WITNESS TO MURDER on TCM aug 19
Posted: August 13th, 2008, 7:44 pm
Anyone interested in catching the superb 1954 noir WITNESS TO MURDER should mark their calendars for Tuesday evening, August 19. Beautifully photographed by the extraordinary John Alton, it is also a film that is of interest to anyone intending to take Professor ChiO's course in cinematic voyeurism next month.
Barbara Stanwyck stars as a woman who inadvertently witnesses a murder one night when, awakened by a thunderstorm, goes to her window and sees her neighbor in an apartment across the street (George Sanders) strangle a woman to death. Panic-stricken, she phones the police who respond to the call but are unable to detect anything out of the ordinary when they arrive to question Sanders. The detectives (Gary Merrill and Jesse White) leave Sanders' apartment convinced that Stanwyck imagined the killing.
Determined to prove the cops wrong, she begins to relentlessly hound Sanders who, it turns out, is a former Nazi and author of books promoting the ideology of the Third Reich. Sanders, a cunning adversary, initiates a retaliatory strike against Stanwyck which, before long lands her in a mental asylum. But will she be able to convince Detective Gary Merrill (who by now has fallen in love with her) that her assertions are, after all, true?
Darkly suspenseful, albeit preposterously improbable, WITNESS TO MURDER follows a similar thread as REAR WINDOW, released the very same year. The most significant difference being in the Hitchcock film James Stewart is a consciously willing voyeur, drawn into a secret world of spying brought on by his own inertia; Stanwyck succumbs to the ramifications of her voyeurism purely by an accident of nature, the victim of circumstances far beyond her control, placing it much more squarely in the domain of film noir than its better known counterpart.
Sadly enough this film has never been available on any home video format; record it while you can!
Barbara Stanwyck stars as a woman who inadvertently witnesses a murder one night when, awakened by a thunderstorm, goes to her window and sees her neighbor in an apartment across the street (George Sanders) strangle a woman to death. Panic-stricken, she phones the police who respond to the call but are unable to detect anything out of the ordinary when they arrive to question Sanders. The detectives (Gary Merrill and Jesse White) leave Sanders' apartment convinced that Stanwyck imagined the killing.
Determined to prove the cops wrong, she begins to relentlessly hound Sanders who, it turns out, is a former Nazi and author of books promoting the ideology of the Third Reich. Sanders, a cunning adversary, initiates a retaliatory strike against Stanwyck which, before long lands her in a mental asylum. But will she be able to convince Detective Gary Merrill (who by now has fallen in love with her) that her assertions are, after all, true?
Darkly suspenseful, albeit preposterously improbable, WITNESS TO MURDER follows a similar thread as REAR WINDOW, released the very same year. The most significant difference being in the Hitchcock film James Stewart is a consciously willing voyeur, drawn into a secret world of spying brought on by his own inertia; Stanwyck succumbs to the ramifications of her voyeurism purely by an accident of nature, the victim of circumstances far beyond her control, placing it much more squarely in the domain of film noir than its better known counterpart.
Sadly enough this film has never been available on any home video format; record it while you can!
