Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

Official trailer

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Witness for the Prosecution is the most entertaining courtroom film ever made. It’s a murder mystery with a famous twist ending, and it’s a comedy too, full of sharp dialogue and eccentric characters, built around a performance by Charles Laughton so enjoyable that it’s worth watching for him alone. It’s tense, funny and clever, and it has never lost its power to surprise.

Billy Wilder directed it in 1957, adapting Agatha Christie’s hit stage play, and it was nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture. I give it a 10. I’m going to say as little as possible about the ending, because the film asks its audience not to reveal it, and anyone who hasn’t seen it deserves to experience it fresh.

I adore this movie. It’s the one courtroom picture where I laugh as often as I lean forward, and the balance never tips. Laughton’s grumbling, Dietrich’s ice and Wilder’s jokes landing in the middle of a murder trial all work on me, and by the final minutes I’m as completely in the film’s hands as the jury is.

Sir Wilfrid

Charles Laughton plays Sir Wilfrid Robarts, the greatest criminal barrister in London, who has just come home from hospital after a heart attack. His doctors have forbidden him to take on criminal cases, to smoke cigars or to drink brandy, and he’s been assigned a fussy, bossy nurse, Miss Plimsoll, to make sure he obeys. He intends to disobey all of it.

Laughton is wonderful: grumpy, brilliant, childish, vain and completely lovable. He smuggles cigars in his walking stick, sneaks brandy in his thermos of cocoa, and uses his monocle to reflect light into the eyes of potential clients, a trick he claims tells him whether they’re lying. He’s the funniest character in any courtroom drama and the smartest, and Laughton gives him a huge, theatrical personality without ever losing the intelligence behind it.

The performance earned Laughton an Oscar nomination, and it’s pure enjoyment. You could watch him argue with his nurse for two hours and be happy. He’s also formidable in court, and the moments when the comic invalid suddenly becomes the most dangerous man in the room are thrilling.

The cocoa thermos full of brandy is my favorite gag in the picture, and I think it tells you everything about Sir Wilfrid in one prop. A man that clever, reduced to smuggling liquor past his nurse like a schoolboy, and Laughton plays each small victory as if he’d just won an acquittal.

Miss Plimsoll

Elsa Lanchester plays Miss Plimsoll, Sir Wilfrid’s nurse, a relentlessly cheerful, bossy woman who counts his pills, confiscates his cigars and follows him everywhere. Lanchester was Laughton’s wife in real life, and their scenes together are a joy, full of the warmth and irritation of two people who know each other completely.

She was nominated for an Oscar too, and she deserved it. Miss Plimsoll is the comic engine of the film’s quieter scenes, and her relationship with Sir Wilfrid, a running battle of wills that slowly turns into affection and respect, gives the film a warm human thread beneath the mystery. By the end, she’s his most loyal ally.

It’s one of Wilder’s additions to Christie’s story, and it’s a brilliant one. The mystery gives the film its tension, and the Robarts and Plimsoll comedy gives it its heart, and the two threads weave together until the very last scene.

The Case

Leonard Vole, a charming, penniless inventor, is accused of murdering Emily French, a wealthy, lonely widow who had befriended him and who, it turns out, changed her will to leave him most of her money shortly before she died. The evidence against him is strong, and the only person who can give him an alibi is his wife, Christine.

Tyrone Power plays Vole with an easy, boyish charm that makes it hard to believe he could be a killer.

Sir Wilfrid, testing him with the monocle, decides he’s telling the truth and takes the case against his doctors’ orders. It was Power’s last completed film. He died the following year, during the making of another film, at the age of forty-four.

The case looks hopeless, and Sir Wilfrid knows it. The scenes where he builds his defense, questioning Vole, studying the evidence and planning his strategy while dodging his nurse’s rules, are the film’s quiet middle, and they’re a pleasure to watch. By the time the trial begins, the audience is as invested in winning as he is.

Christine

Marlene Dietrich plays Christine Vole, Leonard’s German wife, and she’s the film’s great mystery.

Christine is cool, cynical and unreadable. When Sir Wilfrid asks her to provide her husband’s alibi, she refuses to show any emotion, and then she shocks everyone by agreeing to testify for the prosecution. Against her own husband, in a capital murder trial, and she seems entirely calm about it.

Dietrich gives the performance of her career. Christine is a woman who has survived the war and has no illusions left, and Dietrich plays her with an icy control that hides everything she feels. A flashback to her meeting Leonard in a bombed-out Hamburg nightclub, where she sings for a crowd of soldiers, is one of the film’s best moments.

