I would win most of my cases if it weren’t for my clients. They will waltz into the witness box and blurt out things that are better left unblurted.
—Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, barrister,
in the telefilm Rumpole and the Confession of Guilt
Falling in love again, never wanted to.
What am I to do?
I can’t help it.
—Frederick Hollander, “Falling in Love Again”
(Marlene Dietrich’s signature song)
Witness for the Prosecution began its artistic life as a short story that Agatha Christie published in 1933 in Britain in a volume titled The Hound of Death. The story was published in the United States in 1948 in the collection Witness for the Prosecution. When another playwright sought permission to turn the story into a play, Christie decided to adapt it for the stage herself. The play opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in London on October 28, 1953. “When the curtain came down on my ending,” Christie recalled, the play and its author were greeted with a standing ovation.1 After a run of 468 performances in London, the production moved to Broadway on December 16, 1954. The play was a smash hit there, running for 646 performances; it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best foreign play.
Independent producer Edward Small, who had produced the classic film noir Raw Deal (1948), purchased the screen rights to Witness for the Prosecution at a high price, since Agatha Christie was a popular and prolific mystery writer whose works were outsold only by Shakespeare and the Bible.2 Small hired Billy Wilder to cowrite the screenplay and direct the picture for one hundred thousand dollars plus 5 percent of the gross profits. Small would act as executive producer; his partner, Arthur Hornblow Jr., was to produce the picture. Wilder very much wanted to work again with Hornblow, who “had given me my first chance to direct.” Hence Wilder did not grumble about relinquishing the producer’s chores to him. As things turned out, Wilder recalled, Hornblow “took a dark load off my shoulders.”3 It was Hornblow, not Wilder, who went to the front office to talk them out of shaving the budget.
Wilder was interested in filming a Christie mystery because he had read her work over the years. Asked about the influences on his films, he replied, “If there was any influence on me, it must come from the books and plays I read. . . . My work is not sugarcoated, I don’t use the sugar tongs,” he explained. “But I don’t sit down and say, ‘Now I’m going to make a vicious, unsentimental picture.’ ” The tone of the film depended on the source story.4
Stephen Farber points out an interesting parallel between Witness for the Prosecution and Sunset Boulevard. The relationship of Leonard Vole, the young fortune hunter, to Emily French, the wealthy widow whom he eventually murders, “is an almost identical, cut-rate version of the same parasitic relationship of Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond,” once again motivated by greed and ending in violence.5
Small said that “Marlene Dietrich made no bones about wanting the role of the German-born Christine Vole, Leonard’s wife.” As she grew older, Dietrich had not been offered many worthwhile parts. She was convinced that this film would give her the opportunity to prove that she was still an accomplished actress and not merely a headliner at Las Vegas, where she periodically entertained. “Billy Wilder, her old comrade from prewar Berlin, endorsed her for the role of Christine,” Small said. Both Wilder and Hornblow recommended Charles Laughton to play Sir Wilfrid Robarts, and Small approved the casting of both Dietrich and Laughton.6
Small himself suggested Tyrone Power for Leonard Vole. Admittedly, Power was no longer the box office knockout he had been in the 1940s, when he played the swashbuckling hero of several costume dramas. Nevertheless, Small was confident that Power’s name still had marquee value. Power at first declined the role, since he suspected that he would be overshadowed by the well-known scene stealers Dietrich and Laughton. “Ty changed his mind,” said Small, “when I offered him a salary of $300,000.”7 Besides, Power, like Dietrich, welcomed the chance to prove by his performance in this picture that he was a serious actor and not just a movie star. “I’m sick of all these knights in shining armor parts; I want to do something worthwhile, like plays and films that have something to say,” Power said at the time. “Someday I will show the fuckers who say I was a success just because of my pretty face.”8 He also wanted to be directed by the renowned Billy Wilder. By December 1956, the leads were all cast.
