Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  The scene required 145 extras and cost $75,000, including the construction of the nightclub set. Ean Wood opines that Wilder went to all that trouble and expense just to show off one of Dietrich’s famous legs. The film, he comments, was good enough to survive “the unnecessary flashback scene.”14 On the contrary, Wilder deemed the flashback essential to the plot. The sequence establishes how Christine and Leonard fell in love on the spot. Furthermore, we see that Christine is grateful to Leonard for agreeing to marry her and bring her back to London as a war bride. The flashback shows how Christine’s gratitude grows into love—much more clearly than Christie does in the play. It further helps to establish why Christine is later willing to risk prison by perjuring herself on Leonard’s behalf during his murder trial. In short, the flashback sequence is Wilder’s major contribution to his literary source.

  After the completion of the screenplay, Kurnitz vowed never to collaborate with Wilder again, just as Lehman, Blum, and others had done. In a profile of Wilder he later published in a slick magazine, Kurnitz explained why: “Billy’s associates sometimes have a hunted look, shuffle nervously, and have been known to break into tears if a door slams anywhere in the same building. . . . He has a fierce, monomaniacal devotion to whatever project is in the typewriter.” Kurnitz continued, “He is a fiend for work and works nearly all the time. Let’s face it, Billy Wilder at work is actually two people—Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde.”15 Asked to comment on Kurnitz’s article, Wilder said that a journalist once quoted one of his friends as saying that “my collaborators are $50,000 secretaries.” He continued, “For one thing, that individual is no friend of mine; for another, if what he said was true, I would hire my relatives and make their salaries tax-deductible!”

  Principal photography began on June 10, 1957, at the Goldwyn Studios. Laughton upstaged Power in Witness for the Prosecution, just as Power suspected he might. Power had come to Hollywood in 1936 after some supporting roles on Broadway; he immediately established himself as a star in films like Jesse James (1939). After serving in the marines in World War II, he played mostly in colorful historical romances like Captain from Castile (1947). Like Laughton, Power returned to the stage between pictures. He was in fact directed by Laughton in a concert reading of Stephen Vincent Benet’s verse drama John Brown’s Body, with Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey. Film historian Sam Staggs mentions that Dietrich tried to vamp Power during the shooting of Witness for the Prosecution. This embarrassed the actor, because his orientation was apparently more homosexual than heterosexual. Wilder confirmed that Dietrich developed a crush on Power. “Everybody had a crush on Ty Power. Laughton had a crush on him; I did too. As heterosexual as you might be, it was impossible to be impervious to that kind of charm.”16

  Among Wilder’s production crew on this picture, cinematographer Russell Harlan and production designer Alexander Trauner stand out. Harlan had “developed a flinty black-and-white photographic style.”17 The stark, harsh lighting style he developed for Westerns like Red River (1947) was carried forward intact to his hard-edged cinematography for Witness for the Prosecution. Trauner matched his superb work on Love in the Afternoon with his production design for Witness for the Prosecution. Particularly noteworthy was his replica of the Old Bailey, London’s criminal court. He was denied permission to take photographs of the real courtroom, so he had to make detailed sketches of the architecture. Trauner built his set to scale, according to specific measurements: forty-three feet by fifty-six feet, with a twenty-seven-foot ceiling. It was constructed of sturdy Austrian oak, complete with panels in the walls, any of which could be removed to make room for the camera, if a setup called for it, “allowing filming from any angle.” The price tag for the entire set was $75,000.18

  Maria Riva’s biography of her mother, Marlene Dietrich, quotes from many of Dietrich’s letters to her. In a letter dated July 13, 1957, Dietrich complains that, although most observers said they could not tell the difference between the actual Old Bailey and Trauner’s courtroom set, she was not one of them. “Wilder and Hornblow are proud that they have the real thing; except that it is new.” She caviled that “the ceiling is painted fresh and almost white, looking like a Hollywood set. The British barrister we have on the set agreed with me that it is dirty up there from the years. The leather on the benches is brand-new too.”19

  In the same letter, Dietrich took some pot shots at Mr. and Mrs. Wilder. Dietrich frequently spent weekends with the Wilders while the film was in production, and she was not above criticizing the lifestyle of her hosts. “All they do, those two, is sit in front of the TV set! Billy even eats in front of it! They both sit there like Mister and Missus Glutz from the Bronx, eating their frozen dinners! Unbelievable! That’s what happens to brilliant men when they marry low-class women. Sad!”20 It seems that Dietrich was jealous of Wilder’s wife, who was younger than she. Indeed, she sometimes ignored Audrey while she was absorbed in conversation with Billy. Wilder said that he tried to explain to his wife that Dietrich did not slight her deliberately; it was just that Audrey did not exist for her. Audrey replied that her husband’s making excuses for Dietrich did not help.

