Your Witness

The Film Noir Odyssey / The Joan Harrison Odyssey

Writer: Hugo Butler and Ian McLellan Hunter

Director: Robert Montgomery

Cast: Robert Montgomery, Leslie Banks, Felix Aylmer, Andrew Cruickank, Michael Ripper

Cinematography: Gerald Gibbs

Music: Malcolm Arnold

Studio: Warner Bros.

Release: March 6, 1950

As a film noir, “Your Witness” (also known as “Eye Witness”) fails the litmus test – but since its filmmakers include Joan Harrison and Robert Montgomery, we’re going to make an exception. As a mystery movie, you know the solution to the mystery the moment a key character introduces herself – and even if you didn’t, the poster spoils it.

That said, it’s still pretty fun.

Montgomery directs and stars (in his final film role before he segued into television) as a big-time US attorney named Adam, who one day receives word that a man named Sam who once saved his life during the war (Michael Ripper) is now on trial for murder in rural England. He flies overseas to try to help Sam beat the accusation… only to find that Sam did kill the man, but claims he did so in self-defense. The key to getting Sam released lies in a potential witness who was there the night of the shooting – a woman. But if she was the man’s lover, she may well want to see Sam hang for what he did.

The screenplay by Hugo Butler (“He Ran All the Way”) and Ian McClellan Hunter (“The Amazing Mr. X”) takes its time setting up the story. Like, one hell of a lot of time. In any other film, the set-up would take about 10-12 minutes. Here it takes 40 minutes. That’s not an exaggeration. And since we’ve already figured out the solution to the mystery simply by meeting an otherwise superfluous character who is introduced with importance, after that the viewer starts to play a waiting game for the characters to catch up.

And were this a different movie, I would honestly be really fucking annoyed at the pacing. And for the first fifteen minutes or so, I was. But once Adam arrives in England and starts to speak to the locals, I settled and realized that the film was much more interested in the fish-out-of-water aspects of the story and its characters than the mystery itself. It took me a minute to get on the filmmakers’ wavelength, but once there, it’s a much more enjoyable watch.

My favorite recurring bit that the screenwriters conjure is that, even though everyone in the film speaks English, the different accents of the characters make for a bunch of fun lost in translation moments. Once Adam arrives in the town, he tries to rent a room for a few weeks, and by the end both he and the innkeeper Are. Speaking. So. Slowly. And. Loudly. In. Order. To. Be. Understood. Then less than ten minutes later, Montgomery and his writers unleash a seven-minute scene (!!!) of Adam desperately trying to determine who he can speak to in order to see the crime scene while speaking to a lowly bobby at the station. After two minutes, I was crawling up the wall, but somewhere in minute three I started laughing, and by the end, I was completely in tears.

And that’s the strength of “Your Witness.” It’s a movie of moments. Of characters. Taken in that regard, it’s wonderful. But to approach it in any other storytelling manner and everything falls apart. Sam is the one who is going to be hung for murder, but he’s such an afterthought in his own story that you wouldn’t even remember what he looked like between scenes except that he is played by Michael Ripper. And in the investigation, there is only one moment of any genuine interest – when Adam suspects his lady friend Alex (Patricia Cutts) of being the witness, he takes her to look at the crime scene. Noting two doors, he puts on the guise of re-creating the murder and tells her to run into the bedroom – she tries, but goes into the wrong door, confirming to Adam that she isn’t the woman he’s looking for.

Montgomery is both a steady leader of the film in front and behind the camera. He lands all the punchlines he needs to and also knows the perfect moments to let his hardened demeanor crack. Plus he has a nice easy chemistry with Cutts – you can’t help but smile when he misses his plane to walk in the garden with her.

As a director, he and cinematographer Gerald Gibbs (“The Safecracker”) never do much of anything showy, instead content to let the lovely English countryside do the work for them. But a bunch of atmosphere and shadows would not have been right for the movie anyway – it would have made the tone dire and darker than the light screenplay can sustain.

“Your Witness” is inessential almost by design, but it’s nonetheless a good movie. The case matters to the story as much as it did back in “The Thin Man” series – you showed up because you loved Nick and Nora, not because whoever was murdered wherever.

Score: ***1/2