After some very effective location work in the environs of an actual cinema, concluding with a brilliantly directed bus accident, this film reverts to standard Muriel Box form. It's obviously based on a stage play. Just about all the action is set in a hospital ward and it's certainly not a ward that anyone in their right mind would want to spend five minutes in – let alone five days or five weeks! Chatter? Yaketty, yaketty, yaketty! The patients get no rest night after night, with all sorts of characters bursting in and letting fly with their tongues. True, the cast credits look promising, but unfortunately Muriel Pavlow spends most of the film semi-conscious, while Belinda Lee has her premier claim to fame confined to a nurse's uniform. Sinden is handed quite a lot of the script's verbosity and his reaction is exactly what you might expect from a fine actor. He is bored stiff and understandably plays the part with virtually no enthusiasm at all – let alone charisma! Leslie Dwyer succumbs to an unconvincing cameo and even that superb pro, Allan Cuthbertson, doesn't bother to bring even a drop of his usual charisma to his couple of brief scenes as a police inspector. Would you believe that David Knight was handed a scene as an American serviceman and that Charles Victor has only one brief scene as a desk sergeant? Richard Wattis, however, plays his brief scene as an anesthetist with his usual aplomb. If I were the distributor, I'd go for skillful trimming of the lead characters. That would actually improve the movie enormously.
Review of Eyewitness