With shooting only six months away, Wilder got down to writing the script in earnest. His partner this time around was Harry Kurnitz, who had twenty years of experience as a screenwriter. He had, for example, written the screenplay for Carol Reed’s thriller The Man Between (1953). Moreover, he had authored many mystery novels under the pseudonym Mario Page. Kurnitz was not a young screenwriter who would defer to Wilder as Wendell Mayes had done. In fact, Kurnitz reminded Wilder of the intractable Raymond Chandler. Wilder thought Kurnitz was not as serious about devoting himself to the screenplay as he himself was. Kurnitz countered that he was simply not a workaholic like Wilder. He believed firmly in a nine-to-five workday and was not inclined to work overtime as Wilder pestered him to do. And, unlike Edwin Blum and other veteran screenwriters of the Wilder wars, Kurnitz was impervious to Wilder’s sarcastic insults. He was a fast man with a verbal punch who bounded back with clever jokes of his own aimed at Wilder. Even Wilder had to acknowledge that Kurnitz helped him turn out a solid screenplay.
In adapting Witness for the Prosecution for the screen, Wilder realized that Christie concentrated primarily on the tantalizing ingenuity of the plots of her stories, while she treated characterization perfunctorily. Wilder viewed the murder mysteries she churned out as essentially exercises in puzzle solving. On the level of character delineation, Wilder observed, Christie’s mysteries were like “high school plays.”9 Wilder was less interested in showing how the mystery was solved than he was in portraying the characters’ encounters with the evils of a corrupt society.
Accordingly, said Wilder, “We changed a few things from the original.”10 To flesh out the barrister’s character, Wilder gave the overweight Sir Wilfrid a heart condition brought on by overwork. He also gave the barrister a nurse, the peckish, fluttering, relentlessly vigilant Miss Plimsoll, who is charged with keeping Sir Wilfrid from suffering another heart attack. Wilder obtained the services of Elsa Lanchester, Laughton’s wife, for the part; she was best known for playing the title role in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Sir Wilfrid views Miss Plimsoll as a meddling nuisance. In giving him “a foil in Miss Plimsoll, Wilder humanized the character by making him a flawed human being who stubbornly resents the nurse’s ministrations.”11 “If you weren’t a woman, Miss Plimsoll,” he explodes at one point, “I would strike you!” When she confiscates his cigars and brandy—both of which are proscribed by doctor’s orders—Sir Wilfrid fumes, “I’ll snatch her thermometer and plunge it into her shoulder blades!” It would be “justifiable homicide.” Such humorous byplay between them provides some much-needed comic relief.
Wilder and Kurnitz inserted some flashbacks into the screenplay to keep the film from bogging down into a static, talky courtroom drama. The most crucial flashback, which is based on a reference in the play’s exposition, depicts how Christine came to meet Leonard, her husband-to-be, when he was a British soldier in Hamburg at the end of World War II. Wilder took the liberty of working into this flashback a cabaret scene that he had dropped from the screenplay of A Foreign Affair, in which a brawl breaks out when a sailor attempts to paw Erika. Steven Bach notes, “Christine is another version of Erika, singing in an off-limits dive that is nearly a replica of the earlier picture’s Lorelei Club.”12 Indeed, Dietrich’s performance as Christine in Witness for the Prosecution “stands next to her portrayal of Erika in A Foreign Affair in revealing her considerable but sadly underused talents.”13
For the scene in Witness for the Prosecution, Dietrich needed a ribald song to sing while playing her accordion and serenading the American enlisted men in the café with her sassy charm. Frederick Hollander, who supplied the songs for Dietrich in A Foreign Affair, had gone back to Germany. So, with the help of Matty Malneck, who was scoring Witness for the Prosecution, Wilder and Dietrich dug up a German ballad about Hamburg’s red-light district titled “Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins” (On the Reeperbahn at half past midnight). It was composed by Ralph Arthur Roberts, an actor-manager with whom Dietrich had worked in a cabaret in Berlin in the 1920s. Jack Brooks provided the English lyrics for the number, which became “I May Never Go Home Anymore.” In the flashback, when Christine finishes the song, some sailors get rambunctious, and one of them grabs Christine. In the ensuing melee, one leg of Christine’s slacks is ripped open well above the knee.
