Witness to Murder

TCM's Eddie Mueller, introducing Witness to Murder, a terrific 1954 film noir, observes that this thriller has now accrued new relevance in this #me too era.  The movie is about a woman (played by Barbara Stanwyck) who witnesses a murder, reports the crime, and is, then, discredited as hysterical. Of course, the murderer knows the truth and he stalks the witness, gaslighting her into a kind of madness.  Mueller's introductory remarks are thought-provoking and, indeed, not nearly as scathing as the movie.  In Witness to Murder, the villain is a Nazi.  The killer, Albert Richter (played with silky malevolence by George Saunders) isn't revealed to be a Nazi -- rather, everyone knows that he's a Nazi from the very outset.  The scary irony of the film is that the cops all choose to believe a deranged Nazi instead of a sober, professional career woman in her mid-forties.  The assumption is that the Nazi, who is completely insane, is more reliable than the heroine, simply because he is a man.  

Witness for Murder is luridly effective and no one watching the film could ever pretend to be bored.  In fact, the picture is tremendously gripping and, even, maddening.  We know that the heroine has witnessed a real murder, that she is completely justified in her suspicions, and, yet, no one believes her.  Even Larry, a burly cop, who is implied to be her love-interest, thinks she's nuts and encourages her to seek psychological help for her delusions.  And while the coppers are trying to placate the seemingly histrionic "little woman," Richter is setting traps for her, first persuading the patriarchy to have her committed to a ghastly mad-house, and, then, pursuing her relentlessly -- his plan is to throw the heroine off a skyscraper and make it seem that she has committed suicide.  All of this is hokum, but there is startling subtext (or really text) about gender roles in American society.  The film also has other curious and fascinating undertones:  the script proposes that the female witness and the villain are really soul-mates.  Both of them are obsessives and have lost their "significant others," as we would say today, in the War.  Richter goes so far as to say that he and the heroine (she's called Cheryl Draper -- a good name for an interior decorator) would really get along quite well if only he didn't have to kill her.  Stanwyck looks great with the sardonic, scary Nazi.  By contrast, her sober, staid nominal boyfriend, a police detective studying to be a lawyer, isn't well-suited for her -- in fact, the man has a peculiar Neanderthal profile with a heavy low brow furred with eyebrows like unruly caterpillars.  Throughout the movie, the kindly cop condescends to, and patronizes Cheryl Draper in a way that is more offensive than Saunder's homicidal menace.  The film's point, effectively dramatized, is that no one is willing to believe the heroine when her credibility is compared with that of the "denazified Nazi" who has, in fact, written a book ostensibly about history called The Age of Violence, a tract that seems to make Mein Kampf look restrained and genteel by comparison.  Larry, the detective, notes that The Age of Violence is "just a hash of Nietzsche and Hegel", even though the book advocates the slaughter of subhumans as a way to redeem a decadent society.  Men write big, ambitious books; women gossip.  Characteristically, it's Richter's book that ultimately provides the clue that damns him -- from the beginning to the film's very end, no man has believed a syllable of what the murder witness has said; it's is book that condemns him.  If ever a heroine deserved an apology at the end of a film it's poor Cheryl Draper -- but none of the men ever express any regret that they didn't credit a word that she said.  

The picture looks great.  Indeed, on a shot by shot basis it's spectacular.  The photography is by John Alton, a master of the black and white film noir.  In the opening scenes, a wild wind-storm is buffeting high-rise apartments in Los Angeles.  The camerawork captures a tempestuous chiaraoscuro of billowing shadows, canvas awnings flapping wildly in the wind.  Apartments are intricate labyrinths of light and shadow -- the ominous silhouette of an African fetish in Draper's apartment broods against a remote wall.  When Draper is committed to an asylum, Alton goes all-out:  the ward is full of puddles of unmotivated light, each like a fire containing a damned soul and the mad-women are extravagant and spooky.  Cheryl's interview with the psychiatrist in charge of this hell-hole is conducted in a room lurid with a huge cage-like shadow on the wall and floor.  (When Cheryl leaves the nightmarish office, the cage pattern is picked up on the tile of the corridor.)  Saunders is filmed like the Prince of Darkness, rearing up Nosferatu-style against black velvet curtains, a huge hieroglyph of monstrosity.  (In one scene, he says that he will publish the "Gospel of the Future" that will put to shame Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin -- then, he begins to rant in German.)  At the climax, Cheryl Draper flees across empty urban streets and not just Saunders but everyone in town pursues her -- it's a comical effect a bit like Dr. Suess' recently maligned To think that it happened on Mulberry Street, an impromptu mob of about 20 people led by the villain chases Cheryl to the base of a five-hundred foot tower, uncannily clad with a enormous sheath of scaffolding.  You wouldn't get me to climb up that scaffolding even in broad daylight, but, of course, Cheryl flees up to the tip-top of the huge skyscraper through a vertical maze of dark shadows so that height and the abyss can add to her Angst.  The scene in which the villain plunges down an open shaft, smashing through several floors of flimsy cross members outdoes anything Hitchcock achieved in this genre.  (And even with the villain fallen to his death, Cheryl still has to dangle for an extended period from the side of the building).  Some of the direction is inept -- the film maker was Louis B. Mayer's son-in-law.  A few scenes involve jarring close-ups and shots are held too long or not long enough. There's an amusing, if discordant scene, about how people expect real detectives to act like TV cops and Larry's cigar-chomping sidekick sings the theme to Dragnet.  But, by and large, the direction is good and the acting excellent as well.  

Hitchcock's Rear Window released later in 1954 is a variant on the theme.  Hitchcock's movie, of course, is more ambitious and, in fact, comprises a sort of critique of voyeurism and the cinema itself.  This sort of thing is well beyond the reach of Witness to Murder, but the film, in many ways, is more suspenseful and disturbing than Hitchcock's movie.