The Star Witness (1931)

(On Cable TV, May 2021) Warner Brothers has interesting roots as a company — while other studios in the early sound era were going for literary adaptations, period costumes and horror movies, it was focusing on then-contemporary gangster films and urban dramas. It’s in this light that The Star Witness becomes more interesting, as a permutation on familiar themes as it focuses on the drama surrounding an old man’s testimony as a witness to a murder. The story isn’t anything we can’t readily predict, but there’s some interest in seeing the film as an exemplar of another time — organized crime was a pressing concern in the early 1930s, and the film does have some propagandist intent in telling witnesses that there is nobility in testifying against crime. (Even though the message is tinged with anti-immigrant xenophobia.)  Walter Huston shows up as an idealistic district attorney. The Star Witness is not that good of a movie—the thinness of the film becomes apparent even at a running time of barely more than an hour—but it can be interesting in a time-capsule kind of way… or (if you’re more cynical) a suggestion that things don’t really change.