The scene required 145 extras and cost $75,000, including the construction of the nightclub set. Ean Wood opines that Wilder went to all that trouble and expense just to show off one of Dietrich’s famous legs. The film, he comments, was good enough to survive “the unnecessary flashback scene.”14 On the contrary, Wilder deemed the flashback essential to the plot. The sequence establishes how Christine and Leonard fell in love on the spot. Furthermore, we see that Christine is grateful to Leonard for agreeing to marry her and bring her back to London as a war bride. The flashback shows how Christine’s gratitude grows into love—much more clearly than Christie does in the play. It further helps to establish why Christine is later willing to risk prison by perjuring herself on Leonard’s behalf during his murder trial. In short, the flashback sequence is Wilder’s major contribution to his literary source.
After the completion of the screenplay, Kurnitz vowed never to collaborate with Wilder again, just as Lehman, Blum, and others had done. In a profile of Wilder he later published in a slick magazine, Kurnitz explained why: “Billy’s associates sometimes have a hunted look, shuffle nervously, and have been known to break into tears if a door slams anywhere in the same building. . . . He has a fierce, monomaniacal devotion to whatever project is in the typewriter.” Kurnitz continued, “He is a fiend for work and works nearly all the time. Let’s face it, Billy Wilder at work is actually two people—Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde.”15 Asked to comment on Kurnitz’s article, Wilder said that a journalist once quoted one of his friends as saying that “my collaborators are $50,000 secretaries.” He continued, “For one thing, that individual is no friend of mine; for another, if what he said was true, I would hire my relatives and make their salaries tax-deductible!”
Principal photography began on June 10, 1957, at the Goldwyn Studios. Laughton upstaged Power in Witness for the Prosecution, just as Power suspected he might. Power had come to Hollywood in 1936 after some supporting roles on Broadway; he immediately established himself as a star in films like Jesse James (1939). After serving in the marines in World War II, he played mostly in colorful historical romances like Captain from Castile (1947). Like Laughton, Power returned to the stage between pictures. He was in fact directed by Laughton in a concert reading of Stephen Vincent Benet’s verse drama John Brown’s Body, with Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey. Film historian Sam Staggs mentions that Dietrich tried to vamp Power during the shooting of Witness for the Prosecution. This embarrassed the actor, because his orientation was apparently more homosexual than heterosexual. Wilder confirmed that Dietrich developed a crush on Power. “Everybody had a crush on Ty Power. Laughton had a crush on him; I did too. As heterosexual as you might be, it was impossible to be impervious to that kind of charm.”16
Among Wilder’s production crew on this picture, cinematographer Russell Harlan and production designer Alexander Trauner stand out. Harlan had “developed a flinty black-and-white photographic style.”17 The stark, harsh lighting style he developed for Westerns like Red River (1947) was carried forward intact to his hard-edged cinematography for Witness for the Prosecution. Trauner matched his superb work on Love in the Afternoon with his production design for Witness for the Prosecution. Particularly noteworthy was his replica of the Old Bailey, London’s criminal court. He was denied permission to take photographs of the real courtroom, so he had to make detailed sketches of the architecture. Trauner built his set to scale, according to specific measurements: forty-three feet by fifty-six feet, with a twenty-seven-foot ceiling. It was constructed of sturdy Austrian oak, complete with panels in the walls, any of which could be removed to make room for the camera, if a setup called for it, “allowing filming from any angle.” The price tag for the entire set was $75,000.18
Maria Riva’s biography of her mother, Marlene Dietrich, quotes from many of Dietrich’s letters to her. In a letter dated July 13, 1957, Dietrich complains that, although most observers said they could not tell the difference between the actual Old Bailey and Trauner’s courtroom set, she was not one of them. “Wilder and Hornblow are proud that they have the real thing; except that it is new.” She caviled that “the ceiling is painted fresh and almost white, looking like a Hollywood set. The British barrister we have on the set agreed with me that it is dirty up there from the years. The leather on the benches is brand-new too.”19
In the same letter, Dietrich took some pot shots at Mr. and Mrs. Wilder. Dietrich frequently spent weekends with the Wilders while the film was in production, and she was not above criticizing the lifestyle of her hosts. “All they do, those two, is sit in front of the TV set! Billy even eats in front of it! They both sit there like Mister and Missus Glutz from the Bronx, eating their frozen dinners! Unbelievable! That’s what happens to brilliant men when they marry low-class women. Sad!”20 It seems that Dietrich was jealous of Wilder’s wife, who was younger than she. Indeed, she sometimes ignored Audrey while she was absorbed in conversation with Billy. Wilder said that he tried to explain to his wife that Dietrich did not slight her deliberately; it was just that Audrey did not exist for her. Audrey replied that her husband’s making excuses for Dietrich did not help.
