Witness for the Prosecution

SPOILER ALERT. I'm about to reference the ending of a venerable short story and a movie adaptation from the Golden Age of Hollywood. If you wish to read or view either of these in innocence, don't proceed further.

Old Hollywood had a rule that the bad guys never win. The evildoers always get their comeuppance. After all, if people wanted to see evil prosper, they didn't have to go to the cinema for that, they could just stick with the morning newspaper.

Anyway, the rule resulted in innovative re-writes to certain adapted literary works. This may never have been more jarring than in the case of Witness for the Prosecution, a 1925 Agatha Christie short story that had a complicated publication history over the next three decades and that became a movie only in 1957.

ONE FINAL WARNING. TURN BACK OR LEARN THAT ...

The basic plot of the short story is that of a criminal trial portrayed through the eyes of a sympathetic defense attorney, played in the movie by Charles Laughton. Laughton's character agrees to defend a man charged with the murder of a wealthy elderly woman.

The defendant is played by Tyrone Power in the movie. His wife, Christine, by Marlene Dietrich. [Those three names make up about as glittering a cast list as the era could offer.] At any rate, the defendant persuades his barrister (and the innocent audience) of his innocence, but whether the lawyer will be able to persuade a jury seems to turn on whether Christine will give alibi evidence.

Alas, Christine switches sides. She prepares to give contrary evidence as a "Witness for the Prosecution," hence the title.

In another twist, the barrister uncovers evidence that will allow for a devastating cross-examination of Christine.

The in-court show-down then plays out. Prosecution presents its surprise witness; Laughton devastates her credibility; jury brings in a verdict of not guilty. THEN comes the twist ending.

Dietrich confides in the barrister that she herself planted the evidence that he found and used to impeach her credibility, and she had gone to the prosecution planning to be discredited.

She couldn't take the chance of an honest unrigged trial, she says.

"Why, because you knew your husband was innocent."

"No, because I knew he was guilty."

THOSE words are the end of the story, and they work wonderfully, because Christie had been successful in luring us into the contrary conviction.

But as I've noted, Hollywood in the 1950s could not have a story end with a man getting away with murder. So there is a coda in which the barrister expresses his outrage, then the newly-acquitted defendant enters the discussion and tells Christine that he is leaving her for a younger woman. Christine stabs him with a letter opener (which had been an exhibit in the trial) and kills him.

The barrister immediately decides that he will defend Christine against the inevitable charge of murder, and the credits finally roll.

I really wish the creative people involved had found a way to evade the Code and make this movie without the Coda.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

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John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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