The Fatal Witness (Republic, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 8), in order to fill time before KPBS showed the latest episode of Death in Paradise, I looked on YouTube for a movie just under an hour long and found it in The Fatal Witness, a 1945 would-be thriller from Republic Pictures directed by Lesley Selander from a script by Cleve F. Adams and Jerry Sackheim based on a short story by Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903-1979) called “The Marsh Light.” That same story was adapted considerably better in 1959 for an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show, “Banquo’s Chair,” with Hitchcock directing it himself. (Hitchcock personally directed about 20 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including the season openers and whichever other ones caught his fancy.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen “Banquo’s Chair” but the combination of a shorter (half-hour, less commercials) running time and an infinitely better director would probably make it more interesting than The Fatal Witness. Though Evelyn Ankers and Richard Fraser are top-billed, the real central character of The Fatal Witness is John Bedford (George Leigh), scapegrace nephew of Lady Elizabeth Ferguson (Barbara Everest), who keeps threatening to disinherit him. (In “The Marsh Light” it was an uncle, not an aunt, who stood between John and an inheritance.) Another relative, ingénue Priscilla Ames (Evelyn Ankers), tries to get Aunt Elizabeth to lighten up on John – the hint is she’s in love with him, which would mean they aren’t close enough on the family tree for it to be incest – but Aunt Elizabeth is convinced John stole her jeweled brooch. Later the brooch turns up and Priscilla tells Aunt Elizabeth she was just being paranoid – only still later we learn that John did steal the brooch, stripped it of its jewels, substituted paste copies and sold the real ones to get more money with which to gamble.

Ultimately Aunt Elizabeth is found murdered, strangled in her own home, and while John is suspect number one, he has what appears to be an ironclad alibi: he was arrested that night for disorderly conduct at a low-class bar he frequents. Actually, though, he bribed the jail guard (called a “turnkey” in Britain, at least in this film), Scoggins (Barry Bernard), to trade places with him for an hour so he could go home, kill Aunt Elizabeth, then make it back to the jail with no one but Scoggins the wiser. Later Scoggins tries to blackmail him, but John has an answer for that, too: he lures Scoggins to a meeting place outside and kills him, but sets up an alibi with a record of an orchestrated version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. At least according to the writers, there were recording services in London in which you could overdub your own vocal, humming, whistling or what have you onto a record, so you’d end up with two copies: the original and the one with your added part. John had a record made like that and used it to dub his whistling over the treacly orchestral version of the “Moonlight” Sonata the family had in their collection, so it would seem like he was still home when in fact he went out and killed Scoggins. The official police officer on the case is Inspector William “Bill” Trent (Richard Fraser, dull as usual; how did producer Val Lewton and director Mark Robson get that marvelous performance of him in the 1946 film Bedlam when in all his other movies he comes across as so dummy-like you expect there to be a stagehand pushing him around on wheels?), who’s sure John killed both Aunt Elizabeth and Scoggins despite his seemingly unbreakable alibis. He asks Priscilla for their copy of the “Moonlight” Sonata record, but Priscilla previously bumped into John and the records fell and broke as a result – and when she and Trent realize what happened, John has already thrown the pieces of the record out with the trash.

In addition to whatever his relationship is with Priscilla, John is also dating a music-hall entertainer, Gracie Hallet (Peggy Jackson), who protests when John takes her to the same low-life bar where he takes everybody (maybe it’s a Republic picture and they could only afford one bar set). She sings an O.K. song called “From Here On In” which I’ve been unable to find out any information about online (all my searches took me to a much later song of that title by the punk-rock band The Living End in 1996). There are also scenes of a bar fight and a horse race; the horse race is obviously supposed to represent John’s gambling addiction but both it and the bar fight seem also to be there just because it’s a Republic movie and therefore horses and bar fights have to be in there somewhere. Realizing that the only way he can nail John is to entrap him into confessing in front of everyone in the household, Trent hits on the idea of hiring older actress Vera Cavanaugh to impersonate Aunt Elizabeth’s ghost and have her appear at a party. (Wisely, Republic’s casting director chose the same actress, Barbara Everest, to play both Aunt Elizabeth and Vera Cavanaugh.) He solemnly instructs the other guests to pretend they don’t see Vera in Aunt Elizabeth drag so John will think it’s her ghost come back to haunt him into confessing, which he does. Then, in the twist ending that’s become by far the most famous aspect of this story, Trent gets a letter from Vera Cavanaugh apologizing that because of a bad case of flu she wasn’t able to show up at the event, and both Trent and we are left wondering just who that woman was and whether she was really Aunt Elizabeth’s ghost. One of the nine online reviewers for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents show “Banquo’s Chair” attributed this (maybe) supernatural twist to the Hitchcock show’s writer, Francis M. Cockerell (who’d previously worked on One Step Beyond, also a show famous for its supernatural twist endings), but it was there in the original story and in The False Witness. That’s really about the only good thing in this movie, however; otherwise it’s a leadenly-paced would-be thriller and one wonders whether Alfred Hitchcock saw this film and, if so, said to himself, “I could do this better than that!”