Thursday Movie Picks #266: Witness

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week the them is "Witness", which I think is a fairly straightforward one.



Just doing an IMDb search on the word "witness" in the title yields a whole bunch of selections, and two of my three selections actually do have the word "witness" in the title, although I wasn't trying to pick or avoid movies like that. As always, my selections skew just a bit older than the 1985 Witness (which by the way is a pretty darn good movie):

The Star Witness (1931). Grant Mitchell gets about as close to a starring role as he'd have in his career, as a man who witnesses a gangland murder, and is understandably fairly reluctant to testify about what he saw because he knows that he gang members are going to come after his kids (including a very young Dickie Moore) if he testifies. The prosecutor (Walter Huston) tries to put pressure on him. Ultimately it's up to Grandpa (Chic Sale), a Civil War veteran, to save the day.

Shadow on the Wall (1950). I recommended this one recently. Zachary Scott plays a husband who finds his wife is cheating on him with her sister's (Ann Sothern) boyfriend. The two sisters get in an argument about it, and Sothern shoots her sister, with Scott's daughter (Gigi Perreau) witnessing it. She's so traumatized by it she represses the memory, and child psychologist Nancy Davis has to bring the memory back out. When Sothern realizes what's going to happen, she tries to off the little girl.

Witness to Murder (1954). The other 1954 movie about somebody witnessing a killing through their apartment window. She reports the murder to the police, and detective Gary Merrill comes to investigate, but the murderer (George Sanders) realizes what's up and is able to make it look as though there was no murder at all and that Stanwyck must be going crazy. Can she convince the police in time?