Witness to Murder (1954)

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The title, "Witness to Murder" tells you what this movie is all about in three words. Made near the end of the classic film noir period, it is a riveting drama. It had unfortunately disappeared in recent years largely because of its plot similarities to Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window".Cheryl Draper (Barbara Stanwyck) witness Albert Richter (George Sanders) strangling an unknown female. She immediately calls the cops. Lt. Lawernce Mathews (Gary Merrill) and Sgt. Eddie Vincent (Jesse White),respond. The police at first dismiss Cheryl's story chalking it up to a bad dream. Mathews becomes attracted to Cheryl and the two begin seeing each other. Although sympathetic, Mathews continues to insist on some sort of evidence to substantiate Cheryl's story.Richter, meanwhile learns that Cheryl had witnessed the murder and concocts a plan to discredit her story and create the impression that she is going mad. Police Captain Donnelly (Harry Shannon) is convinced and has Cheryl placed in an "observation" ward at the local hospital. Following her release and despite Mathews' attempts to try and prove her story, Richter confronts Cheryl in her apartment and.....................................Barbara Stanwyck gives a stand out performance as the nervous Cheryl. Her scenes in the hospital are especially riveting as she tries to convince the medical staff of her sanity. Claire Carleton, Juanita Moore and the then 90 plus year old Adeline DeWalt Reynolds impress as the other patients in the room. Was there ever a better actor to play the suave sophisticated stuffed shirt villain than George Sanders? His cunning manipulative Richter is one of his best performances. Jesse White (the Maytag repairman) has little to do except smoke his trademark cigar.The atmosphere of the story is pure noir, complete with darkened rooms, rain soaked streets et al. The only criticism I have is the scene where Sanders confesses to Stanwyck and reveals his plans for the future. A little melodramatic and unnecessary in my opinion.After all is said and done "Witness to Murder" turns out to be a classic film noir.

Witness to Murder (1954) ** 1/2 (out of 4)Great performances are somewhat wasted in this thriller that simply has way too many logical problems to really work. Cheryl (Barbara Stanwyck) wakes up one night and looks across the street to an open window where she sees a man (George Sanders) kill a woman. Cheryl goes to the police but they don't believe her and after a while they start to think she's the one that is crazy. She strikes up a relationship with the lead detective (Gary Merrill) but the only person who knows she's telling the truth is the killer himself. WITNESS TO MURDER features three great performances from the leads but sadly there are just way too many logic issues that keep this from being a complete winner. As many other reviewers have pointed out, there were times where I wanted to jump through the screen and just smack the detective and those helping on this case. It doesn't help that right from the start no one is taking the woman serious because if anyone had done the smallest amount of work then there were all sorts of signs that she was telling the truth. Another big problem is that the Sanders character can pretty much do whatever he wants, no matter how silly it is, and the police will never question it. After a while you pretty much just have to throw your hands in the air. Another major problem I had was with the music score, which was just constantly on and being way too dramatic for its own good. With that said, the three leads really make the film worth watching and especially Sanders who is terrific as the villain. He does a great job at playing this rather dark character and I loved the way the actor played it up to scare Stanwyck while playing it cool and collective whenever facing the police. Director Roy Rowland does a nice job with the ending, which contains some suspense but sadly the screenplay doesn't give him more to work with.

Like a horror movie that requires the potential victims to be hollow-headedly dumb and virtually serve themselves up to the serial killer, the entire plot of this movie is hinged on frustratingly inept police work. Even for the LAPD these guys are a pretty lazy bunch; expecting a person to supply all the evidence and proof of a case before reporting it.Barbara Stanwyck sees Nazi-neighbor George Sanders commit a murder in his apartment and tells the police a totally plausible, non-sensational story (in that level-headed, Stanwyck manner). Pretty much based on a landlord's claim that Sanders is a model tenant, two alarmingly disinterested cops just assume that because there is not a dead body for them to trip over and Sanders doesn't just blurt out "Yes! I did it, I did it!", that a murder couldn't have possibly taken place.What follows is a very drawn out drama of Stanwyck going to the police with her assertions only to be patted on the hand and told to "calm down." Though Sanders makes for an impressive villain and Stanwyck is always wonderful, the plot has nowhere to go because the cops (Gary Merrill and Jesse White) regard evidence not as something you investigate, but something that jumps out at you and lands in your lap.It ultimately gets too repetitive and tiresome with the deck so stacked against Stanwyck that you just know everything will work out in the end. The writer just doesn't try hard enough to make plausible everyone's lack of belief in Stanwyck's story.A pleasant enough film if you imagine it to be an episode of one of those anthology TV shows like "Thriller," but very disappointing given the cast.

Witness to Murder (1954)This talented, gripping crime drama is a little outside the party in many ways, and even now it shamefully falls under the radar with reviewers and on wikipedia. But if you overlook a couple of creaky elements, like the police carelessly revealing their witness to the killer at the start, you will find a great B-noir.I say B-noir because it was produced by Chester Erskine Productions (this is their only movie) and released by United Artists (who distributed lots of the independent small company releases). And this is interesting because the movie has a stellar cast. The leads alone are big name stuff, Barbara Stanwyck and George Sanders. But keep going down the list and you'll find both detectives are well known noir and drama actors (especially Gary Merrill), the apartment manager is the guy who shouts out the window in "It's a Wonderful Life," and there is the incomparable Juanita Moore (from Sirk's "Imitation of Life") in a insane asylum scene.Add to this ace noir cinematographer John Alton ("Border Incident" and "The Big Combo") and uncredited screenwriter Nunnally Johnson ("The Three Faces of Eve" etc.) and you have all the ingredients for a great movie. And it is great in many ways. The plot itself, which I don't like to spend time on, is a classic one--someone sees a murder out their window. And of course, the murderer finds out they've been seen. If this sounds like Hitchcock's "Rear Window" you are right, and there are many echoes, even with the killer showing up at the witness's apartment. But wait just a second--both movies are the same year. In fact, "Witness to Murder" was released first by nine months. At the time, it did fine at the box office, but it is history, and the vagaries of video release through various studios who buy and sell rights to these movies, that has forgotten this. And with the plot so similar to "Rear Window," the less flashy, black and white, low budget "Witness to Murder" never had a chance against the Technicolor Hitchcock release, which is a far more inventive masterpiece. Stanwyck and Sanders maybe be approaching their years of decline in popularity (Stanwyck had a second birth in television's "Thorn Birds"), but they are both great here. When Sanders breaks out in German, it's a shock because it is utterly convincing. And when Stanwyck does anything, like take the burning supper out of the oven, or light a match, or run for her life, she does it with modern, natural ease. This is a smart movie, and director Roy Rowland's best movie, from what I can tell--neither you nor I are likely to see any of the others (of his fifty movies, two are available on Netflix, DVD and streaming both).But see this one. It uses lots of clichés, but it uses the very well.