  If Marlene Dietrich was jealous of Audrey Wilder, Elsa Lanchester was jealous of Dietrich. Lanchester, who was one year younger than Dietrich, resented that she looked matronly while Dietrich’s svelte beauty was still alluring. She gossiped to friends that Dietrich was in the makeup chair at the studio at the crack of dawn every day during filming. The makeup man, she said, would spend two hours banishing the wrinkles from her face to preserve the illusion of Dietrich’s youthful glamour.21 Noel Coward, who visited the set, noted dryly, “Marlene, with her intense preoccupation with herself, is showing signs of wear and tear. How foolish to think that one can ever slam the door in the face of age.” Nevertheless, “slam it shut she did,” Bach writes. “Marlene, in fact, looks uncannily young in most of Witness,” particularly in the flashback to her warbling songs in the sleazy Hamburg nightery.22

  Wilder was fascinated by Dietrich. “The femme fatale, with her feather boa, fake eyelashes, and long legs” was her screen personality. “At home, Dietrich scrubbed the floors on her hands and knees, fried eggs and potatoes.” She doctored lovers and stagehands “with homemade remedies for hangovers and colds. . . . She was so down-to-earth.”23 As one of her multiple complaints to her daughter during filming, Dietrich felt she had reason to question Tyrone Power’s personal appearance in the film. She wrote to Maria, “Ty Power sits in the prisoner’s box; he wears a beautiful tweed jacket; his shirt is immaculate, cuffs freshly pressed.” He was, nevertheless, playing the unemployed defendant in a murder trial. “None of the poor English appearance, the wrinkled cuffs and sleeves” of a man who is out of a job, hard up, “a man who is in prison on top of that. There he sits, a HOLLYWOOD LEADING MAN so out of character.”24 By contrast, Dietrich, who was playing the wife of an impecunious grifter, was made to wear relatively inexpensive outfits. She was miffed that Power’s costumes were more elegant than hers, which did not show off her beauty. Wisely, Dietrich communicated her negative judgments to her daughter but not to Wilder.

  Laughton had a reputation for being a troublesome and temperamental actor. Yet Wilder reported that Laughton’s spirits were high during the shooting of Witness for the Prosecution; he was “full of suggestions on every aspect of filmmaking, from costumes to camera angles.”25 Wilder regularly conferred with Laughton while rehearsing a scene and considered his suggestions seriously. Dietrich resented their tête-à-têtes on the set, from which she was excluded. She wrote to Maria in her letter of July 13, “By now Laughton is co-directing me with Billy. He is a sly fox, and Billy does not notice what he is doing. There were long conferences after every one of my takes between Laughton and Billy; and I just stood there and took it. I know I have a terrible legend to overcome: that I am only interested in my looks” and did not care about acting. Dietrich could not refrain from being offended by the reluctance of her director and costar to ask for he
r input. After all, she had played promiscuous females all her life, “and this one they don’t even think I can contribute anything to.” She concluded, “I will still get Mrs. Vole on the screen” in a good performance.26

  As a matter of fact, Wilder was more satisfied with Dietrich’s performance, as filming progressed, than she realized. In retrospect, Dietrich’s overriding evaluation of Wilder was likewise favorable. In her autobiography, she writes, “Billy Wilder was a master builder who knew his toolbox and used it in the best way possible to set up the framework on which he hung the garlands of his wit and wisdom.”27

