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Sir Wilfrid Robarts (played by Charles Laughton) is renown as one of the greatest barristers in England, but his failing health has placed him at the mercy of doctors, and in the clutches of an overbearing nurse (Elsa Lancaster) . However, when he is introduced to Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), an innocent man on his diagram to the gallows, Sir Wilfrid decides to risk his health and consume his jurisprudential skills to establish Vole. A wrinkle in the case is Vole’s surprisingly harsh wife (Marlene Dietrich), but fortunately a wife can never be stale as a scrutinize for the prosecution. [Black-and-white, released in 1957, with a running time of 1:56.]

Buy,Download, Or Stream Witness For the Prosecution! Click Here

This movie is based on Agatha Christie’s shortstory of the same title, which was first published in the 1933 book The Hound of Death and Other Stories, and is nothing short of a triumph! The three main actors of the movie (Laughton, Power and Dietrich) set on a unbelievable performance, making this movie tantalizing from commence to conclude. Plus, as a fan of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey books, I must say that I liked the setting. (I do gain that any Rumpole fan will also esteem this movie.)

So, if you are involved in courtroom drama, classic movies and broad acting, and want a movie that is all three, then you must come by this DVD!

Although this film is filled with a bevy of marvelous actors and actresses, and although he did play the allotment of Gracchus in SPARTACUS a couple of years later, and an pleasant supporting role in Negate AND CONSENT a couple of years after that, this is the last truly spacious performance in the career of perhaps the greatest character actor film has seen. Charles Laughton was in no sense a leading man: obsese, unattractive, unathletic, awkward. He nonetheless managed to keep together an unbelievable career. Contemplate FOR THE PROSECUTION was released in 1957, but until that moment, the 1950s had not been kind to Laughton, whose greatest success came in the 1930s and 1940s. He had directed the mighty THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER in 1955, but his acting parts in the decade, apart from David Lean’s HOBSON’S CHOICE, were for the most fragment undistinguished and not among the finest of his career. Eye FOR THE PROSECUTION is Laughton’s stunning return and, because of declining health, last ample role. If Inspect FOR THE PROSECUTION had nothing else to recommend it, Laughton’s performance would design it well, well worth seeing.

Luckily, this film has far more than Laughton to recommend it. Ironically, it was also the last gargantuan role for Tyrone Power, for whom Perceive was also a allotment of a comeback (he also excelled in THE SUN ALSO RISES) . I have to say, for anyone who had seen Power in films in the 1940s, his physical appearance in 1957 is grisly. Remarkable like Errol Flynn, he had lived a hard life, and it shows. He would die of a heartattack a year after this performance, and looks worthy older than 43 years used. Nonetheless, the great thing about Power is that while not a particularly vast actor during the heyday of his career, when he looks carried him from role to role, advance the ruin of his life he grew considerably as an actor. Ogle FOR THE PROSECUTION is one of his better performances, by far. Unlike Laughton and Power, both aging and in dreadful health, but similar to both in that the 1950s had up to that point not been one of her most active decades, Marlene Dietrich appears barely to have former since the 1930s. The kinds of parts she was best genuine for were far too subversive for the staid 1950s. Her natural cynicism and sexuality were far too threatening at that time even for the darkest of film noir. So, Explore FOR THE PROSECUTION was something of a comeback (or the continuation of a comeback in the case of Power) for the three principles. The cast was rounded out by some stellar characters actors, including the always astonishing Una O’Connor, the frequently villanous Henry Daniell (though not in this one), and John Williams (who had played Audrey Hepburn’s chaffeur father in Wilder’s SABRINA, playing Laughton’s law partner in this one) .

Buy,Download, Or Stream Witness For the Prosecution! Click Here

Unlike the three leads, Billy Wilder was not suffering from any kind of lull in his career when he made this film. He had, first as a screenwriter and then as a director, been marching from triumph to triumph for the previous twenty years, and would continue to do so for another ten years. The movie was untypical Wilder, however. Along with Preston Sturges, Wilder is arguably the greatest writer of comedy scripts in the history of film (he had cowriters, but their critical function was to legal his Germanicisms, to polish his rough English; Wilder supplied the ideas and action) . In Inspect FOR THE PROSECUTION, however, although adapting an Agatha Christie novel, and adding a immense number of Wilderian touches, he largely is working from someone else’s work. Wilder virtually always wrote completely current stories.

A lot of people appreciate the site of this one, and especially the twists, but I have to say that I glean this somewhat artificial, and some of the least bright parts of the film. What I do delight in is the interplay between the various characters, the chemistry between the actors and actresses, the dozens of microscopic touches and transitions that Wilder makes while working within the limitations of someone else’s yarn.

But most of all, this film is mammoth because Charles Laughton was able to get one last, gigantic role before his career came to an slay.
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