Witness to Murder (Chester Erskine Productions, United Artists, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie I watched this morning – I’ve taken to watching the Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” films on their repeat showings at 7 a.m. Sundays so I can still watch both them and the Lifetime movies on Saturday night – was Witness to Murder, produced rather late in the film noir cycle (1954) and with a cast headed by Barbara Stanwyck and George Sanders, both looking the worse for wear as they’d weathered (or not weathered) the years. It was produced and written by Chester Erskine, whose name leaves me with a bad taste because of his first film as a director, Midnight (1934), a leaden gangster drama filmed in New York for Universal and notable only for Humphrey Bogart’s appearance as scapegrace gangster “Gar Boni” (that’s really his character name!). It was the story of a juror who has to consider the case of a woman who shot her faithless gangster boyfriend and then realizes that his own daughter is also dating a gangster and may be headed for a similar fate – a premise James Whale had done to a turn for Universal a year or two earlier in the film The Kiss Before the Mirror but Erskine, saddled with the incredibly hammy actor O. P. Heggie in the lead (whom Whale would get to calm down and underplay as the blind hermit in The Bride of Frankenstein a year later), could do little with it. I had no idea Erskine’s career lasted as long as it did – he lived until 1986 and his last writing credit, The Invincible Six, was from 1970 and his last credit as director was something called Irish Whiskey Rebellion from 1972.

For Witness to Murder he was the producer and also the writer, and though he didn’t direct this time the person who did, Roy Rowland, was the sort of director actors call “a traffic cop.” He could shoot a film quickly and efficiently, and he could adapt himself to virtually any sort of subject matter (I think his two best films are 1949’s Scene of the Crime and 1954’s Rogue Cop, both made for MGM – not exactly the studio that first comes to mind when you think about film noir, but such films were popular then and the studio wasn’t going to turn down a genre that was actually making money at the time), but he wasn’t particularly insightful either as an actors’ director of a visual stylist. “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller noted that producer Erskine hired a cinematographer who could supply the visual atmospherics Rowland wasn’t interested in: the phenomenal John Alton, who wrote a book on cinematography called Painting with Light and had started on “B” movies for Republic. He therefore knew all about how to save money by using noir effects – if you’re going to keep half a room in darkness all the time you only have to build a set for the half that is going to show, and I love the story on how he used his low-budget expertise to make himself an extra $2,000 working on a 1953 RKO “B” called Count the Hours. Alton asked the film’s producer, Benedict Bogeaus, how much he had budgeted for rigging, the system of pipes, ropes and cables that ordinarily suspends lights above a film set. He was told $4,000, and said to Bogeaus, “Pay me $2,000 above my salary and I won’t use any rigging.” He did it, director Don Siegel recalled, “by having almost no lights from overhead.”

Examples of Alton’s visual virtuosity abound in Witness to Murder and give this pretty pedestrian and clichéd thriller most of the distinction it has – though he also shot the 46-year-old Barbara Stanwyck’s close-ups in soft focus to minimize her wrinkles, a practice the late cinematographer Gregg Toland once joked about: “You have a young actress just starting out and you don’t have to use anything in front of the lights. Then she gets older and you have to use chiffon. Then she gets even older and you have to use linen. Finally she’s so old you have to use burlap.” Witness to Murder has an interesting plot premise but also one that had been well worn by early 1954 – the person who sees someone commit murder through an open window and tries to report it to the authorities but isn’t believed – which Alfred Hitchcock had tapped in The Lady Vanishes in 1938 and had been the subject of previous movies involving Deanna Durbin (Lady on a Train, 1945) and Bobby Driscoll (The Window, 1949). Durbin’s character wasn’t believed because she was an inveterate reader of mystery novels (indeed, she dragoons her favorite mystery writer to helping her solve the real-life case) and Driscoll’s wasn’t believed because he was a boy with a fantastic imagination (a variation on the Aesop fable “The Boy who Cried Wolf”).

At the end of the showing Muller suggested something that had already occurred to me – that Erskine may have filmed this to get a version of the basic plot premise out to theatres five months before Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in which the person who witnessed a murder in progress was a man, a news photographer played by James Stewart, who was forced to stay at home due to a broken leg and started spying on his neighbors through their windows to relive his own boredom at being quarantined (sounds like an all too familiar story now!) and stumbles on Raymond Burr killing a woman and dismembering her to dispose of her body more easily. It’s likely someone had announced in a trade paper that Hitchcock was working on an adaptation of the short story “Rear Window” by Cornell Woolrich (oddly the edition of the story I read was bylined by Woolrich’s frequent pseudonym, “William Irish,” but the film’s poster used Woolrich’s real name) and Erskine decided to rush Witness to Murder into production and get it out before Hitchcock’s (which he did by five months).

