A Film Canon

Witness For The Prosecution identifies the criminal courtroom as a space whose inherent staginess opens up a potential dialectic between theatrical and cinematic language; that is, between the ritualistic insularity embodied by Charles Laughton's blustery, burlesque portrayal of defending attorney Sir Wilfrid Robarts, and the manipulative foreign presence embodied by Marlene Dietrich's portrayal of client Leonard Vole's (Tyrone Power) wife, Christine - or, rather her performance of her own star image, as evinced a flashback that places their first meeting in a barely concealed version of 'The Blue Angel'. Not only is this thinly veiled xenophobia subsumed into a more general anxiety about the dissolution of the traditional nuclear marriage, as evinced in the narrative preoccupation with the juridical relationship between husband and wife, as well as the status of annulled and undisclosed marriages, but it provides a dialectic between the theatrical twist, which turns on sudden, dramatic revelations, akin to the instantaneous removal of a mask ("It's a little too neat, too tidy, and altogether too symmetrical"), and the cinematic twist, which forces the viewer to confront their subliminal spectatorship, what they have glimpsed without realising it - a dialectic that is all the more eloquent in that the final twist turns on the transformation from the first mode to the second, offsetting Agatha Christie's slightly contrived set-up with the implication that her story and play needed filmic adaptation to make their full paranoia felt.