Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2011 December 14 • Wednesday

In Witness to Murder Barbara Stanwyck looks out the window and sees her neighbor George Sanders murder a woman.

It came out the same year as Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Is that a coincidence?

It's been noted that the murderer's window in Rear Window looks like a movie screen. The murderer's window in Witness to Murder is like a theatre stage, with a curtain.

The murder scene begins with the dramatic parting of those curtains.

Unlike Barbara Stanwyck in Witness to Murder, James Stewart doesn't actually witness the murder in Rear Window. The plots of the two movies don't have much in common other than the window.

Witness to Murder is practically a remake of The Window (1949), which, like Rear Window, was based on a Cornell Woolrich story. (The Window was directed by Ted Tetzlaff, who was the director of photography for Hitchcock's Notorious.)

But Witness to Murder also reminded me of some Hitchcock movies that were yet to come, such as Vertigo.

North by Northwest also came to mind.

Vertigo also has a scene like that, near the beginning, and perhaps that's more like the scene in Witness to Murder since it also takes place in a city. James Stewart is hanging onto a gutter which is about to buckle. Stanwyck in this scene is perched on a precarious wooden platform that's about to tear itself loose from the wall.

Witness to Murder made me think of Psycho, too, and not just because George Sanders convinces the police that Barbara Stanwyck is crazy and gets her committed to an insane asylum. When Stanwyck gets doped up by her doctors, there's a whirlpool effect that reminded me of another whirlpool.

And like Jason Leigh in Psycho, Barbara Stanwyck in Witness to Murder is freaking out in her car and has to deal with the sudden appearance of a police car that pulls alongside her.