Reeling Backward: "Witness for the Prosecution" (1957)

Charles Laughton is today's Morgan Freeman. He was good in supporting roles or leads, as comic relief or deadly serious, and he made every movie he was in better. I've enjoyed catching up with some of his roles while writing this column for more than five years (!), and "Witness for the Prosecution" features one of his most delicious performances.

First, a word about film credits. Tyrone Power was the top-billed actor and the face on most of the posters, with Marlene Dietrich a close second. Both give nice turns in "Witness," but it's clear from watching even five minutes of the movie that they're the supporting characters. The story is focused entirely through Laughton, playing ailing British barrister Sir Wilfrid Robarts, defending an acccused murderer in the trial of his long and storied career.

Power plays Leonard Vole, the accused, a seemingly hapless fellow and natural charmer with the ladies. It turns out (spoilers ahead) that he actually did commit the murder he's accused of, and relied on the skilled thespian powers of his German war wife, Christine (Dietrich), to construct an elaborate ruse to get him off. It was deliberately playing against type for Power, who was known mostly for heroic swashbuckling roles such as Zorro.

"Witness" was also his final film -- Power succumbed to a sudden heart attack at the tender of age 45, literally with a sword in his hand while filming his next big production.

Dietrich, still a stunner at age 57, continued to perform for many more years, including a live stage show in which she flaunted a "nearly nude" sheer dress in her 70s. She was also laid low during a performance, falling off the stage during a show in Australia and suffering a seriously broken leg. She endured until age 90, alcoholic and largely bedridden.

So why was Laughton, certainly no small fry as a movie star himself, relegated to third billing despite carrying the entire movie? Who really knows, as showbiz has rarely made a lot of sense. Maybe the advertising boys preferred the winsome couple over the famously frog-faced Laughton.

Laughton certainly garnered all the meaningful attention, earning an Academy Award nomination (the third of his esteemed career) as well as a BAFTA nod. The film also got Oscar noms for best picture, best director (Billy Wilder), editing and sound recording. Neither Power or Dietrich were recognized, though strangely Elsa Lanchester was for her comic relief role as Robarts' nagging nurse.

Based on a short story (later turned into a play) by Agatha Christie, "Witness for the Prosecution" wears the clothes of a whodunit while existing more as a character study of its leading trio. Wilder and Harry Kurnitz adapted the story for the screen, and while the last few minutes are deliberately shocking, the actors carry the narrative rather than the other way around.

Probably three-quarters of the picture takes place inside a courtroom, in the British version of the familiar courtroom drama genre. It's much more stuffy and genteel than American courtroom films, which tend to have a lot of big emotions and sweaty stand-offs.

Christine was thought by Robarts to provide the key alibi for her husband, who dilly-dallied with an older heiress in hopes that she would loan him money to develop his eggbeater invention. She turned up with her head bashed in, and the woman's crotchety maid points the crooked finger of blame at Vole. Things aren't helped when it's revealed that the victim changed her will to make him the beneficiary of an £80,000 inheritance -- about $2 million in today's dollars.

Robarts is vexed when Christine is instead called as a witness for the prosecution, and proceeds to throw Leonard under the bus, saying he came home with blood on his sleeves and at 10:10 p.m., not the 9:26 p.m. he swore to. But then Robarts receives some letters from a mystery woman that claim the whole thing was a plot to get rid of the husband she'd grown tired of.

I won't reveal the very end, but suffice it to say that the brilliant barrister finds out that he's had the wool pulled over his eyes.

Robarts has just returned from a long convalescence, with a strict nurse in tow and instructions not to try any more criminal cases. Of course, he gives in to the temptation of a juicy murder case -- along with cigars and brandy snuck into his thermos full of cocoa.

Blowsy, charismatic and indulgent, Robarts can't leave behind the life of outfoxing his opponents he's grown to love so much. There's even a funny little trick he does of using his monocle to shine a reflected light in a person's face to find out if they're lying. Turns out it isn't so reliable, as Vole passed with flying colors.

"Witness for the Prosecution" is good old-fashioned filmmaking -- a thriller-cum-drama where all the real action is confined to the courtroom. It's there Robarts, and Laughton, ply their considerable skills with reptilian panache.