Dietrich reportedly hoped the role would win her an Oscar, and she wasn’t nominated. The performance has come to be seen as her finest. The whole film’s design depends on that performance. Everything the audience believes about the case depends on how they read Christine, and Dietrich makes sure they can never quite read her at all.

I think the Academy got this one badly wrong. Dietrich’s Christine is the performance I keep turning over after the credits, that flat, unreadable calm and the nightclub song in Hamburg, and she should have had a nomination at the very least.

The Old Bailey

Most of the film takes place in court, at the Old Bailey, and Wilder built a detailed replica of the famous London courtroom on a Hollywood soundstage. The trial scenes are superbly staged, with Sir Wilfrid sparring with the prosecution, cross-examining witnesses and turning apparently damning evidence to his client’s advantage. Laughton is at his best here, sly and theatrical, playing the jury like an audience.

Wilder keeps the courtroom scenes lively and funny, and every witness is a vivid character, from a sharp-tongued housekeeper who despises Vole to a pompous police inspector. The legal battle is gripping, and the film’s structure, building from one revelation to the next, keeps the audience off balance. By the time Christine takes the stand, the tension is enormous.

The Twist

The film builds to a celebrated twist ending, in fact to more than one, and I won’t say anything about it except that it works, it’s fair, and it changes the meaning of almost everything that came before. It comes in the last few minutes. It’s followed by one more surprise that nobody sees coming.

When the film was released, the studio added a message over the end credits asking audiences not to tell their friends how it ended, so that everyone could enjoy the surprise.

It was a clever piece of marketing, and it worked very well for a film that has been seen by millions since. Theaters reportedly admitted no latecomers during the final minutes. The twist has been discussed and imitated for decades, and it still works.

Watching it a second time, knowing the ending, is its own pleasure. Every scene is carefully constructed to play fair, and the clues are all there, hidden in plain sight, in the performances and the dialogue. It’s a film that’s just as satisfying the tenth time as the first, because the pleasure shifts from surprise to admiration for how carefully it was made.

Billy Wilder

Wilder was one of the great directors of his era, the man behind Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. He brought his sharp wit and cynical intelligence to Christie’s play, adding humor, expanding the characters and building the relationship between Sir Wilfrid and Miss Plimsoll. That isn’t in the original.

The result is a film that’s much more than a mystery. The film is also a portrait of a gifted, difficult man returning to the work he loves, and of the people and the illnesses that try to stop him. Wilder’s touch is everywhere: in the jokes, the pacing and the way the film keeps its biggest surprises for exactly the right moment.

He also knew how to use his stars. Laughton gets to be larger than life, Dietrich gets to be enigmatic and Power gets to be charming, and each of those qualities turns out to matter to the story.

The casting itself is part of the misdirection. That’s a trick only a director as clever as Wilder could have pulled off.

I admire Wilder most here for making the casting do the lying for him, and being outplayed that cleanly is a pleasure.

Agatha Christie

The film is based on Christie’s play, adapted from her own short story. It was a huge success on the stage in London and New York. Christie reportedly considered Wilder’s film the best adaptation of her work.

It’s easy to see why. It keeps her ingenious plot and adds a layer of wit and character that makes the story richer.

Christie’s great gift was misdirection: making the reader look in the wrong place while the answer is sitting in front of them.

The film understands that completely. Everything is presented fairly, and the audience is still taken completely by surprise. Wilder’s version adds a final turn that deepens the play’s ending. That helps explain why the film has outlived so many other Christie adaptations.

The story has been remade several times since, for television and on stage, and none of the versions has matched Wilder’s. The combination of Christie’s plotting, Wilder’s wit and those three central performances has proved impossible to repeat, and the 1957 film remains the definitive telling of the tale, the version every later adaptation has been measured against and found wanting.

What does Witness for the Prosecution (1957) get right?

It does everything a great entertainment should do, and does it perfectly. It’s funny, tense and surprising, it has three fine central performances and a supporting cast full of vivid characters, and its twist ranks with the best ever devised. It rewards repeated viewing, as its careful construction becomes visible.

It’s the film I’d show anyone who thinks old films are slow or stiff. Laughton alone will convince them otherwise. Watch it without reading anything about the ending, and then watch it again to see how it was done. It’s the rare film that becomes a different, equally rewarding experience on a second viewing.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Witness for the Prosecution

Absolutely. It’s a 10 because every piece of it pulls its weight: Laughton’s comedy, Dietrich’s mystery, the courtroom sparring and a twist that plays fair. There isn’t a scene I’d trim. Watch it without knowing the ending, please don’t tell anyone how it ends, and then watch it again to see how cleverly Wilder and Christie put it together.

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