Word: courtroom
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...minimums for Britain's wartime rations; the failure to find his killer was an international humiliation for the French police. After long and confused police investigations, Gaston Dominici was carted off to prison. Last week the mahogany-faced old peasant, now 77, stood in the dock in a courtroom at Digne to answer the charge of murder...
...eyes of all France watched as Gaston, his weathered features paler after a year in jail, faced his tribunal of seven jurors and three judges. The courtroom was packed with a crowd of 400 eager spectators for the most publicized French trial since those of Petain and Laval in 1945. Banks of reporters from Paris and London came down to tell the story for their readers. A U.S. movie producer dropped by to measure the film possibilities of Gaston's case. Famed French Author Jean Giono was on hand to get material for a book. By comparison with Gaston...
...same problem which sunk The Suspects besets Witness for the Prosecution. Mystery stories, with their pat situations and inevitable chains of clues, may seem real to a reader who can make good use of his imagination. On stage, the same situations take on an absurdity which no amount of courtroom hysterics, tearing of hair, and general melodrama can erase. Two hours do not furnish enough time to develop the complex details of a murder, and at the same time create characters who even remotely resemble real people...
...first act is a static, cumbersome affair, in which Leonard Vole, a murder suspect, relates his story to two English barristers. If action is dull and the dialogue not very witty, the act at least has the virtue of developing a situation and preparing the audience for the courtroom scene to follow. It also leads one to expect that the hero will be saved by some new and ingenious clue, and the drama will be resolved in terms of the circumstances and not the people involved. Indeed, the leading characters are never more than shallow caricatures made ludicrous...
What little suspense Witness for the Prosecution creates comes in the courtroom scene, which represents one of Miss Christie's better efforts in play writing. But even here, the histrionics of the acting, rather than the suspense, will be remembered as typical of the play: "Leonard Vole, you murdered this woman," cries the prosecuting attorney, and Vole answers with a voice which seems to shake the chandeliers, "It's all a horrible dream...