The Witness for the
Prosecution
Director:
Year: 2016
Rating: 7.0
This is another of BBC's recent adaptations of one of Agatha Christie's most
famous works. The script is by Sarah Phelps who was also behind The ABC Murders,
Ordeal by Innocence and the in-production The Pale Horse. She definitely
takes well-worn stories and gives them a new mood that I have found very
interesting. This was originally a short story by Christie published in 1925
and then some three decades later Christie took it and made it into a successful
play that ran in London and then Broadway. In 1957 Billy Wilder directed
a very star-studded glamorous version of it with Charles Laughton, Marlene
Dietrich, Tyrone Power and Elsa Lancaster that was a huge hit.
The plot of this one follows along the same lines and yet is a very different
film in many ways. It is much gloomier and seedier as a large part of it
plays in cheap lodgings, a broken down music hall, dark alleyways, dreadful
prison surroundings and a solemn mood in which everyone feels badly damaged
from WWI. That feeling permeates through the film from the beginning as two
of the main characters meet in a trench during a bombardment. In the 1957
version Laughton plays a high class lawyer near the end of a great career
who takes on this case because he is convinced that his client is innocent.
In this one the lawyer played by Toby Jones is a nobody living in a shoddy
apartment with a wife who disdains him and a barely lit office under a street
grate. He was in WWI and was gassed and coughs throughout. It is shot often
in dim light using green and grays to give everything a melancholy look.
And the plot of this one goes well-beyond the big reveal of the first film
in time and with an entirely different ending that surprises and depresses.
I don't know which is closer to the play or the short story - the movie code
may have played a part in how the 1957 version ends but not with this one.
I see that Ben Affleck is planning to make yet another version of this in
the near future.