Diagonaldi Very well executed

NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

josef05 In the fifties, the dubbing of foreign movies, who treated the subject Nazis or ex-Nazis, were often different from the original. And because nearly all foreign movies and TV-shows had been dubbed in German, nobody realized the difference. Today, of course, you can find all the information on the web. In the German dubbed version the name of the murderer is Gabor Rethy. In the German version, also the scenes are cut out, where Richter is referred as an old Nazi, there is also a different version of the book cover. Besides that, this movie is a very fine example of a film noir, with great actors as Barbara Stanwyck, George Sanders and Gary Merrill.

gavin6942 A woman (Barbara Stanwyck)'s sanity comes into question, after she claims to have witnessed a murder from her apartment window.So, this film has the interesting distinction of coming out around the same time as "Rear Window" and shares some plot similarities -- the basic premise that a murder is witnessed out a window and the police do not believe the viewer. Due to the timing, this film has become rather obscure... how do you compare to Hitchcock? But we have just as good of a thriller with plot twists and turns, and some unexpected developments. Was it a hallucination? Or is she being tested by the killer? One can never be too sure, as she is without the faintest shred of evidence.

MartinHafer The premise for "Witness to Murder" is very good but the film suffers from one serious problem--the writing. In the movie, the police almost immediately assume that a person who reported a murder is either wrong or crazy. Maybe I am a bit naive, but I really don't believe that the police would be so fast to do this and would take a reported murder A LOT more seriously. However, in the world of this film, they very quickly assume this is the case...too quickly to be realistic. Later, other such stupid assumptions sink the film."Witness to Murder" begins, not surprisingly, with Barbara Stanwyck looking out her apartment window and seeing a woman being killed in an apartment across from hers. She does what any person would do--contacts the police. And, almost immediately they assume she is wrong! Later in the film one of the cops (Gary Merrill) starts to wonder and actually begins to do his job! But, the smooth killer contacts the idiot police Captain and convinces him that he's being harassed by Stanwyck--and they lock her in the loony bin! I was frustrated by the film--it just assumed something that the film simply didn't establish. Had they had Stanwyck ACT crazy or the police investigated thoroughly THEN they assumed she was wrong it COULD have worked well.Fortunately, the film did get better...for a while. Once Stanwyck was released from the hospital, Sanders actually torments her--telling her that he DID kill the lady but that now no one would believe her! This was great--and I really wanted to see more of this. But, it then gets stupid again when Sanders is in her apartment late in the film and a neighbors SEE this and hears Stanwyck cry for help, they immediately assume she's crazy--even though they have no idea about the investigation and police opinions about Stanwyck's sanity. If a neighbor cried out for help, I sure as heck would have done SOMETHING!!! The bottom line is that the acting is fine--the writing was not. However, it's is a VERY frustrating movie. It could have been good and had a good cast...but ultimately was crap due to wretched writing...just wretched.

T Y This is a very poor way to encounter material that is superficially similar to Rear Window. It's obvious and corny, to suit a 50s audience, yet it still struggles to fill its short 78 minute runtime, after jumping the gun by showing the murder before the credits are even over. And that signature sequence highlights all the movies problems. It's shot cheap: Saunders apartment is seen behind a very poor matte painting of a balcony. The music is overwrought. And the credits embody the low-rent, lurid aesthetic seen throughout.Barbara Stanwyck lives across from the killer, and no one believes her story of witnessing the murder. But luckily the neighborhood detective likes her (as we see in about 6,000 identical scenes) Her character arc is initially interesting, but the writing quickly begins to suck, and we get "She's insane. Put her in the psych ward" nonsense. So there we are in an unpromising psych ward sequence that can go absolutely nowhere. Soon after that, the effete George Saunders reveals that he's German (!) and a Nazi (The characters already know this... ho-hum) and eagerly shares his thoughts on the master race. Gee, thank god the villain is so over the top. Finally the whole thing collapses as Stanwyck falls into Saunders clutches. She runs away, and he holds back for no better reason than if he didn't, he'd catch her in about 10 seconds, and the movie would be deprived of its absurd, construction-site, tower-climbing, King-Kong finale. It is written in the big book of clichés: all bad guys must fall to their deaths, no more than 60 seconds before the credits roll. So there Stanwyck goes, up the tower, the least sensible place to escape from a villain, clomping up countless stairways in a pair of gigantic, loud pumps that would reveal her location to anyone within quarter of a mile ...you just roll your eyes, thinking, "Yeah... you'd make it about 20 feet in those shoes." 'Witness to Murder' can barely muster button-pushing. Nothing happens beyond the catalog of bad answers/motives provided on screen. It lacks any trace of ambition to add to film discourse. Refinement is absent and a viewer with a mind can bring nothing to the experience. It's greatest hope is that viewers will respond to rather artless, sensationalistic stimuli. It plays like a debilitated version of noir. (It qualifies - There are maybe 5 nice Noir compositions). But at least half the movie is shot in standard "women's picture" middle grays.It's bad, but at least it's so absurd it made me laugh now and then. The Maytag repairman plays the detective's cohort. In a bizarre coincidence, Raymond Burr is in this, AND Rear Window.