If Marlene Dietrich was jealous of Audrey Wilder, Elsa Lanchester was jealous of Dietrich. Lanchester, who was one year younger than Dietrich, resented that she looked matronly while Dietrich’s svelte beauty was still alluring. She gossiped to friends that Dietrich was in the makeup chair at the studio at the crack of dawn every day during filming. The makeup man, she said, would spend two hours banishing the wrinkles from her face to preserve the illusion of Dietrich’s youthful glamour.21 Noel Coward, who visited the set, noted dryly, “Marlene, with her intense preoccupation with herself, is showing signs of wear and tear. How foolish to think that one can ever slam the door in the face of age.” Nevertheless, “slam it shut she did,” Bach writes. “Marlene, in fact, looks uncannily young in most of Witness,” particularly in the flashback to her warbling songs in the sleazy Hamburg nightery.22
Wilder was fascinated by Dietrich. “The femme fatale, with her feather boa, fake eyelashes, and long legs” was her screen personality. “At home, Dietrich scrubbed the floors on her hands and knees, fried eggs and potatoes.” She doctored lovers and stagehands “with homemade remedies for hangovers and colds. . . . She was so down-to-earth.”23 As one of her multiple complaints to her daughter during filming, Dietrich felt she had reason to question Tyrone Power’s personal appearance in the film. She wrote to Maria, “Ty Power sits in the prisoner’s box; he wears a beautiful tweed jacket; his shirt is immaculate, cuffs freshly pressed.” He was, nevertheless, playing the unemployed defendant in a murder trial. “None of the poor English appearance, the wrinkled cuffs and sleeves” of a man who is out of a job, hard up, “a man who is in prison on top of that. There he sits, a HOLLYWOOD LEADING MAN so out of character.”24 By contrast, Dietrich, who was playing the wife of an impecunious grifter, was made to wear relatively inexpensive outfits. She was miffed that Power’s costumes were more elegant than hers, which did not show off her beauty. Wisely, Dietrich communicated her negative judgments to her daughter but not to Wilder.
