Witness to Murder Reviews

On a hot, windy Los Angeles night, Stanwyck wakes up to close her window and across the way she sees Sanders murder a woman. She calls the police, but by the time they arrive Sanders has hidden the body in the apartment next door and cleaned up any evidence of his crime. Police detective Merrill tells Stanwyck that she must have been mistaken and Sanders finds out it was she who reported him. He is a writer of historical novels and the victim was his mistress, who was standing in the way of his marriage to a wealthy woman. He pays a visit to Stanwyck, and as he leaves, he tampers with the lock so that he can get back into the apartment later. When Stanwyck goes out, he enters, and on her typewriter writes somes letters threatening himself. He mails them to his address, then later shows them to the police as evidence that Stanwyck is mentally disturbed and is persecuting him. She is taken to an asylum where she is repulsed by the lunacy around her, and when she is released, she sees Sanders reading the newspapers telling of the discovery of the body of his mistress. She figures out what he has been doing to her and confronts him. Sanders feels he has nothing to fear from this officially labeled "disturbed woman" and tells her his own semi-Nazi beliefs that call for the elimination of the mediocre. He tells her he intends to write a suicide note on her typewriter and murder her, but she runs away, fleeing to a rooftop. Sanders pursues her and they struggle on a rickety scaffold. As the police close in, Sanders falls to his death and Stanwyck is left dangling when the scaffold collapses, but she is rescued just before she loses her grip. This interesting melodrama has good performances by Sanders and Stanwyck, who gets to go through much of the same hysteria she handled so well in SORRY, WRONG NUMBER. The cinematography is very good, conveying the claustrophobic apartments and asylum and the hot wind blowing over everything. Stanwyck and Sanders were both on the long slide from stardom, but they still make this one worth watching.