WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION

(1957) Just finished a re-watch of one of the best courtroom dramas ever committed to film.  Witness for the Prosecution, directed to perfection by maestro Billy Wilder, features a stellar cast that brings to dramatic, vivid life the short story by the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie; a story that has such a startling, unexpected ending, a voiceover at the end of the film asks the viewer to please never divulge the ending they just saw to another, in the event of spoiling the film for them.  Tyrone Power stars as Leonard Vole, an American living in the UK trying to find his place in the world more than a dozen years after serving in World War II.  He's an inventor - more of a milquetoast, really - married to a German woman named Christine (the one and only Marlene Dietrich), the two of them having fallen in love during wartime, and seems a man simply wandering through life when a chance passing by of a hat store introduces Vole to the rich widow Emily French (Norma Varden).  The two become friends over the next several weeks, incurring the adoration of Mrs. French and ire of her housekeeper Janet (Una O'Connor) ... until, sure enough, Janet comes home one night to find her employer bashed over the head and killed - Leonard Vole summarily arrested for the crime when it's learned the smitten widow left him eighty-thousand pounds in her will.  Enter Sir Wilfrid Roberts (Charles Laughton), London's most infamous barrister and recent sufferer of a massive heart attack, who is literally sent home with a live-in nurse (Laughton's real-life wife, Elsa Lanchester) - and forbidden to try any more cases in open court - on the very day Leonard Vole arrives to hire him for his defense.  Roberts brushes off the case, passing it onto a more-than-capable colleague ... until Christine Vole, cold as ice and twice as hard, shows up in his offices and implies, in more ways than one, that perhaps she doesn't have her beloved husband's best interests at heart for his murder trial, after all.  Everything about this film shines like a raw diamond - the performances, direction, cinematography, writing, everything - and considering much of the movie takes place in a courtroom, there is not a boring moment or single frame of wasted time in the film's entire 116-minute runtime.  The hilarious, often cutting banter between Lanchester and Laughton is priceless - the screen literally lights up whenever they are on it together - and perfectly off-sets the more dramatic tension of the story itself.  And then there's that ending; one which, if you've never seen this or don't know the story, will knock you on your proverbial ass as the story flips - flips - and flips again, all within the last ten minutes of the film.  One of the last truly great classics from Hollywood's Golden Age, they simply didn't make films better than Witness for the Prosecution - and, sadly, never will again. (unrated)  9.5/10 stars