Laughton had a reputation for being a troublesome and temperamental actor. Yet Wilder reported that Laughton’s spirits were high during the shooting of Witness for the Prosecution; he was “full of suggestions on every aspect of filmmaking, from costumes to camera angles.”25 Wilder regularly conferred with Laughton while rehearsing a scene and considered his suggestions seriously. Dietrich resented their tête-à-têtes on the set, from which she was excluded. She wrote to Maria in her letter of July 13, “By now Laughton is co-directing me with Billy. He is a sly fox, and Billy does not notice what he is doing. There were long conferences after every one of my takes between Laughton and Billy; and I just stood there and took it. I know I have a terrible legend to overcome: that I am only interested in my looks” and did not care about acting. Dietrich could not refrain from being offended by the reluctance of her director and costar to ask for her input. After all, she had played promiscuous females all her life, “and this one they don’t even think I can contribute anything to.” She concluded, “I will still get Mrs. Vole on the screen” in a good performance.26
As a matter of fact, Wilder was more satisfied with Dietrich’s performance, as filming progressed, than she realized. In retrospect, Dietrich’s overriding evaluation of Wilder was likewise favorable. In her autobiography, she writes, “Billy Wilder was a master builder who knew his toolbox and used it in the best way possible to set up the framework on which he hung the garlands of his wit and wisdom.”27
Dietrich was correct in sensing that Wilder had a very high opinion of Laughton’s acting ability. “Wilder was convinced that Laughton had the greatest range and power of any actor” he had ever directed. Nothing tests an actor’s mettle like the role of a lawyer, and Laughton’s larger-than-life portrayal of Sir Wilfrid is one of the craftiest and juiciest performances of his career.28 “In our film it is Laughton who pulls the whole thing together,” Wilder explained. Sir Wilfrid is a much more important character in the film than he is in the play. “Laughton is more of a three-dimensional character in the film”; he makes the barrister a knight in search of justice.29
In photographing the courtroom drama, Wilder often used long, uninterrupted takes to allow the camera to move about the set, so that the pace of the action never falters. In this manner he kept the movie from looking static and stagey. Moreover, an extended take, uninterrupted by cuts to other angles, enables the actor to give a sustained reading of a long speech and thus to build steadily to a dramatic climax. In one scene, for example, Sir Wilfrid has a virtuoso speech in which he exposes Christine as lying on the witness stand. Laughton’s voice “rises from a whisper to a tremendous roar of fury” as he denounces her as a liar; the word reverberates for several seconds.30 Laughton spoke “very low for a page-and-a-half,” Wilder recalled; “and then worked up to the big line, ‘Are you not a chronic and habitual LIAR?’ The whole thing we did in one close-up, one take.”31 The single, unbroken take makes Laughton’s delivery all the more effective.
Laughton biographer Simon Callow reports that Laughton was in such good humor during shooting “that he volunteered to read all the parts for the jury’s reaction shots.” The extras who played the jurors were hired for one day; passages of dialogue would be read to them off camera, and they would react. The reaction shots would later be cut in to various scenes. When Laughton asked Wilder to let him read the off camera speeches, Wilder answered, “You don’t want to do this, Charles; it’s donkey work. The script girl can do it.” But Laughton insisted, and he presented perfect impersonations of his fellow actors. “Wilder beamed at Laughton’s sheer skill,” notes Callow.32
As the plot unfolds, a Cockney doxy phones Sir Wilfrid from Euston station, claiming to be in possession of documentation that is pertinent to the trial. Sir Wilfrid acquires the evidence from her in a hurried meeting at the depot, and it results in Leonard Vole’s acquittal. The mysterious woman is subsequently revealed to be Christine Vole in disguise; she masterminded the clever ruse to save her husband from the gallows.
For this impersonation, Wilder tagged Laughton to coach Dietrich in a Cockney accent. “Marlene was forever up at our house,” said Lanchester, “taking lessons in Cockney from Charles. She was obsessed with this impersonation; I never saw anyone work so hard.”33 Noel Coward was visiting Laughton and Lanchester at the time, and so he also helped Dietrich with the dialect, both at their house and on the set. “It is not easy to teach Cockney to a German glamour-puss,” Coward recorded in his diary, “but she did astonishingly well.”34 Indeed, Dietrich’s Cockney accent was so authentic that a rumor soon spread around the studio that her voice in the scene had been dubbed by another actress. But Jay Nash and Stanley Ross note that “production stills exist of Dietrich rehearsing the telephone scene without make-up.”35 In addition, during postproduction, Dietrich wrote in her diary, “Sept. 4th. Dubbing Cockney woman.”36
Dietrich mastered the dialect, but there was still the question of how to disguise Christine in a way that would fool both Sir Wilfrid and the audience. The makeup artists, Gustaf Noran, Ray Sebastian, and Harry Ray, went to work on Dietrich, supplying her with a dark wig, a false nose, and a scar on her cheek. Orson Welles, for whom Dietrich had recently made a cameo appearance in Touch of Evil (1958), kibitzed on the fashioning of Dietrich’s false nose out of putty. Wilder thought that Dietrich in full makeup looked positively grotesque. Dietrich herself suggested that the fake nose be made less prominent and that her makeup in other ways be toned down. Wilder approved the adjustments.
