Disbelievingly, I went with them, with great trepidation back to Brigg’s class. The insect man was no longer there but the sheet containing the results was, abandoned, they said, as Briggs broke down and fled from the room. They showed me the remarkable  evidence to support their extraordinary claim. I stared, but still could not believe it, and yet it had happened.  Proof positive made it no easier to accept.

Witness for the Prosecution was a Hitchcock that Alfred had nothing to do with. Billy Wilder directed, plainly with Hitch in mind, a fine movie based on a play by Agatha Christie, with a neat trick ending that works brilliantly. Charles Laughton turned in what many think to be his greatest performance here as a barrister recovering from a heart attack but willing to risk his health to win the case, and Elsa Lancaster as his busy-body nurse, was equally outstanding. Tyrone Power was out of his depth as the accused man, but it is a remarkable performance from Marlele Dietrich that ends up dominating proceedings. Wilder made many great fims and this is one of the best of them.

 

Alan Paton’s great book Cry the Beloved Country is a sort of automatic classic. The tale of a simple man on a simple mission in a very complicated country couldn’t miss. The child-like simple language of the Zulu, a proud race at the brink of extinction and despair, is powerfully presented.  No further description is worthy of it. Never was the inappropriateness and irrelevance of politics so evident. Anyone who has not read it has no right to call themselves human.