sakana1’s review published on Letterboxd:
[The film industry] “hasn’t any confidence at all ... They never say to women: Let us try and see what she’s done.”
— Muriel Box
Muriel Box is not as well know as Ida Lupino (though she has one more Oscar than Lupino did, sharing one with her husband for the The Seventh Veil screenplay), but she shared with Lupino the challenging novelty of being one of the only women working as a director in her native film industry (in the case of Box, that was Britain), as well as an interest in examining the experiences of women in her films. Though Eyewitness is a noirish crime film rather than a social issue picture, the great majority of its characters are women, and the screenplay by Janet Green (known for her issues pictures like Victim and Sapphire) takes on an enormous amount with impressive grace.*
Ostensibly about a woman (Lucy, played by Muriel Pavlow) who witnesses a robbery and is hit by a bus as she flees, the movie also manages to cast its eye upon subjects as diverse as marriage as an institution, the refusal of a patriarchal society to believe women who say inconvenient things, the ways in which men exert their power, and, oh yeah, a sweet love story for Belinda Lee (who is fucking ravishing, though I suppose I say that every time I see her anything) on top of everything else.
Lucy's misadventures begin because of a fight with her husband Jay (Michael Craig) over money: having bought a TV on installment from Lucy's brother, Jay is mortified by the possibility of returning it, despite them already owing payments on virtually everything they own, because "what'll he think of us?" Giving the impression that he's more worried about his relationship with Lucy's brother than he is with his wife, Jay refuses her demand to get rid of the TV, and Lucy walks out.
Left alone, Jay loyally watches the TV, only to see a story about a desperate wife whose husband sends them ever-further into debt by trying to give her everything he thinks she deserves, and who is considering leaving him, "for his own good." To his credit, Jay gives a wry smile in response and heads out to visit his old haunts, places where he has become "a stranger" since his marriage, something he repeatedly hears is inevitable when men take wives.
Everywhere he goes, Jay hears (or thinks he hears — at one point, a man is talking in great detail about forcing his crying cocker spaniel to take a pill, a story which Jay thinks is about the man's wife) casual, masculine rhetoric about the burden of marriage and the interference of wives. There's a sense that Jay is more self-aware than most of his peers, but the conversations are nevertheless very pointed, and impossible to ignore as the screenplay progresses into its nearly all-female central universe.
Once we get to the hospital with Lucy, our attention is focused on a women's ward, watched over by the cheerful, warm Penny (Lee). She knows her patients well and deals with each of them in a way appropriate to their own personalities and habits — she seems to genuinely love her job, and she's good at it. Despite all of this, however, Penny steadfastly refuses to believe the patient everyone calls simply Granny (Ada Reeve, who is excellent), who insists that she is seeing men outside in the ward's garden, and then even chases one off who came inside, and stood over the unconscious Lucy in a threatening way. Further, Penny's superior, too, laughs off Granny's fears and protests, first dismissing them as bad dreams, and then physically forcing her to take a sleeping pill. Coming on top of the earlier discussions of marriage, the treatment of Granny (and, later, of Lucy herself when, in a delirious state, she repeatedly expresses fear, and refers to a safe), paints a grim picture of the reality in which women live.
To the great credit of the film, its writer, and its director, though, it's not simply a document of all of the ways in which women are mistreated. Instead, we also see a man mistreat another man — one with a disability — as well, cruelly and intentionally. As Lucy lies in the ward, the thieves lurk outside (Granny, needless to say, was right), one of them (Wade, played by Donald Sinden, who reportedly based his performance on real-life murderer Neville Heath) bent on killing the one person who can identify them, while the other (Nigel Stock as Barney), a deaf man who also seems to struggle with social interactions, becomes increasingly frightened of his partner, and more and more regretful about his participation in their heist.
And Barney is right to be scared of Wade. Wade is a sociopath, someone who truly believes he's infallible, despite almost comical evidence to the contrary, and who, it is alarmingly clear, has selected Barney as his partner not only because the man is a talented picker of locks but, of equal importance, because he is someone over whom Wade knows he can exert control.
Because Barney is a shy man, someone not used to being included who, in spite of himself, glows with pride every time Wade says something that even resembles a compliment. Similarly, he sticks with Wade long after he should have left, because of how desperate he is to hear someone praise him; because the way society treats him is so cruel that what Barney does sometimes feels almost gentle.
It's amazing that, despite running fewer than 90 minutes, Eyewitness is able to incorporate all of these themes and characters, while still telling a truly suspenseful story. In addition, there are a few scenes that are stunning in their physical layout, particularly those in which the long, long halls of the hospital become almost church-like, with their peaked roofs and white walls. Overall, the film is a cheap, flimsy affair, but one well worth watching, for both its themes and its ambition.
*Like Lupino, Box also had to deal with men talking ignorant shit about her, as when Michael Craig, who has the tiny role of Lucy's doofus husband, described Box as someone whose "skills as a director were confined to the ability to say 'Action!' and 'Cut!'", then offered what he no doubt felt was something that would make it all better: "she was", he said, "a very nice lady!" Dude, fuck off.