Wilder filmed the scene in which the Cockney trollop phones Sir Wilfrid from the train station in two ways. In one version, writes Bach, “we see it is Christine speaking with a Cockney accent. At the end of the call, she takes from her purse the wig we will later see her wear in disguise.”37 In the other version, Dietrich, already made up as the Cockney hooker, makes the call to Sir Wilfrid. Wilder was aware that there were two ways that the scene could be played: with suspense or with surprise. Viewers might be made aware in advance that the Cockney harlot was Christine’s invention. That would generate suspense, because the filmgoer would be anxious to see precisely what Christine was up to. Or the viewer might be left in the dark as to the real identity of the mystery woman. That would cause surprise when Christine’s masquerade was finally revealed at the film’s climax. Wilder chose surprise rather than suspense, so that the audience is genuinely shocked at film’s end to learn that Christine and the Cockney woman are one and the same person. Wilder wanted the audience to be caught off guard by the revelation of Christine’s elaborate deception at the same time that Sir Wilfrid is.
Wilder absolutely insisted that strict secrecy be maintained about the movie’s surprise ending during shooting. Throughout the production period, a placard was posted on the door of the soundstage, demanding that no one who saw the play “ever told the secret” and informing all columnists and other visitors to the set that they must sign the following pledge: “I promise not to reveal any of the secrets . . . which lead to the disclosure of the surprise ending.”38 Among the signatures on the poster was that of Noel Coward, who had helped coach Dietrich on the Cockney accent. The final ten pages of the screenplay were not distributed to cast and crew until just before it was time to film the final sequence. On the day that the finale was shot, Wilder had security guards posted at the door of the soundstage.
Principal photography wrapped on August 20, 1957. Wilder lucked out in his choice of editor for Witness for the Prosecution. He had not had a regular film editor for some years, although Doane Harrison continued as supervising editor, in addition to being an associate producer for Wilder. For the present film, Wilder snagged Daniel Mandell as editor; Mandell thus began an association with Wilder that would last for ten years. The veteran editor had already won two Academy Awards, for Pride of the Yankees (1942) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Mandell always maintained that “the greatest accomplishment of a good editor is, ironically, that the audience is totally unaware of his work.” Wilder heartily agreed. “The minute someone in the audience says, ‘What a snappy piece of editing that is in that montage,’ they are no longer paying attention to the story.” Mandell’s edit of Witness for the Prosecution was “an adept combination of action and intimate drama.”39
The credits of Witness for the Prosecution unroll as the Old Bailey comes into session, accompanied by a solemn “Pomp and Circumstance”–type march. The film’s mystery concerns a clever cad named Leonard Vole. Leonard is accused of the murder of Mrs. French, a rich widow with whom he had been friendly—so friendly, in fact, that she wrote him into her will shortly before her demise. Christie tips off the audience subtly that Leonard is not really a decent sort by giving him the last name of Vole. Yet Leonard’s wife, Christine, seems devoted to him, and we learn why in the flashback to Christine’s shabby basement digs in war-ravaged Hamburg: Leonard married her and brought her back to London as a war refugee. The flashback concludes just as the ceiling collapses in Christine’s bombed-out flat while Leonard is with her; this disaster subtly foreshadows how the roof will cave in on both of them before the film is over.
