Hostile Witness (1968)
When Hollywood was shifting to a new mode of movie-making, Britain was apparently still able to make what you might call a routine, early 1960s styled film. And no wonder, with old school Ray Milland as both leading actor and director. It's a modern England, including some terrific Mod fashion on the women (and nice suits on the men, to be fair). But this is a relatively stiff affair, and for a 1968 film, rather old fashioned, pleasurable and unexceptional.
It's worth adding, quickly, that this is a dull film cinematically, too. It's widescreen of course (not a made for television movie) but it's lighted as if for t.v. (low contrast ratio) and the camera is functional, rarely or never an active presence, or even a creative one. This I blame on Milland as much as the cinematographer. It frankly kills even the best scenes, which are blasted with light in an unrealistic and dulling way. Sad. But if you know Milland, who can sometimes be interesting (if never exciting), it makes sense--he's a stiff, snotty type, at least on screen.
But he's not a bad actor, and if there is one consistent strength, in acting, it's actually the director. Which is fair enough. And there is the plot, which I think is supposed to sustain us, even if it's doled out painfully slowly. The curiosity is the sudden death of what might have seemed a potential main character, the beautiful (and well dressed) daughter of the leading man, high powered lawyer Simon Crawford (Milland). You get the sense in this film (more than his few others he directed) that he is aware of Hitchcock's later films (post-Psycho era). As a fellow Brit (Milland was Welsh), there was a commiseration, no doubt (same era, same sense of drama within a relatively false presentation). And as a crime film replete with ordinary folk overwhelmed by terrible facts.
But as a director, Milland is no Hitchcock, which they probably both realized in the rather terrific "Dial M for Murder" which was directed by one master and acted by the other (in one of his best performances). The plot, the strength of the movie, is laid out mostly through drawing room (or law office) conversations. It's slow going, if somewhat rigorous in logic. Milland's stiffness is better suited to the second half of the movie, where he is in the formality of the courtroom. In the end, this is a courtroom drama, with all its argument-based back and forth. The logic is stretched by the end however, with a showdown of shouting convictions and then a last minute surprise (the last ten seconds of the movie) and it's almost laughable.
There are so many better movies, I'd skip this one. To say it's solid on some old-fashioned level isn't really a defense. There's little here to lift it up, very little.
