietrich’s famous legs, an entire scene was written that required 145 extras, 38 stuntmen and cost $90,000.
• The courtroom setting, which cost $75,000 to build, was a recreation of an actual courtroom in London’s Central Criminal Courts, The Old Bailey.

Watch Witness for the Prosecution here

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)
(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)

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