Leonard tells his lawyer, Sir Wilfrid, that he is counting on Christine’s testimony to save him from the gallows. But the barrister has a hunch that, if Leonard assumes that the unpredictable Christine is going to save him, “he is a drowning man clutching at a razor blade.” Sir Wilfrid faces an open-and-shut case, but he nevertheless mounts a full-scale defense for his client, since he is convinced that Leonard is caught in a web of circumstantial evidence.
Given Christine’s apparent loyalty to Leonard, Sir Wilfrid is flabbergasted when she appears in court as a witness for the prosecution. Sir Wilfrid reminds her that a wife cannot testify against her husband, but Christine counters that she and Leonard were never properly married because she was never legally divorced from her first husband, Otto Helm, who is living in East Berlin. She then proceeds to give evidence that undermines Leonard’s alibi for the night of the murder. She testifies that Leonard returned home that night with blood on his sleeve after ten o’clock, allowing him ample time to have killed Emily French earlier that same evening.
After court is adjourned, Sir Wilfrid is summoned to a railway station by a phone call from a Cockney prostitute, who sells him some incriminating love letters written by Christine to Max, her lover. Christine clearly indicates in the letters that she has given false testimony against Leonard because she wanted him to be convicted so that she can go off with another man. Sir Wilfrid presents this newly acquired evidence in open court. The jury is shocked at Christine’s duplicity and votes to acquit Leonard.
Once the courtroom is cleared, Christine approaches Sir Wilfrid and lapses into the Cockney accent she employed when she talked with him the night before, while she was disguised as the prostitute. Christine fabricated the documentation and then sold it to Sir Wilfrid so he could use it against her in court and win an acquittal for Leonard. Christine adds that she concocted the whole masquerade not because she thought Leonard was innocent but because she was certain of his guilt. While Sir Wilfrid is still reeling from Christine’s disclosure, Leonard casually announces that he is now free to leave Christine for a younger woman. Maddened with jealousy, Christine snatches a bread knife from the evidence table and stabs him to death right in the courtroom.
Christie’s original short story ends with the revelation of Christine’s clever maneuvers to save Leonard from the gallows. In the play Christie engineered Christine’s “private retribution” on Leonard because she was no longer satisfied to allow Leonard to go unpunished for killing the hapless Emily French. The play ends with Christine declaring, “I shall be tried for the murder of the only man I ever loved.” Looking at the judge’s bench, she adds, “Guilty, my lord,” as the curtain descends.40 Bach reflects, “The result is the transformation of Christine Vole from calculating bitch to desperately wronged woman.”41 The ending of the play implies that Christine herself will go to the gallows for killing Leonard.
Wilder was not completely satisfied with the play’s outcome. “Wilder could no more sentence Christine to death for murdering a bounder than he could send Erika off to the labor camp without implying that she would never get there,” Bernard Dick comments perceptively. So Wilder supplies an escape clause for Christine before the film’s final fade-out. Sir Wilfrid agrees to defend Christine, explaining that she did not murder Leonard; “she executed him.” Dick concludes, “So it was not murder, but retribution. Christine is meting out the sentence that the jury would have, if it had all the facts.”42 One knows that Sir Wilfrid will secure an acquittal for Christine. Paul Bergman and Michael Asimov write that it is “to Miss Plimsoll’s despair” that “Sir Wilfrid immediately volunteers to represent Christine.”43 On the contrary, Miss Plimsoll encourages Sir Wilfrid to defend Christine. Brandishing the thermos that Sir Wilfrid pretends contains cocoa, she calls out to him, “You forgot your brandy!”
With Witness for the Prosecution, Wilder fashioned a film noir in the grand tradition of Double Indemnity. Indeed, Witness for the Prosecution resembles Double Indemnity in that it possesses the fascination of a hair-raising tale told by the tabloids; it is concerned with “the kind of people we read about so often in the less austere dailies.”44 Wilder was acclaimed for directing a film in which the courtroom is knee-deep in spirited argument, and suspense builds as witnesses reveal crucial details.
