Eyewitness

Recently, I fired up the Tubi app on my Roku box to see what movies are leaving the platform at the end of the month. It seems as though Tubi has a whole bunch of British programmers and B movies that I'd never heard of, and one of those showed up near the top of the list of movies they won't have much longer: a 1956 film called Eyewitness.

Lucy and Jay Church (Muriel Pavlow and Michael Craig) are a lower-middle-class couple living in what looks like a relatively new semi-detached house in a provincial town in the UK. Lucy wants to save to get ahead, and has presumably had that conversation with Jay many times, as she's horrified to find out that Jay has, without asking her, gone and bought a TV on the installment plan, meaning more debt for them. He refuses to take the TV back, so she decides she's had it and walks out on him. (Seriously.)

To cool down, she goes to the the local cinema. Eventually she's had enough, so she decides she's going to call Jay and talk to him, except that he isn't home, having gone out to look for her. On the way back to the movie, she passes by the manager's office, where two men have waylaid the manager as they were planning to rob the night's takings out of the safe. They've already hit the guy, but when he tries to fight back, one of the two men shoots the manager, causing Lucy to scream in horror.

Now she's in trouble, since the two crooks obviously hear that and start chasing Lucy. She's eventually able to get out of the building and stay one step ahead of the crooks, but as she tries to cross the street to get away from the crooks, she's run down by a bus that was unable to stop. Barney (Nigel Stock), one of the crooks and a man who's hard of hearing and needing one of those old-style hearing aids, thinks that Lucy is probably dead and that's the end of their problems. The mastermind Wade (Donald Sinden), however wants to find out which hospital has taken Lucy, just to make certain that she's died, and if she hasn't, well, he'll be the one to make certain of it....

Lucy didn't die; she's just badly concussed and with no ID on her so that nobody is able to figure out who she is. She's put into one of those wacky hospital wards that only show up in movies, the sort with a whole bunch of stock characters to provide various levels of comic relief. The two main patients are a little girl, and an old lady who keeps seeing Wad out of the windo since the ward has a nice glass door leading out to some sort of patio. That door has stupidly been left unlocked for the night, giving Wade an opportunity to get back in to try to finish the job.

You can see why somebody would want to make a movie out of this material, as it's got a lot of potential. Unfortunately, this Eyewitness doesn't really reach great heights, which I think is a lot down to a lack of budget that would have allowed for a tighter script, or at least one that's more properly paced. As things stand, there are a few too many twists and turns for a movie that only runs about 83 minutes, and a few too many plot holes (like the aforementioned leaving the back door unlocked. Eyewitness isn't terrible, but it certainly could have been a lot better.