Teresa Reviews “The Witness for the Prosecution” (1982)
Teresa reviews “The Witness for the Prosecution” (1982) and her verdict is “not proven.”
Fidelity to text: 4 blunt objects
This remake is sometimes closer to the stage play than Billy Wilder’s 1957 opus. Other times, it adds extraneous, unneeded material, while cutting more important stuff.
Quality of movie on its own: 3 blunt objects
Stick to Billy Wilder directing Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, and Charles Laughton. You won’t miss a thing.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movies on her podcast.
Billy Wilder made an amazing movie, one of the very few that Agatha saw and liked. He collected stacks of award nominations, including best picture. That year’s Academy Award didn’t go to Witness for the Prosecution. Instead, The Bridge Over the River Kwai won. Perhaps the Academy made a mistake in judgement, perhaps not. Tastes vary. All of which is to say that remaking a landmark film like this one is an exercise in peril.
Despite the risk, I understand why they did it. Back in ye olden days, before DVD players and even further back, before VCRs, if you wanted to watch a movie you either hoped it would show up on late-night cable OR you traveled to some out-of-town film festival or revival house. By 1982, Witness was 25 years old. Memories fade and a new audience would judge a new production on its own merits.
The production company didn’t take any chances. They reused (mostly) Billy Wilder’s script and hired an all-star cast.
Did it work? Not really.
The script changes were good and bad. Sir Wilfred meets the mysterious cockney woman in a dingy flat rather than at the noisy train station (bad). They kept Miss Plimsoll, the nurse clashing with crusty Sir Wilfrid (good). They added a scene showing the happy nurses, staff, and patients waving goodbye to Sir Wilfred when he leaves the hospital.
But this script skipped the entire backstory where Christine and Leonard Vole meet in the rubble of Berlin after the war. That scene was important: it showed how desperate Christine was and hinted at her acting skills. It showed how Leonard Vole got by on smarm, charm, and luck. He’s not that smart and when he was young and handsome, his second-class skills didn’t matter. As he got older, they did.
We also missed seeing Leonard demonstrating his magical egg-beater, the reason he chatted up Emily French. He needed money for his get-rich-quick scheme and she had it. We didn’t get scenes showing Leonard as a small-time grifter. They mattered because they made us dislike Leonard, making the prosecution witness’ testimony all the more stunning.
Even shooting the film in color made a difference. Compare Sir Wilfred’s monocle scenes (much more extensive in 1957). They are far more effective in black and white than in color. Similarly, careful camera work in 1957 made you think you, like Sir Wilfred, we’re seeing far more of the mysterious cockney woman than we were, which made revealing her ravaged face all the more shocking. In this version, she keeps twitching her scarecrow wig back and forth to hide her face. Despite the evocative rooming house, it didn’t work. She behaved like she was pretending to suffer from the DTs. Sir Wilfred also didn’t use his monocle at the climax, highlighting the knife on the evidence table.
The right cast can compensate for script weaknesses, but this cast was … not right.
Other than Sir Wilfred, the most important people onscreen are Leonard and Christine. You have to believe that Leonard is oily, smarmy, the kind of man who, when he says the sun rises in the east, you look out the window. Yet he also has to be charming to lonely, older ladies who crave a handsome man who flatters them, pays them attention, and makes them feel young and alive.
Tyrone Power was astonishingly good at portraying a man who shouldn’t be trusted but you do anyway. Beau Bridges is a blank. He’s a California boy, lost in London. We don’t see him charming anyone, including Sir Wilfred. He doesn’t bother. Because we don’t see any scenes setting up his character, his murder of Emily French is all the stranger. Tyrone Power played Leonard as a man with no impulse control. He learned he’d inherit Emily’s £80,000 and one week later, smashed her skull in so he didn’t have to wait. No planning. No forethought. Beau Bridges was so lackadaisical he seemed to be sleepwalking through life. He would live off an old lady’s affection, but he couldn’t work up the energy to beat her to death.
I could not accept Diana Rigg as Christine Vole, who she poured all her acting abilities into maintaining her accent. She was too polished.
Christine’s relations with Leonard was another area where Beau Bridges was miscast. Tyrone Power? Yes, any woman would put up with a lot from him. Bridges, however, was a handsome but charmless lump. As a couple, they were chemistry-free. Why would she stick with him? He doesn’t care enough to go after her!
Ralph Richardson as Sir Wilfred was acceptable, but he’s no Charles Laughton. His monocle was largely removed from the script. His playing with his pills to indicate his thought processes during court scenes disappeared completely. He wasn’t as acid, nor was he as upset as Charles Laughton when he discovered how he’d been so completely fooled.
Another problem actress was Wendy Hiller as Janet Mackenzie. This is not because she can’t act. It’s because she made such a huge impression as the Princess Dragomiroff in Murder on the Orient Express (1979). Her voice is very distinctive and I kept seeing a Russian princess and not a Scottish maid.
Should you watch this? For completeness’s sake, sure. Otherwise, stick with Billy Wilder’s wonderful, superlative film. It delivers. This doesn’t.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
