Three Witnesses

THREE WITNESSES is a rather ordinary murder mystery to come out of Britain. The action is centred in and around a law firm which is riven by rivalry and conflict between two brothers with very different ideas and their scheming manager. When a man is found shot dead at the bottom of a staircase, a friendly solicitor decides to investigate in a bid to discover the identity of the murderer.

This film is a little confusing due to the casting, namely the presence of popular actors of the day Henry Kendall (THE GHOST CAMERA) and Sebastian Shaw (RETURN OF THE JEDI) who look almost exactly the same as each other. There are a lot of back and forth moments where it takes the viewer a moment to work out which character is on the screen, but neither actor has a very distinguished part to play. Kendall's protagonist is quite ordinary and average while Shaw never quite gets to grips with the accused character he portrays.

As for the murder mystery elements, they're rather obviously done and the identity of the murder is easy to guess about halfway through the proceedings. There's a good pace to keep things moving along and a little comic relief here and there but THREE WITNESSES is very much an average film of its type.

Someone gets murdered but it's very nonchalantly handled in this slick but talky and meandering Twickenham Studios potboiler complicated - as Leofwine_draca has already pointed out - by Henry Kendall and Sebastian Shaw looking more like each other than Shaw and the actor supposedly playing his brother. (Kendall had just played a double role in 'Death on the Set' and they could have saved the trouble of trick photography by simply casting these two.)

Fortunately, figuring out who was behind it all is simple for anyone familiar with George Formby's films of a few years later...

Garry Marsh offers to buy siblings Sebastian Shaw, Noel Dryden, and Eve Gray out of their shares, offering a generous bonus to the assessed value. Dryden needs the money; Miss Gray is indifferent; but Shaw is adamant about holding on, and without his agreement, the sale can't take place. The brothers quarrel. Marsh urges them to calm down, go have lunch, and they'll talk about it Monday. They leave, and Shaw goes to have lunch with his girl friend. The janitor rushes in to tell Marsh that Dryden is dead, and the police come to arrest Shaw. Can solicitor Henry Kendall prove his client's innocence with the aid of his idiot clerk, Richard Cooper?

It's a very talky quota quickie from Julius Hagen's factory, but under the direction of Leslie Hiscott, it moves at a good clip, thanks to Kendall talking a mile a minute. There are some nice red herrings, but the essence of the mystery is there's no one with a motive for shooting Dryden, which kept me puzzled until the revelation. The result is a pretty good mystery in a mediocre movie. Still, it's more than worth it to see Geraldine Fitzgerald in a very early role.