Witness for the Prosecution played exclusive engagements in New York and Los Angeles in December 1957 to qualify for that year’s Academy Awards. When it was released in February 1958, it quickly became a box office sensation, ultimately accruing $8 million in domestic rentals alone. In the notices Laughton was singled out for praise: “Sage of the courtroom and cardiac patient, who’s constantly disobeying his nurse’s orders, . . . Laughton plays out the part flamboyantly and colorfully.”45
More to the point were the critics who said that in this film Dietrich demonstrates that “she is a dramatic actress, as well as a still glamorous chanteuse.”46 This is precisely what Dietrich set out to prove when she lobbied for the role of Christine Vole. Christine sees herself as a victim when Leonard abandons her at film’s end, and Dietrich expertly locates the ache at the core of Christine’s character in the final scene.
Since Laughton and Dietrich had showier roles than Power, his performance as the feckless, lazy, but adorable Leonard Vole was mostly overlooked in the reviews. Yet Jeanine Basinger quite rightly states in The Star Machine, “Perhaps the best performance Tyrone Power ever gave was in Billy Wilder’s 1957 Witness for the Prosecution, the one movie Power made in his postwar freelance period that really stands out today.” In the film, Power does not hesitate to use his celebrated sex appeal “to play a rotting seducer well on his way to full decay as a wicked old roué.”47
Witness for the Prosecution received six Academy Award nominations, including best director, actor (Charles Laughton), supporting actress (Elsa Lanchester), and editor (Daniel Mandell). Marlene Dietrich was not nominated as best actress. There are two possible explanations. The first theory is that, as Malene Sheppard Skaerved says, “Many suspected that the Cockney voice had been dubbed” by another actress. Though this was not true, the doubts kept her from being nominated.48
The other theory is that Wilder quietly spread the word around the studio that Dietrich should not be nominated because knowledge of her playing two roles had to be suppressed to keep from revealing the surprise ending to moviegoers who had not yet seen the film. Dietrich would not have been aware of Wilder’s alleged machinations because, by the time the Oscar nominations were in the works, she had been gone from Hollywood for several months.
Maximilian Schell, director of the feature-length documentary Marlene (1983), favored the second theory. He told Dietrich that Wilder had discouraged her nomination and asked her whether she resented not being nominated for an Academy Award for her performance. She responded that an Oscar no longer mattered: “Rubbish! Garbo never got one either.” Referring to honorary Oscars, she concluded, “They give you one on your deathbed; then you know you are dying.”49 Wilder, of course, vehemently denied sabotaging Dietrich’s chances for an Oscar. He had told her after the picture wrapped that she deserved an Oscar (not that she would receive one for this movie) and he let it go at that.50
Irene Atkins terms Witness for the Prosecution “a triumph for Christie, just as the play had been.”51 Asked if he thought the film should have been deemed a triumph for himself as well, Wilder responded, “Frankly, I have never been interested in what the critics say of my films. A good review means less to me than, for instance, a comment Agatha Christie made about Witness for the Prosecution.” Looking back, she called Witness the best film that had ever been derived from her mysteries.52 “That means a great deal more to me than anything a critic has ever said of one of my films.” Wilder noted.
Witness for the Prosecution has worn well. Released on DVD in 2001, it is a shining example of how a combination of expert remastering and intelligent packaging can invigorate a classic film. On June 17, 2008, the AFI broadcast a TV special in which the ten greatest films in ten genres were selected. Witness for the Prosecution was chosen as one of the top courtroom dramas of all time.
With the release of Witness for the Prosecution, Wilder had fulfilled his contract with Edward Small and was free to go to work for the Mirisch brothers again. He suggested to them that he make a comedy based on a 1932 German film. That in itself did not sound very promising to the Mirisches. Still, Love in the Afternoon had been derived from a 1931 German film, and that had turned out okay. So the Mirisches gave Wilder the go-ahead on a film that would turn out to be a milestone in his career.