A married professor kills the beautiful blackmailing student he's been having a sexual affair with in the presence of a baby.A married professor kills the beautiful blackmailing student he's been having a sexual affair with in the presence of a baby.A married professor kills the beautiful blackmailing student he's been having a sexual affair with in the presence of a baby.
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Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaDolores Hart retired from acting to become a nun.
- GoofsAt 22:10, when Mrs. Davidson brings her daughter out to the rear porch, she is holding a doll. When the camera shot changes, she's holding the real baby again.
- Quotes
[afterword]
Alfred Hitchcock: [Hitchcock is still in the jail cell] Well, you can't win them all. I understand that Don Mason was condemned to a cell
[gestures to his surroundings briefly]
Alfred Hitchcock: very much like this one.
[the camera pulls out as Hitchcock gets up to move a giant alphabet block on top of other blocks, revealing that he is actually dressed as a toddler in a giant baby playpen]
Alfred Hitchcock: And now, daddies and mommies, I think the time has come to lam out of here. Suppose you take this opportunity to escape, until next time of course.
[Hitchcock begins to climb up the blocks out of the playpen when the sirens start to wail; he stops to aim and fire a water pistol through the bars directly at the camera]
- SoundtracksFuneral March of a Marionette
Written by Charles Gounod
"Silent Witness" unfortunately returns to the disappointing standard and is closer to the quality of "Vicious Circle" (except with a far sillier premise) than to "A Little Sleep". It is the first disappointment of Season 3, which was actually very good up to this point with me really liking to loving all the previous episodes, and one of the weaker episodes of the first quarter of the season. It does nothing to make a not particularly plausible premise any more probable and is even less interesting than it sounds. The acting is on the whole fine but the story execution just wasn't there.
The best aspect is the acting. Dolores Hart allures and Patricia Hitchcock is a strong presence too. Don Taylor's role can be preposterous and not as sinister as it ought to have been, but he does do his conscientious best and is suitably intense. Hitchcock's bookending is suitably ironic and he delivers it drolly.
It is moodily and slickly filmed and the audio has the right amount of atmosphere. The theme music is great. It starts off quite well.
For all those good things, "Silent Witness" could have been so much better than it turned out. The script is too talky and the pace could have been a lot tighter. Henreid's direction is undistinguished and fails to generate any tension.
Worst of all is the story, it is not an appealing or easy to swallow premise to begin with but the storytelling is beyond far fetched and silly for reasons already given and lacks any kind of tension and suspense. There are a lot of vague and what the heck-inducing character decisions, and the way Taylor's character behaves is dumb and borderline improbable. Which really trivialises any menace the character could have had. The ending is a real let down, such a shame that the season went from the previous episode's knockout twist to one of the series' most far fetched copouts.
Overall, didn't really do it for me. 5/10.
- TheLittleSongbird
- Sep 7, 2022
Details
- Runtime30 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1