  Dietrich was correct in sensing that Wilder had a very high opinion of Laughton’s acting ability. “Wilder was convinced that Laughton had the greatest range and power of any actor” he had ever directed. Nothing tests an actor’s mettle like the role of a lawyer, and Laughton’s larger-than-life portrayal of Sir Wilfrid is one of the craftiest and juiciest performances of his career.28 “In our film it is Laughton who pulls the whole thing together,” Wilder explained. Sir Wilfrid is a much more important character in the film than he is in the play. “Laughton is more of a three-dimensional character in the film”; he makes the barrister a knight in search of justice.29

  In photographing the courtroom drama, Wilder often used long, uninterrupted takes to allow the camera to move about the set, so that the pace of the action never falters. In this manner he kept the movie from looking static and stagey. Moreover, an extended take, uninterrupted by cuts to other angles, enables the actor to give a sustained reading of a long speech and thus to build steadily to a dramatic climax. In one scene, for example, Sir Wilfrid has a virtuoso speech in which he exposes Christine as lying on the witness stand. Laughton’s voice “rises from a whisper to a tremendous roar of fury” as he denounces her as a liar; the word reverberates for several seconds.30 Laughton spoke “very low for a page-and-a-half,” Wilder recalled; “and then worked up to the big line, ‘Are you not a chronic and habitual LIAR?’ The whole thing we did in one close-up, one take.”31 The single, unbroken take makes Laughton’s delivery all the more effective.

  Laughton biographer Simon Callow reports that Laughton was in such good humor during shooting “that he volunteered to read all the parts for the jury’s reaction shots.” The extras who played the jurors were hired for one day; passages of dialogue would be read to them off camera, and they would react. The reaction shots would later be cut in to various scenes. When Laughton asked Wilder to let him read the off camera speeches, Wilder answered, “You don’t want to do this, Charles; it’s donkey work. The script girl can do it.” But Laughton insisted, and he presented perfect impersonations of his fellow actors. “Wilder beamed at Laughton’s sheer skill,” notes Callow.32

  As the plot unfolds, a Cockney doxy phones Sir Wilfrid from Euston station, claiming to be in possession of documentation that is pertinent to the trial. Sir Wilfrid acquires the evidence from her in a hurried meeting at the depot, and it results in Leonard Vole’s acquittal. The mysterious woman is subsequently revealed to be Christine Vole in disguise; she masterminded the clever ruse to save her husband from the gallows.

  For this impersonation, Wilder tagged Laughton to coach Dietrich in a Cockney accent. “Marlene was forever up at our house,” said Lanchester, “taking lessons in Cockney from Charles. She was obsessed with this impersonation; I never saw anyone work so hard.”33 Noel Coward was visiting Laughton and Lanchester at the time, and so he also helped Dietrich with the dialect, both at their house and on the set. “It is not easy to teach Cockney to a German glamour-puss,” Coward recorded in his diary, “but she did astonishingly well.”34 Indeed, Dietrich’s Cockney accent was so authentic that a rumor soon spread around the studio that her voice in the scene had been dubbed by another actress. But Jay Nash and Stanley Ross note that “production stills exist of Dietrich rehearsing the telephone scene without make-up.”35 In addition, during postproduction, Dietrich wrote in her diary, “Sept. 4th. Dubbing Cockney woman.”36

  Dietrich mastered the dialect, but there was still the question of how to disguise Christine in a way that would fool both Sir Wilfrid and the audience. The makeup artists, Gustaf Noran, Ray Sebastian, and Harry Ray, went to work on Dietrich, supplying her with a dark wig, a false nose, and a scar on her cheek. Orson Welles, for whom Dietrich had recently made a cameo appearance in Touch of Evil (1958), kibitzed on the fashioning of Dietrich’s false nose out of putty. Wilder thought that Dietrich in full makeup looked positively grotesque. Dietrich herself suggested that the fake nose be made less prominent and that her makeup in other ways be toned down. Wilder approved the adjustments.

