Touches You

Too much of everything

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Late one evening a restless Cheryl Draper (Barbara Stanwyck) witnesses a murder in the apartment building across from her. She calls the police but suspect and author Albert Richter (George Sanders) covers his tracks quickly to cast doubt on Draper's story. After he gets the body out of his apartment he goes on the offensive to frame Draper and he succeeds in having her briefly committed.Released earlier in the same year as Hitchcock's masterpiece Rear Window, Witness to Murder's two stellar lead players are given a rather far fetched at times script to work with as gaping holes in the plot and a villain with a brazen confidence that has the local law unwittingly colluding with him and browbeating and stepping all over Draper's rights rings false in more than one scene. No shrinking violet herself Draper in turn stomps on over to Richter's place to confront him and make herself an easier target. Stanwyck provides some stale and strident Sorry Wrong Number hysteria along with a brief bit of Snake Pit horror while Sander's iniquitous Richter with sadistic inflection and multi lingual talent fare much better. Gary Merrill tepidly underplays the role of detective and romantic interest while Maytag repairman Jesse White as his partner has the film's best line mocking and humming the Dragnet theme and if I may quote Sgt. Friday regarding this film I would say "Nothing here to see folks, move on".

The movie shows what a cast and crew of Hollywood veterans could do even as the B-movie was on its last legs. Sure, the material is derivative. For some reason these windowpane murders were popular plot lines at the time, especially with Rear Window (1954). Maybe that's because there's so much built-in suspense to proving that you're not just imagining or dreaming what you think you see. This movie manages the suspense in spades, thanks to journeyman director Rowland, cinematographer Alton, and a near-perfect cast that make it all seem so real.Pity poor Stanwyck! She spies super slick neighbor Sanders throttling a girl, but can't convince the cops since Sanders is ever one step ahead. Meanwhile, Sanders is at his coldly calculating and charming best, while Stanwick wobbles expressively as a woman in distress. Toss in Gary Merrill as a romantically inclined cop, and together they manage to breathe real life into familiar material.Hard to say enough about Alton's expressive photography. Some of those b&w compositions are darn near artistic; at the same time, they lend the dramatics a properly noirish atmosphere. No, there's nothing really new here, but it's so darn well done, you'll hardly notice. I'm just sorry that these intense little human dramas have been replaced on screen by special effects extravaganzas that entertain mainly 12-year olds.

I prefer the more mature Barbara Stanwyck...like the one you see in this film. And, there's a fairly strong "second tier" supporting cast, including Gary Merrill, an underrated actor. And the great George Sanders.Stanwyck's character witnesses a murder through her bedroom window -- a la "Rear Window", reports it to the police, but there is no evidence to back up her story. The murderer -- George Sanders. One of the police officers that investigated the murder report is Gary Merrill, who then begins dating Stanwyck. What's scary is how easily Stanwyck was placed in the mental ward when she appears to be trying to frame Sanders, who is an ex-Nazi.I'm not particularly a fan of crime dramas, but this one is well done (despite some goofs, as outlined on this site). UNTIL the climax of the film. Then, while running away from Sanders. who is going to murder her, by making it look as if she committed suicide by jumping out of her bedroom window, Stanwyck decides to flee him by climbing up the stairs inside a sky scraper that is under construction. Really? You'd try to escape a murderer by running into a dead end??? And then, were that not enough, Stanwyck falls off the top of the skyscraper...onto a temporary wooden ledge, which then begins to splinter...and she is rescued by Gary Merrill who grabs her from above, just in the nick of time. Were it not for the ending of the film, I would give it a "7", but this is so dumb an ending that I'm dropping it to a "5". Oh, and while this is a minor matter, keep an eye on the back of Gary Merrill's neck (just behind and below the year) and see how from scene to scene he is rather shaggy (a real wolf man) or clean shaven. Yawn.

WITNESS TO MURDER is one of the great unsung noir gems from the 1950s. Sharply directed by Roy Rowland and brilliantly photographed by John Alton, it is criminal that this terrific film has yet to see a DVD release.Barbara Stanwyck stars as a woman who inadvertently witnesses a murder one night when, awakened by a thunderclap, goes to her window and sees her neighbor in an apartment across the street (George Sanders) strangle a woman to death. Shaken but collected, she phones the police who respond to the call but are unable to detect anything out of the ordinary when they arrive to question Sanders. The detectives (Gary Merrill and Jesse White) leave Sanders' apartment convinced that Stanwyck imagined the killing. Determined to prove the cops wrong, she begins to relentlessly hound Sanders who, it turns out, is a former Nazi and author of books promoting the ideology of the Third Reich. Sanders, a cunning adversary, initiates a retaliatory strike against Stanwyck which, before long lands her in a mental asylum. But will she be able to convince Detective Gary Merrill (who by now has fallen in love with her) that her assertions are, after all, true?Darkly suspenseful, albeit preposterously improbable, WITNESS TO MURDER follows a similar thread as REAR WINDOW, released the very same year. The most significant difference being in the Hitchcock film James Stewart is a consciously willing voyeur, drawn into a secret world of spying brought on by his own inertia; Stanwyck succumbs to the ramifications of her voyeurism purely by an accident of nature, the victim of circumstances far beyond her control, placing it much more squarely in the domain of film noir than its better known counterpart. Highly recommended!