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.