Witness to Murder (1954)

Directed by Roy Rowland; produced by Chester Erskine

Cheryl Draper (Barbara Stanwyck) is a career-woman living a contented life in Los Angeles. One night, looking out her bedroom window, she sees, across the street in another apartment window, a man strangling a woman. An immediate call to the police brings no justice, however, as the killer, Albert Richter (George Sanders), observing them arrive, assumes rightly that they have come because of his actions. He hides his victim’s body and improvises a plausible story, leading to Cheryl’s story being discounted as a nightmare. Then begins a deadly cat-and-mouse game between witness and murderer, one seeking to prove the truth, and the other trying to conceal it.

Witness to Murder was released the same year as a much more famous movie with a similar premise, Rear Window. Unfortunately for the subject of this review, the former suffers both in comparison and on its own merits.

Stanwyck was of course an excellent actress, and several of her movies are classics, due in large part to her inclusion. By the 1950s, however, the better roles seemed few, perhaps because she was no longer considered leading material for the superior scripts. Witness to Murder is an example of the lesser entries on her resumé.

The principal problem is the screenplay. The premise of the ignored witness in a crime-drama depends to a great extent on the reaction of others to the witness’s claim. In The Window (reviewed on this blog in November of 2020), a boy’s assertion that he saw a murder comes amid the many incredible tales he tells; he is thus disbelieved. Rear Window takes another path: the wheelchair-bound voyeur is indeed believed by his friends, who help him investigate when the police do not. The detective in that movie does not entirely dismiss the claims.

In Witness to Murder, the detective (Gary Merrill) annoyingly insists that Cheryl dreamed the episode, and accept Richter’s version of events over the woman’s. Certainly Richter is smart: when frantically attempting to hide the corpse, he initially considers and silently rejects a broom-closet down the corridor from his flat; viewers assume that he thinks the police will look there. They don’t, which signals that the killer is smarter than the police. Indeed, he is one step ahead of them through most of the movie.

Further, the murderer, who has things his own way through the story, does something needless at one point; one can guess that he did it only because the writers could not think of a way of implicating him at last.

The writing is lacking in other ways. For one, the character of Albert Richter is more interesting than that of either Cheryl Draper or the police lieutenant; the last two begin a romance that feels perfunctory and unnecessary, and Cheryl is repeatedly referred to as a ‘girl’ – Stanwyck was 47 at the time.

The direction is adequate but no more. It gives the impression of an early television drama, rather than a cinematic release, and there is very little tension created; what tension exists seems to come from Sanders’s acting more than anything else. Stanwyck’s performance, despite the history of her talent, comes across as melodramatic.

A minor entry in the thriller genre, Witness to Murder is surpassed by other films with similar plots, and will likely leave viewers unsatisfied.