Billy Wilder Outguesses His Audience Through A Mastery Of His Characters In Classic Agatha Christie Courtroom Drama

DIRECTOR: BILLY WILDER

STREET DATE: FEBRUARY 6TH, 2024/ KINO LORBER STUDIO CLASSICS

Spoiler culture, painful though it is to call it that, has nevertheless held a strong influence on how movies are discussed and even experienced over the past twenty years or so. Possibly coinciding with the beginnings of internet discussion forums, and subsequently expanding exponentially across manifold social media platforms, the increasing sensitivity of viewers to plot elements and details from virtually all unseen films, even those movies not in current release, has reached such a tipping point that it has become unusually difficult to discern what level of pre-knowledge does or does not “ruin” a film, and when precisely, and in what context, important plot elements from any given film can or cannot be discussed.

Personally, one can’t help feeling it’s gone a bit overboard when a bare-bones description of the plot from a written review, say, necessitates a caps-locked, exclamation-pointed SPOILER ALERT! before mentioning a character’s name or the actor that plays them. But then, such over-concern may be symptomatic of a culture at large that has mostly forgotten that in art, as in life, it’s less about the destination than the journey; paraphrasing, I dunno, John Lennon, I think.

Which makes it all the more painful to admit that yes, there are powerful examples of story-driven films whose dramatic impact increases on a first viewing, and whose element of surprise is equally and artistically integrated alongside the withheld revelations of the story. Released a full two-and-a-half years before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) most famously exploited that fact in the very promotion of the film, refusing entrance to late arrivals and discouraging viewers from discussing the film with those who hadn’t yet seen it, Billy Wilder‘s 1957 film of Agatha Christie’s stage-play Witness for the Prosecution similarly capitalized on outguessing an audiences expectations in terms of both casting and through its singularly cunning construction of plot. No mere trick film however, Wilder and co-adaptor Harry Kurnitz add layers of complexity that hold up on several re-viewings, and even then complicates our perception of events long after they have occurred. Adding twists not present in Christie’s play, and depths of characterization that resonate well past the film’s final revelations, Witness for the Prosecution remains the high watermark for films whose discussion fully deserves a corresponding SPOILER! mark after its introductory paragraphs.

Broadly speaking, then, the film opens with distinguished barrister Sir Wilfred Robarts (Charles Laughton) returning to practice after a near-fatal heart attack, attended by a Nurse Plimsoll (Elsa Lanchester) upon being discharged from hospital for “conduct unbecoming to a cardiac patient”, the stern attendant tasked with preventing her patient from indulging his all-consuming vices of cigars, brandy, and criminal cases. One of the latter is immediately brought for his consideration by his solicitor colleague Mayhew (Henry Daniell) in the personage of one Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), who upon unburdening himself of his involvement with recently murdered, wealthy widow Emily Jane French (Norma Varden), and withstanding Sir Wilfred’s test of his monocle shined directly in his subject’s face – as the barrister poses probing questions about motivation and guilt – Vole is subsequently arrested for murder after motive is established by postmortem reports of Vole’s 80,000-pound inheritance from the late widow, even as Sir Wilfred confidently accepts Vole’s innocence of the charges.

A later interview with Vole’s wife Christine (Marlene Dietrich), a former actress and cabaret performer who escaped her native Germany after the war by marrying then British soldier Vole, leaves far more questions than the poised performer skillfully fails to answer, and Sir Wilfred’s defense in the lofty theatrical setting of the Old Bailey entirely depends on a convincing presentation of his client’s innocence, essentially enacted – or, more accurately, performed – in the highly dramatic style of criminal jurisprudence for which he is justly famed. But whether his judgment regarding the character of his client is ultimately true, and how this relates to certain revelations that perhaps too conveniently unfold in the course of the trial, may have more bearing on its outcome than Sir Wilfred, carefully arranging the pattern of nitroglycerin tablets taken during the emotional testimonies while raising repeated cries of “Objection!”, is prepared to admit to himself.

Wilder and Kurnitz’s additions including but not limited to Sir Wilfred’s drama-lingering heart condition, the exquisite comic character of Elsa Lanchester’s disapproving nurse – the latter point of casting strongly aiding and aided by the endearing real-life dynamic onscreen of Mr. and Mrs. Laughton – the fleshing out of the wartime backstory, and the significant visual motif of Sir Wilfred’s monocle spotlight, the melodramatic legal malarkey of Christie’s clockwork precision-plotting again gains both human dimension and probability as each character motivation is revealed and its corresponding psychological complexity unraveled. While further discussion of the story past the second act might be considered irresponsible, especially in this age of hypersensitivity to such plot revelations, and a deeper delving into Dietrich’s Christina’s surreptitious activities during the trial, or Power’s Leonard Vole’s convincing manner of gaining Sir Wilfred’s and the jury’s sympathy might appear similarly unnecessary, all the answers and solutions an audience might need are ingeniously present in the unfolding of the story before these questions are even posed.