  Wilder filmed the scene in which the Cockney trollop phones Sir Wilfrid from the train station in two ways. In one version, writes Bach, “we see it is Christine speaking with a Cockney accent. At the end of the call, she takes from her purse the wig we will later see her wear in disguise.”37 In the other version, Dietrich, already made up as the Cockney hooker, makes the call to Sir Wilfrid. Wilder was aware that there were two ways that the scene could be played: with suspense or with surprise. Viewers might be made aware in advance that the Cockney harlot was Christine’s invention. That would generate suspense, because the filmgoer would be anxious to see precisely what Christine was up to. Or the viewer might be left in the dark as to the real identity of the mystery woman. That would cause surprise when Christine’s masquerade was finally revealed at the film’s climax. Wilder chose surprise rather than suspense, so that the audience is genuinely shocked at film’s end to learn that Christine and the Cockney woman are one and the same person. Wilder wanted the audience to be caught off guard by the revelation of Christine’s elaborate deception at the same time that Sir Wilfrid is.

  Wilder absolutely insisted that strict secrecy be maintained about the movie’s surprise ending during shooting. Throughout the production period, a placard was posted on the door of the soundstage, demanding that no one who saw the play “ever told the secret” and informing all columnists and other visitors to the set that they must sign the following pledge: “I promise not to reveal any of the secrets . . . which lead to the disclosure of the surprise ending.”38 Among the signatures on the poster was that of Noel Coward, who had helped coach Dietrich on the Cockney accent. The final ten pages of the screenplay were not distributed to cast and crew until just before it was time to film the final sequence. On the day that the finale was shot, Wilder had security guards posted at the door of the soundstage.

  Principal photography wrapped on August 20, 1957. Wilder lucked out in his choice of editor for Witness for the Prosecution. He had not had a regular film editor for some years, although Doane Harrison continued as supervising editor, in addition to being an associate producer for Wilder. For the present film, Wilder snagged Daniel Mandell as editor; Mandell thus began an association with Wilder that would last for ten years. The veteran editor had already won two Academy Awards, for Pride of the Yankees (1942) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Mandell always maintained that “the greatest accomplishment of a good editor is, ironically, that the audience is totally unaware of his work.” Wilder heartily agreed. “The minute someone in the audience says, ‘What a snappy piece of editing that is in that montage,’ they are no longer paying attention to the story.” Mandell’s edit of Witness for the Prosecution was “an adept combination of action and intimate drama.”39

  The credits of Witness for the Prosecution unroll as the Old Bailey comes into session, accompanied by a solemn “Pomp and Circumstance”–type march. The film’s mystery concerns a clever cad named Leonard Vole. Leonard is accused of the murder of Mrs. French, a rich widow with whom he had been friendly—so friendly, in fact, that she wrote him into her will shortly before her demise. Christie tips off the audience subtly that Leonard is not really a decent sort by giving him the last name of Vole. Yet Leonard’s wife, Christine, seems devoted to him, and we learn why in the flashback to Christine’s shabby basement digs in war-ravaged Hamburg: Leonar
d married her and brought her back to London as a war refugee. The flashback concludes just as the ceiling collapses in Christine’s bombed-out flat while Leonard is with her; this disaster subtly foreshadows how the roof will cave in on both of them before the film is over.

  Leonard tells his lawyer, Sir Wilfrid, that he is counting on Christine’s testimony to save him from the gallows. But the barrister has a hunch that, if Leonard assumes that the unpredictable Christine is going to save him, “he is a drowning man clutching at a razor blade.” Sir Wilfrid faces an open-and-shut case, but he nevertheless mounts a full-scale defense for his client, since he is convinced that Leonard is caught in a web of circumstantial evidence.

  Given Christine’s apparent loyalty to Leonard, Sir Wilfrid is flabbergasted when she appears in court as a witness for the prosecution. Sir Wilfrid reminds her that a wife cannot testify against her husband, but Christine counters that she and Leonard were never properly married because she was never legally divorced from her first husband, Otto Helm, who is living in East Berlin. She then proceeds to give evidence that undermines Leonard’s alibi for the night of the murder. She testifies that Leonard returned home that night with blood on his sleeve after ten o’clock, allowing him ample time to have killed Emily French earlier that same evening.

  After court is adjourned, Sir Wilfrid is summoned to a railway station by a phone call from a Cockney prostitute, who sells him some incriminating love letters written by Christine to Max, her lover. Christine clearly indicates in the letters that she has given false testimony against Leonard because she wanted him to be convicted so that she can go off with another man. Sir Wilfrid presents this newly acquired evidence in open court. The jury is shocked at Christine’s duplicity and votes to acquit Leonard.