In Witness to Murder the witness to murder is Cheryl Draper (Barbara Stanwyck), who works as an interior designer for the W. and J. Sloane store (which really existed; it’s surprising to see an actual business name, not a fictitious one, on a film this early, and even more surprising to see them credited with the décors used in the film, the sort of product placement that has since become all too common in films) and lives alone. Her being both middle-aged and single is explained by a brief bit of dialogue that she was engaged to a member of a bomber crew who was killed during World War II. She happens one night to look across the street and see Albert Richter (George Sanders), a former official in the Ministry of Propaganda and Culture for Nazi Germany who fled to Switzerland when he realized the war was lost, went through de-Nazification and settled in the U.S. after the war. While here he published a book called Art of Violence which offered some Nietzschean knock-offs about how it’s the duty of the strong to subjugate the weak and violence has been a force for good through human history. He’s also engaged to marry an heiress named Mrs. Overhill (whom we never see, though I liked the in-joke in her name, “Overhill,” appropriate for a film featuring two, shall we say, veteran actors in the leads), and he’s hoping to use her money to build a mass neo-Nazi movement in the U.S. and ultimately take over as the second Führer and finish the job Hitler started. He even makes the uncomfortably Trumpian comment that the country is off on the wrong track and “only I can bring it back.”

The woman he murdered was an inconvenient mistress whom he’d enjoyed as essentially a sex toy (not that this could be spelled out under the Production Code, but given that she was dressed when he killed her and she’s naked when her body is discovered, dumped in Griffith Park far away from where she was killed, there’s already something pretty kinky about their relationship) but who might get in the way of his upcoming marriage to Ms. Moneybags (which is a big enough deal it’s a front-page story in the city’s four newspapers, including the fictitious Los Angeles Chronicle). Once she witnesses the murder Cheryl does what’s seemingly the right thing – she calls to report it to the police (she has to ask the operator to put the call through because the 911 emergency number didn’t exist yet) – only the police, in the persons of Lt. Lawrence Mathews (Gary Merrill, who as the fourth Mr. Bette Davis certainly knew how to deal with strong women in real life!) and his cigar-chomping partner, couldn’t be less interested. Both of them try to convince Our Heroine that she only dreamed she saw a murder being committed across the street. Richter reports her when she steals a pair of earrings that Richter’s victim left behind in his apartment – they fell off as he was strangling her – but agrees not to press charges. Instead he tells the cops that Cheryl has obviously got obsessed with him and gets them to question her sanity – and he also sneaks into her apartment and writes himself notes on her typewriter accusing him of murder to bolster his contention that she’s crazy. (There’s a plot hole here in that the final note is written on an unusual typewriter for the time, with extended sans-serif letters, but as we see him using her typewriter to write the second one it’s a typewriter using the normal Courier font.)

Cheryl ultimately ends up arrested and put on what would now be a 72-hour psych watch, where she’s imprisoned in a hospital’s mental wing with three fellow inmates, an elderly woman obsessed with men, a Black woman (played by Juanita Moore and credited simply as “Negress” on the cast list) who sings a blues number (“Nowhere Blues” by Herschel Burke Gilbert, who also wrote the film’s background score, with lyrics by Sylvia Fine, Mrs. Danny Kaye – so Gary Merrill wasn’t the only person associated with this movie who had a more famous partner in the business!) incessantly, and another old woman who keeps repeating the line, “Mr. Peabody is in the library now.” All of a sudden Barbara Stanwyck’s old fire, pretty well banked through much of the movie, comes out again even though I wondered if she was thinking, “Oh, my God! I’m having a flashback to Ladies They Talk About!” The scenes in the psych ward are the best parts of the movie, helping make up for the all too familiar plot twist in which Lt. Mathews falls for Cheryl and starts believing her because he’s in love with her. Of course we know from the get-go that somehow Cheryl is going to persuade the cops to believe her and Richter will get his comeuppance – which happens when the police discover the nude body of Richter’s victim in Griffith Park, and when they search her apartment, amidst all the sleazy near-porn that’s her main reading material they find a copy of Richter’s book.

Richter ends up assaulting Cheryl, she gets away and there’s a chase scene through the Los Angeles streets that does not end, as I’d expected it to, with one of the characters getting run over by a passing car. Instead Richter chases Cheryl to the site of a big skyscraper under construction and Cheryl makes the typical dumb-movie-heroine mistake of fleeing up until she ends up trapped on the roof with Richter and Mathews – only Mathews is able to stop Richter from pushing Cheryl off the building (she ends up on a crude wood scaffolding and Mathews eventually helps her up and rescues her) and Richter is dispatched by falling through an empty elevator shaft since the elevators hadn’t been installed yet. Witness to Murder has been cited by feminists as an early example of a movie in which a woman has to assert herself against a lot of male-chauvinist disbelief, though it’s interesting that the original posters for it cited Double Indemnity and Sorry, Wrong Number as the precedents among Stanwyck’s previous films that would induce audiences to see this one. Certainly it has a lot more in common with Sorry, Wrong Number (Stanwyck as a disabled woman who realizes she’s the target of a murder plot instigated by her husband) than Double Indemnity (Stanwyck as a murderess herself), but Witness to Murder doesn’t have the intensity of either of its predecessors and it also doesn’t have the frisson of seeing a normally sympathetic actor like Fred MacMurray or Burt Lancaster playing a villain. Instead it has George Sanders looking older and seedier than he’d been in his prime, though when he starts spouting his neo-Nazi garbage (and especially when he lapses into German, the native language of his character) he suddenly seems to come alive in a way he doesn’t in the rest of the movie, much the way Stanwyck seemed to come alive most in the psych-ward scenes. Witness to Murder is quite competent entertainment, the work of talents like Stanwyck, Sanders and Alton who’d done better in earlier, stronger films, but still reliable professionals who enlivened what could otherwise have been a really clichéd movie sucking off the bones of older and better movies and trying to get a witness-to-murder movie into theatres before Hitchcock did.