Key Witness

A short flick lasting 66' with a largely unknown cast, this shoestring production actually had me riveted throughout thanks to an imaginative script, sharp dialogue, an unassuming leading male character (no frills from John Beal, apart from the apparently useless gadgets he keeps inventing), his disappointed and downputting wife in a surprisingly cynical role by Barbara Read and Charles Trowbridge in a short but effective part as the father of the dead character Beal gets to impersonate.

Better cinematography than this type of C production tended to have.

I thoroughly enjoyed it!

John Beal stars in "Key Witness" from 1947. He plays a somewhat henpecked draughtsman, Milton Higby, who is not ambitious enough for his wife. His real aspiration is to be a novelty inventor.

While his wife is out of town, he has incredible beginner's luck at the race track and wins a fortune.

Unfortunately, he has to go on the run when a woman he meets is murdered. He becomes a hobo.

When he and his friend Smiley find a dead body on the railroad tracks, Higby switches identities with him.

This leads to some good things- he is accepted as the long lost son of the hobo's father and is able to pursue his inventions. Then they're recognized as Milton Higby's.

I met the lead in this film, John Beal, some years ago. A very nice man. When I see he's in a film, I watch it. His Broadway career began in 1931 and ended in 1993, his film career was from 1935-1993.

This B movie is actually pretty good and holds interest, in part I think because the Beal character is so sympathetic. Very satisfying film.

John Beal is a hardworking office worker. He's supervised by petty tyrant Harry Hayden, and things are no better at home, where his wife, Barbara Read, berates him for not getting ahead. Then one day, while Miss Read is out of town, Beal's pl drags him to the horse races, where Beal hits the daily double on a couple of long shots. He tells Hayden off, and is spending some of the money on a good time when the girl he is with has her ex-husband come in and shoot her dead. Terrified by the thought of being found guilty of murder, Beal becomes a hobo for several years. Then one day he winds up in the hospital, where he is mistaken for a rich industrialist's son, who the man has not seen since he was two.

Although this might have made a nice two-reel movie, or perhaps an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock show, it goes on way too long, with Beal being an inert lump who absorbs good and bad luck like a bean bag. At a shorter length, it might have some sardonic wit. But at 67 minutes, you have time to despise every character in it.

Fortunately for Beal, he was another of those actors who didn't need the silver screen. He lived for another fifty years and prospered, on stage and big and little screens, dying in 1997 at the age of 87.

Key Witness is a B movie with B actors, but gets A directing. And the screenplay is so outrageously unlikely that it was highly entertaining for me. It would make a wonderful midnight movie. I would go as Smiley.

The mechanical objects depicted in the film are clever and an integral part of the film. The movie is a bit reminiscent of the hobo classic, Sullivan's Travels, that wonderful 1941 film starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. Quite frankly, I thought that film was better than the Oscar winner that year, How Green Was My Valley.

This film breezes by in just over an hour, and you kind of wish it would have lasted longer. Lots of fun.

So this lead character is a nice enough guy, pleasant, hard worker, faithful and loving husband, and creative. While at the same time he is also a scared, ineffectual dolt of a guy. The bad decisions that he repeatedly makes throughout this film is only surpassed by the absurdity of unlikely events that follow those poor decisions. It really takes a suspension of logic and believability to stay committed and fully onboard as the story progresses. That's too bad though because like I said it does have any easy, pleasant quality to it, and most of the performances are solid enough to hold the viewer's interest. It's just the unlikeliness of the chain of events to this story that honestly can make it frustrating at times.