Eight Witnesses

"Eight Witnesses" is a film in the public domain and after seeing how dull and cheap it was, I think I can understand why no one bothered to renew the copyright on this one! The film is a Cold War thriller about spies and communism (though oddly communism or the Soviets are NEVER mentioned). This stuff sure should have been tense and exciting...but it wasn't.

When the film begins, Dr. Ernst Hildebrandt has escaped from this captors behind the Iron Curtain. However, oddly, he hasn't yet turned up in the West. Eventually he does show--but only briefly to his daughter. Then, he quickly disappears and his body is found in a library. However, the witnesses to his murder are an odd lot--they are all blind. Using these witnesses, his strange daughter and intuition, an agent tries to piece events together. After all, the professor was supposed to be carrying important documents on him and they were not found on the body. And, the killers are apparently still looking for them. Eventually, the papers are recovered...but by then, you really don't care!

As I said, the film is very low energy (the actors NEVER seem emotional or real), dull, has uninteresting characters and has a musical score that is cheap and doesn't fit the movie. In fact, I'd swear it's recycled as often it his inappropriate crescendos and seemed a bit random and over-done. Additionally, Peggy Ann Gardner was a poor choice to play the daughter, as she was supposedly from the same country as her father had an American accent--yet his was very pronounced and sounded like he was from central Europe. How could you possibly make a spy movie involving a murder THIS dull?!

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.

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.

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....