The Witness

Witness, The (1941)

** (out of 4)

Joe Doakes (Robert Benchley) is reading in the newspaper about a group of investigator who use their toughness to get people to talk and Joe explains that if he was ever in that position he'd fight back and teach them who's boss. Joe has a couple fantasies about fighting back against these people but soon enough he's really on the spot. In this Paramount short Benchley is pretty much playing a Walter Mitty type role and he's pretty good in it but it's just a shame that his screenplay wasn't a tad bit better. The film runs under 9-minutes so there's not too much story to speak of but what we do get are a couple fantasy sequences where Joe acts tough as nails but of course you know he's going to crack under pressure once the real thing comes. The problem is that the first portion of the film is pretty bland as his wife screams at him for carrying on conversations on his own. This here isn't funny. It's also not any funnier once we get to the fantasy scenes because the one-liners and come backs simply aren't that strong. Benchley's performance helps keep the film moving but there's just so much he can do and when the material isn't up to par then the jokes just don't work.

It's too bad that the great humorist Robert Benchley, who starred in a number of comic short films, never portrayed Walter Mitty on screen. He actually did portray Thurber's everyman with dreams of glory in a 1945 radio adaptation of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," but never in the movies. It feels like a missed opportunity because he'd have been perfect for the role, far more appropriate than Danny Kaye, who played Mitty in an ill-conceived musical version of the story.

In The Witness, however, Benchley comes pretty close to playing Mitty: here he's an average guy who fantasizes about being questioned by an investigative committee, vaguely political in nature and hostile in tone. In his daydream our hero triumphs over his persecutors with snappy comebacks, sarcasm, and wisecracks. The film is based on Benchley's magazine piece "Take the Witness" which has a courtroom setting, but in this adaptation the premise is adapted to then-current events, when various congressional committees were investigating war profiteering, political subversion, etc. (And it's fair to say that what was considered acceptable material for a comedy short in 1942 would not have been acceptable a few years later, during the era of Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare). With a cool, superior attitude, Benchley makes a fool of his interrogator. The punchline comes when, snapped out of his fantasy, he is confronted at his door by an unpleasant man taking a survey and finds himself at a loss, forcing his wife to deal with the guy.

This short takes an approach somewhat different from the original magazine piece. In the film Benchley's quips in the committee sequence aren't all that witty, yet the spectators laugh and murmur in approval, he's quite full of himself, and it all feels unreal, even dreamlike. For me that's what makes the premise work, because it's so true to life. In our fantasies, our jokes ARE funny, people laugh and applaud, we gain their approval easily and win the day. Then reality intrudes: the phone rings, we wake up, it's a telemarketer peddling something or taking a survey, and our fantasy of heroism is over. Benchley captures that experience nicely in this amusing short.

This Robert Benchley feature is both amusing and pointed. Benchley plays a role that is somewhat different from the lecturer or narrator roles that he so often assumed, but he does a good job. His character is the means for satirizing both the government and himself.

It starts with Benchley's Joe Doakes character reading the paper and getting wound up about the way that a government committee has been interrogating its witnesses. Doakes then fantasizes about appearing before the committee, and getting the best of them. It's clever in that it effectively deflates the kind of self-important government figures that plague almost every era, while at the same time more gently lampooning the kind of person whom Doakes represents, with his unlikely but entirely understandable fantasizing.

Benchley handles this kind of feature well, with his dry delivery and good timing. Just when it seems as if it is going to run out of steam, it closes with a good gag that is also very appropriate to the ideas behind the feature. The subject matter itself is also still relevant, and indeed would be so at almost any time.