THIS MOVIE SWEARS YOU TO SECRECY ABOUT THE END SO I CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENS. I mean, I AM going to tell you what happens because that’s sorta the point of this blog, but, uh, be warned: spoilers.
Barrister1 Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Charles Laughton) is recovering from a heart attack and has been explicitly instructed not to take on any murder trials.2 Naturally, he takes the case of Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), an accused murderer whose alibi relies on his German wife, Christine (Marlene Dietrich). Then BANG, first twist: Christine is called to testify for the prosecution, despite the fact that a wife can’t testify against her husband.3 On the stand, she torches Leonard’s alibi. Case closed, right?
Well, that night, a mysterious woman comes to Sir Wilfrid with evidence that may exonerate Leonard. The woman has letters between Christine and a lover hatching a plan to kill Leonard! Wilfrid uses the letters during the trial to show Christine had a motive to perjure herself, discrediting her testimony. Leonard is found not guilty.4
The final twists in the minutes after the verdict: Wilfrid discovers that Leonard really did do the murder and that the “mystery woman with evidence” was, gasp, actually Christine. The couple conspired to have Christine incriminate Leonard, then get discredited by Wilfrid. Their fait now accompli, Leonard discards Christine to run away with a surprise new lover—which is when a shocked Christine stabs Leonard dead.
Rating: 6/10, it’s “Perry Mason” right up until it’s “Game of Thrones.”
Cast and Crew
We started this project in 1950, so we missed the part of Charles Laughton’s career where he didn’t look like Uncle Vernon.
We missed Laughton in 1933’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, for which he won a Best Actor trophy, and as Capt. Bligh in the original Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).5 His only film directorial effort, The Night of the Hunter, is a classic thriller that we touched on in the 1955 Wrap-Up.
This is Tyrone Power’s final film role, as he died in 1958, aged 44. Power was a swashbucklin’ type of leading man, starring in Jesse James (1939)6 and The Mark of Zorro (1940). Consider him a less-famous Errol Flynn or Clark Gable. Just recently, Guillermo del Toro remade 1947’s Nightmare Alley, a noir where Power played a scheming carnival barker.
There’s one truly great performance in Witness for the Prosecution, though, and it’s from Marlene Dietrich. When you watch dreck like Love Me or Leave Me, it becomes almost incomprehensible that a thoroughly modern figure like Dietrich could exist contemporaneously. If you’ve got a bunch of time, listen to Karina Longworth’s outstanding podcast episode of “You Must Remember This” on her.7
So what do you need to know about this German femme fatale? Well, you gotta know the vibe.
For films, her big ones are The Blue Angel (1930), where Dietrich played a cabaret singer and popularized the song “Falling In Love Again (Can’t Help It)”; The Scarlet Empress (1934), where she played Catherine the Great; and Touch of Evil (1958), where she co-starred with director Orson Welles. We’ll be seeing Dietrich again in a 1961 movie that’s basically an Avengers-level event for people who have been in this column; get excited.
The Trivia
Witness for the Prosecution is based on an Agatha Christie play, so let’s talk about the “Queen of Crime.”
We’ll start with her creation of Hercule Poirot, the Belgian super-detective with the super-moustache. Maybe you know his name from the silly way Alex Trebek would say it or maybe you know it from Kenneth Branagh’s “multiverse for adults.”8
Poirot’s first appearance was in “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” (1920; note that Styles is a house). Beyond his bonkers mustache, you should know that he’d frequently cite his “little grey cells” as the source of his deductive prowess. He died in “Curtain: Poirot's Last Case” (1970, pretty clearly not a spoiler).
Christie began to tire of the “insufferable” Poirot, but she had other detectives on hand. One was the cozy spinster Miss Jane Marple, an amateur detective whose most famous cases were “The Murder at the Vicarage” and “The Body in the Library.” Christie also created a detective couple, Tommy and Tuppence, that played like a more toned-down (read: soberer) version of Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles.
You should also know Christie as a playwright. Her most famous play is “The Mousetrap,” which is the longest continually-running play in history. Its name comes from the common name for the play-within-a-play in “Hamlet.”9 Anyway, Christie’s “Mousetrap” has a big-time twist ending that the viewer is sworn to secrecy about, but I’m not about to spoil it.10
Also, if you’re not feeling Christie’s mysteries, she also wrote semi-biographical novels about love and family under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
Odds and Ends
The film starts with a judge saying “oyer and terminer”; this is a French law phrase meaning “to hear and to determine”...Leonard and his victim play canasta, a card game whose name means “basket”; the goal is to collect sets, known as melds...a barrister’s wig is called a peruke…Power’s role was originally written for William Holden, who would have made a better murderer than the affable Power…the motto of the monarch of the U.K., which appears on the coat of arms, is “dieu et mon droit,” meaning “God and my right”...Billy Wilder directed this film, and in his filmography, it’s a footnote…they mention the case is going to be like “the charge of the light brigade”; that was a British cavalry charge during the Crimean War, immortalized in a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson11…Old Bailey is a metonym for the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales; it follows the route of an old wall around London that was part of the “bailey.”12
“Barrister” is British for “lawyer.” So is “solicitor.” Barristers and solicitors are different, though, breaking the law of transitivity.
His nurse is played by Laughton’s real-life wife, Elsa Lanchester. The African Queen was originally pitched as a vehicle for Elsa and Charles, though it ended up with Bogie and Hepburn.
This is true—it’s called spousal testimonial privilege. In the movie, Christine was still married to someone in Germany when she married Leonard, invalidating the latter marriage. On “Arrested Development,” George Bluth asserts that “they can’t arrest a husband and wife for the same crime,” which is, uh, less true.
Of course, the syllogism assumed here—if Christine’s lying, Leonard’s not guilty—doesn’t hold, intellectually or in practice. I’d love a LegalEagle takedown of this trial and verdict.
He also directed the original play version of “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” meaning we passed on two opportunities to mention Laughton in our Caine Mutiny write-up.
Leonard and the murder victim watch a Jesse James movie together, likely a nod to Power’s film.
Longworth’s work is rigorous and detailed, which is of course the exact opposite of what we’re going for here.
The Branagh Poirot movies are Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Death on the Nile (2022), and A Haunting in Venice (2023).
Classic trivia thing: that play-within-a-play is actually called “The Murder of Gonzago.” There’s a fun theme trivia to be written about works within works.
One, because “The Mousetrap” is still running, but two, because I haven’t seen it and don’t want to spoil it for myself.
You know the one—“Into the valley of death rode the six hundred,” etc., etc.
“Bailey” being part of “motte-and-bailey,” a castle defense where raised ground (the motte) ends at a wall (the bailey). “Bailey” as a metonym can be seen in “Rumpole of the Bailey,” a British TV series about a barrister named Horace Rumpole.