Eight Witnesses

The movie is sold with the premise that a murder occurs in front of eight witnesses but all of them are blind, however this is not really a murder mystery rather its an espionage thriller, and a damn good one at that.

The plot of this Cold War movie is that a scientist with knowledge of a secret formula escapes to the West from a "Soviet" lab. He calls a British agent for a pick up but before that can happen he is spooked by two men waiting to use a pay phone and runs off. He flees to where his daughter works, a library for the blind, however before she can go off with him, he is killed in front of several blind witnesses. The film film then becomes a quest to catch the killer and to recover some papers that he was carrying.

This is not a real murder mystery. We know who the killer is from the outset, the real question is who will get the papers that have been hidden in the library. Its a tense little movie that is unremarkable in most ways except that it is highly entertaining. You really do wonder what is going to happen to are hero (the British agent) and heroine (the scientist's daughter). Will the romance, begun by the agent as a means of keeping tabs on the girl, survive the strain of the chase? You probably know the answers already, but you'll still watch this all the way to the end to find out because the little twists of plot and German scenery make this something above the normal run of the mill.

I really liked this movie. It took a shop worn tale and dressed it up nicely and made itself into a small little guilty pleasure.

Definitely worth looking for, especially on the budget priced DVD that was just released.

8 out of 10.

Charles Jacquemar has just gotten over the border from the East with some scientific papers that western intelligence wants to see. First he goes to see his daughter, Peggy Ann Garner. He thinks he is being pursued, and takes refuge in a reading room, where it turns out he is right; he is knifed in front of eight people.... all of whom are blind. When intelligence officer Dennis Price gets there, all that can be determined is the killer was a man who smoked cigars. The papers have disappeared. Can the good guys find them before the bad guys do?

The copy of this movie shot in Bavaria for television was a poor one, so any details of the camerawork were washed out, but the beginning was a good one, run largely silent, with palpable fear on Jacquemar's face. The story, doesn't have much call for elaboration beyond the beginning and the climax scene. The direction by Lawrence Huntington is not particularly interesting, but it gets the job done so efficiently that a three-minute epilogue had to be added to bring the run time up to an even hour.

There are some Hitchcock moments here that will stick in your mind. The murder sequence is a killer because of the long, meticulous foreplay that leads up to it, without you or the victim having the chance of getting any idea of the emergence of the murderer until it's too late. The victim is a sweet old man on the run with some state secrets, and of course he is concerned and slightly paranoid, being too well aware of the secrets he is carrying, while we never learn anything about it. Dennis Price, always elegant and eloquent, makes a good show together with Peggy Ann Garner, a librarian managing the hall of the blind readers, all reading braille. She is the daughter of the fugitive and is not involved in any way in her father's secrets, but gets harassed by his murderers anyway. It's a great thriller in a small format, but the high moments of psychological cinematography with astute sensitivity calls to mind not only Hitchcock but also Graham Greene.

The spy/mystery movie "Eight Witnesses" is not bad as light entertainment, but it is based on an interesting plot idea that is never fully developed. It ends up being a fairly fast-paced but rather routine feature that could have been better.

The story starts with the murder of a scientist carrying important information, with only a group of blind persons as potential witnesses. It's an interesting premise, but after one scene in which the witnesses are questioned, it moves on to more routine material.

What follows is nothing exceptional, but it does move pretty quickly, and it is not very long. Dennis Price and Peggy Ann Garner, as the two leads, work all right together. If you like mysteries or spy stories, "Eight Witnesses" probably has just enough to be worth a look.

A Fairly good start for this spy thriller but later part was rather unimaginative and felt like Routine lines.... Eight Blind witnesses should get more focus imo.... Not Bad film if you are a fan of Classic Crime films from British Cinema....