Reeling Backward: "The Desert Rats" (1953)

"The Desert Rats" is a quasi/sorta sequel to "The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommell" with James Mason reprising his role as the famed German military tactician. I didn't care for the first film, as described in a previous column, but the follow-up is quite a ripping good war picture, as the old-timers are wont to say. (They are also wont to use antediluvian terms, like "wont" and "antediluvian.")

Instead of being a sympathetic, heroic figure, this time Rommel has a supporting role as the arrogant German commander, speaking mostly German and inspiring terror in all those around him. The focus, rather, is on the Australian troops who defied him during the long siege of Tobruk, a turning point in the World War II African front.

The film was directed by Robert Wise, one of Hollywood's most successful genre-hopping directors, and it was just Richard Burton's second American film, released when he was age 27. Burton was one of those actors who always seemed older than he really was -- when I first started watching the film I thought it was made in the mid-1960s, when in fact it came out in '53.

It's not that he appeared prematurely aged, despite his life of hard drinking and smoking; rather, his manly bearing and clipped line readings tended to make him seem more authoritarian and older.

Burton and Mason share one great scene together, where both men are wounded and being treated in a German medical tent, after Burton's character has been captured. Both actors taunt and sneer at each other, a mano-a-mano combat of words by two bloodied but proud men. It's also practically a contest to see which thespian can display better diction.

As far as historic fidelity goes, "The Desert Rats" is a total wipeout. Start out with the fact that the title got its nickname from an entirely different British outfit. In the film the Australian 9th Division holds the seaside base of Tobruk against Rommel for over eight months, allowing time for a newly-formed Allied army to forum up in Egypt and head west to oppose him. The real Aussies began referring to themselves as "the rats of Tobruk" in defiance of German propaganda that labeled them so.

Virtually everything that is depicted, from the personnel to the military tactics, was a fabrication by screenwriter Richard Murphy. The key sequence in which the British commanders allow Rommel's Panzers to penetrate their outer defenses as a trap is a concoction, as is the daring commando raid undertaken to blow up a German ammunition dump. And in actuality, the Australians were withdrawn after five months and the latter portion of the defense held by British troops.

In the best Hollywood tradition, Murphy, having taken a real, dramatic event and made up virtually everything about it for his script, was rewarded with an Oscar nomination.

And he deserved it. "The Desert Rats" is a war adventure, not a historical drama, and its allegiance is to its own semblance of truth, not a factual one.

Burton plays "Tammy" MacRoberts, aka Mac, a British infantryman captain who's given lead of an Australian outfit when their commander buys it. Over the course of the long siege, he is promoted to major and then a field promotion to lieutenant colonel, and placed in charge of several battalions.

The Aussies are naturally distrustful of having a British officer command them, and the resentment grows to near-mutiny level when Mac orders the Australian lieutenant (Charles Tingwell) court-martialed for leaving his post during a barrage to rescue a fellow officer. After getting a talking-to by both an Australian confidante and the British general, he agrees to withdraw the charges.

Eventually, Mac garners the respect of his troops and does them proud. His main access point in this endeavor is Tom Bartlett (Robert Newton), a middle-aged private who turns out to be an old schoolmaster of Mac's. He is deferential to his old teacher, repeatedly referring to him as "sir" despite their wide distance in rank and showing favoritism toward Bartlett in terms of cushy assignments.

Bartlett is an interesting character to have dropped into the middle of a film like this, and despite a fine performance by Newton -- best remembered for playing Long John Silver in Disney's Treasure Island" -- the character never really quite fits in. A self-confessed drunk, failure and coward, Bartlett moved to Australia to start a new life and enlisted while intoxicated when war broke out.

Near the end Bartlett volunteers for the most dangerous assignment there is, manning the forward sentry post where soldiers last about four hours before being killed. In movies of this sort, it's virtually a requirement that a character such as his die a noble death, but here Bartlett survives and is cheered by his fellow soldiers, becoming the unofficial mascot of their defiance.

As a footnote, I'd like to point out that "Rats" is one of those testosterone-laden movies in which no women have speaking roles, or are even seen. At one point we see a photograph of Mac's wife, as he comments that he's only seen her for a week since they got married in 1939 (the events take place in '41) and he's never met his son.

Wise and Murphy keep the action focused on the men and the military strategy, rather than making the mistake so many war pictures do of bringing in a bunch of mushy romance and secondary plots to distract us. At a crisp 86 minutes, "The Desert Rats" is all business.