(1957; b/w) Based on Agatha Christie's play, director and co-screenwriter Billy Wilder's courtroom drama displays devilishly clever repartee (spiked with humor) and delivers an altogether surprising denouement.

In 1952, Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Charles Laughton), the most experienced barrister in London, returns from the hospital, following recovery from a heart attack, with his nurse, Miss Plimsoll (Elsa Lanchester) to his office. His physician has given him strict orders not to handle any criminal cases, which might cause undue excitement with fatal results. Nevertheless, along with ignoring a prohibition to smoke cigars, the rotund Sir Wilfrid, "champion of hopeless causes," takes on the defense of Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power in his last cinematic role), introduced to the great fox by Mr Mayhew (Henry Daniell), a solicitor (only barristers are permitted to argue a case before the court), when Mr Brogan-Moore (John Williams), another barrister brought in to handle Mr Vole's defense, tells Sir Wilfrid, after hearing the "mass of circumstantial evidence" strongly implicating the defendant of murder, that he cannot be certain of Mr Vole's innocence.

Admitting his inability to pay for legal services, Leonard - unemployed, down on his luck, a former soldier, without previous police record - explains the circumstances from his point of view: he accidentally met Mrs French (Norma Varden) outside a hat shop and again in a movie theater (watching a western about Jesse James) before befriending the wealthy widow (in her fifties) whom he intended to ask for a loan ("an honest business proposition") to support his eggbeater invention; on the evening of the murder, he was with Mrs French for a few hours, departing before 9:30 while she was very much alive. Sir Wilfrid, applying his monocle test on Leonard, is satisfied with the defendant's version of events, though the lack of a motive is suddenly overturned when word arrives that Mrs French's will has left 80,000 to Leonard, who swears he knew nothing about the inheritance.

Chief inspector Hearn arrives with a warrant for Leonard's arrest. Just as Miss Plimsoll appears to have got Sir Wilfrid to bed, he goes back downstairs (via his automated conveyance) to hear Christine (Marlene Dietrich), Leonard's wife, circumspectly recite to Brogan-Moore her account of Leonard's return home, just he had said, on October 14th, the Friday night of the murder. After Sir Wilfrid tells her that as Leonard's wife she cannot be impelled to testify harmfully against her spouse, Christine reveals, "He is not my husband," though she adds: "He worships the ground I walk on."

Two weeks later Sir Wifrid hears from Leonard how he and Christine Helm, formerly an actress singing and playing an accordion in a café, met in Hamburg, Germany, in 1945, before he brought her back to London with him after the war. When Leonard leapt onto her bed, the roof gave way, giving him a knock on the head. After he assured her he could repair the roof - saying, "I'm good at it" - she replied about his headache: "Maybe I can fix it. I'm good at it." Without telling Leonard what he has learned from Christine, Sir Wilfird says: "You must learn to trust me."

In the Old Bailey, with judge and lawyers in their black robes and white wigs, the trial takes place, beginning with the police inspector's testimony that the murder of Mrs Emily Jane French took place between 9:30 and 10:00 PM and that Mr Vole's jacket had been recovered with blood stains on the sleeve. Next the feisty Scottish housekeeper, Janet McKenzie (Una O'Connor) - admitting, "I never liked him" - says he heard Mrs French and Mr Vole talking together at 9:25 - "Who else could it have been?" - before she left the house, returning at 10:30 to find her mistress dead. She also believed Mrs French had become romantically involved with Mr Vole.

Sir Wilfrid deftly manages to neutralize the testimony of the chief inspector with plausible explanations and of Miss McKenzie by pointing out that she had not yet received the hearing aid for which she'd applied six months earlier and that her name had been replaced in Mrs French's will by Mr Vole's.

On the third day unexpectedly the prosecutor Mr Myers (Torin Thatcher) calls Christine Helm to the stand as the last witness for the prosecution, surprising Sir Wilfird; worse her testimony is astonishing, prompting Sir Wilfrid to declare it a "horror of fiction." Setting before the court Christine's pattern of lying, her fraudulent and bigamous marriage to Mr Vole, Sir Wilfrid sternly reminds the witness that perjury is punished by a prison sentence in Great Britain.

For his only witness, Sir Wilfrid brings Leonard to the stand, asking him only one question, "Did you murder Emily Jane French?," before turning him over to Mr Myers for cross-examination, who introduces an incident of Leonard's being in the company of a "clinging brunet" on October 8th, making inquiries at a travel agency for an expensive cruise.

The evening prior to the final day in court with summations to be presented to the jury, Sir Wilfrid, disturbed by a sense of his client's being suspended between "the gallows and a banana peel," receives a mysterious telephone call, offering to sell revealing letters composed by Mrs Helm to her inamorato. There's a rat on the loose.

At the film's conclusion, a voiceover requests, "For the greater entertainment of your friends," that I not spoil the fun by divulging the secret of the finale.

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