For me, the most significant sequence providing psychological and dramatic justification of the film’s famous last ten minutes – here undescribed – is a closer viewing of the mentioned flashback to the circumstances of Leonard and Christina’s first meeting in the ruins of Berlin; with the former an opportunistic British occupying soldier and the latter a survival-minded prostitute/cabaret performer. A callback of sorts to Billy Wilder’s decade-earlier romantic comedy A Foreign Affair (1948), which actually had been shot on location in postwar Berlin, and which also co-starred Dietrich in a similar performing/performance role, the scene opens with Dietrich’s bare legs splashed across a nighttime poster adorning the bombed-out rubble of an underground cafe. Coolly watching his illegally-assembled British soldier colleagues converge on the stage to tear the pants off the fully-dressed but falsely-advertised musical performer, Power’s Leonard Vole casually places his drink on top of a sewer pipe running through the bowels of the subterranean club upon hearing the rumble of the MP’s trucks rolling up to raid the event and to close the venue. The suggestively-named Vole proceeds to saunter out onto the street as his drunken fellow soldiers are packed into the trucks – smoothing the “Out Of Bounds” sticker hastily plastered over the bare-legged performing bill as they motor away – and just as blithely walks down the steps, back into the basement and, without even looking, retrieves his drink, before moseying on over to the clothes-ripped Christina crouched hands and knees in the stage-muck searching for her accordion. (Which Vole promptly finds by stepping on it in a crushed musical discord.)

With that last classic Wilder touch of comic misdirection, I would submit, ladies and gentlemen, that if Charles Laughton’s monocle-wearing, heart-addled barrister had been listening carefully to the less savory details of this character-foundational story and its subsequent instant coffee-for-sex transaction in Christina’s collapsing side-stage bedroom – particularly that detail about the sewer pipe – Sir Wilfred Robarts might have saved the British public significant time, expense, and drama. “Too symmetrical!”, he later – too late, as it turns out – laments, but one can hardly fault a flawlessly constructed plot for so successfully and snaring even this most clever of characters.

And of course us! Kino Lorber’s re-issue of their previously bare-bones Blu-ray release of Witness for the Prosecution from 2014 allows viewers a further chance to ponder the complexity of its characters and the limitations of their individual perception; which basically boils down to Sir Wilfred believing the dishonest but charming Leonard Vole, and disbelieving the bigamous but ultimately truthful Christina Vole née Helm. (But one must caution, Sir Wilfrid’s final monocle spotlight has yet to shine!) In addition to the fancy slipcover and gallery of trailers for Wilder films also available from Kino Lorber, this 2024 reissue includes footage from director Volker Schlöndorff’s circa 1970s interview with Billy Wilder, where Wilder discusses some of the specific changes he made in adapting the Agatha Christie play. More importantly, though, the re-issue also includes a new feature-length commentary from Joseph McBride, author of the 2021 critical biography Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge.

McBride’s commentary is very much like a semester’s worth of material on Wilder’s life, art, and technique as brought to bear on this specific film, conversationally yet comprehensively compressed to the film’s running time of 116 minutes. McBride provides a compelling reading of the film connected to Wilder’s life-and-career-breadth, thematic concerns, including an honest and sympathetic portrayal of female and male prostitution, a jaded journalist’s eye for truth-at-all-costs, and an approach to character traits and psychological motivation that dictate the direction of the story, as opposed to plot dictating character. In view of Wilder subsequently entering the most fertile period of his career with original scripts co-written with I.A.L. Diamond, including Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960), McBride makes a strong case for Wilder’s sly, incisive touch on this adaptation, the “flawed investigator” character as enacted – and significantly, as in-character performed – by the always charismatic Charles Laughton, linking this story and its all-too-human inquisitor not only with Edward G. Robinson’s claims adjuster Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity (1944), but also much later with the world’s most famous fictional detective in Wilder’s perennially overlooked The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970).

“Nobody’s perfect”, Wilder seems to be saying, in a surprisingly personal vein in the film before he actually said it, the unfolding of its clever plot, coeval to the revelations of its compelling characters, inextricably linked to complexities that linger in the viewing mind well past the last spoiler being revealed.

Images used in this review are credited to DVDBeaver and are taken directly from Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release of Witness for the Prosecution (1957).