WITNESS TO MURDER (director: Roy Rowland; screenwriter: Nunnally Johnson/Chester Erskine; cinematographer: John Alton; editor: Robert Swink; cast: Barbara Stanwyck (Cheryl Draper), George Sanders (Albert Richter), Gary Merrill (Lawrence Mathews), Harry Shannon (Capt. Donnelly), Jesse White (Eddie Vincent), Lewis Martin (Psychiatrist); Runtime: 81; 1954)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Cheryl Draper (Barbara Stanwyck) can't fall asleep and is disturbed by the wind, when she goes to close her window she sees in the apartment across the courtyard Albert Richter (George Sanders) choking a woman to death. She phones the police, but when Lieutenant Larry Mathews (Gary Merrill) and his partner Eddie Vincent (White) arrive to question the historical writer and ex-Nazi accused by Cheryl, there is no body. Richter removed the body to an empty apartment on the same floor before the police arrived.
The detectives are satisfied that no murder took place after questioning him and tell Cheryl that she must have made a mistake, or dreamed what she saw. But Cheryl feels the police have not investigated thoroughly, and sticks to her story that she saw a murder.
This well-crafted suspense film will emphasize the familiar noir devices --- a witness to a murder is not believed, the innocent witness becomes a victim to the city's indifference, and the authorities side with the murderer and ignore her pleas as being hysterical.
Richter killed his secret lover because she threatened to interfere with his upcoming marriage to a wealthy society woman. When he sees that Cheryl snoops around the empty apartment and finds an earring there which she turns over to the police, he decides to turn his attention on her.
Larry, who is a bachelor, studying to become a lawyer, is attracted to the single witness, who works at Sloane's as an interior designer. But he tells her there is not one shred of evidence for him to do anything, and after tracing the earring to Richter's deceased wife, he even clears the suspect of that suspicion. He talks Cheryl into doing the sensible thing and forget about it.
But Richter can't forget about the threat he perceives from the witness. He visits her apartment and fixes her doorlatch so that he can open it, and then returns when she is not home to type up some letters accusing him of murder. He will bring them to the captain, Larry's superior, and the captain will put Cheryl under mental observation, where she spends a brief time at the mental hospital ward until Larry frees her.
The story becomes too melodramatic for even these fine performers to bring credibility to it. The climax comes when Cheryl is driven to face Richter, as she sees him buying up all the newspapers at a stand and realizes that there is a story in all the papers of a missing woman who is found dead. When she confronts Richter with the knowledge that she now knows the name of the victim, he goes into a Nazi spiel and becomes a stereotypical evil depiction. The film culminates as Richter tries to kill Cheryl as she runs from him into a construction site and Larry arrives to fight Richter off and fatally pushes him off the roof of the building.
The camerawork of John Alton is the star of this vehicle. He sets a dark mood of the Los Angeles scenario, escalating the dramatics with shadowy building shots. The twist in the story is, that as upstanding a citizen as Stanwyck is, the authorities still side with the Nazi Sanders. The noir theme of alienation is richly furnished, but the film had too many scenes that stretched too far afield in disbelief for it to have the necessary flow in it to sustain the tension. Stanwyck was just too strong a character to be so completely victimized, so the film became more symbolic than a real flesh and blood story.
REVIEWED ON 7/31/2000 GRADE: B-
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
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