From Aesop’s fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf to Cornell Woolrich’s The Window (1949) and The Boy Cried Murder (1966), the story of a boy losing credibility and witnessing a real threat has become a familiar chapter in art and literature. John Hough’s Eyewitness (1970) comes as a riveting thriller based on the same story.
Titled Sudden Terror in America, Eyewitness uses a different setting for the boy to witness the murder. Ziggy (Mark Lester,) along with his sister Pippa (Susan George), is spending the summer in Malta, staying at his grandfather’s (Lionel Jeffries) lighthouse.
Having lost the trust of his family for making things up, Ziggy and Pippa go to view the welcoming ceremony of an African leader. While Pippa meets a young man Tom, who would instantly become her love interest, Ziggy sneaks inside the building to explore. As the African leader is assassinated by a shooter from the building, Ziggy witnesses it, seeing who did it. This makes him run for his life till the end of the story.
The island setting, day-light public assassination witnessed by many, and a high-profile assassination instead of a murder in the neighboring house seen through the upstairs bedroom window (as in The Window) make Eyewitness more of a political thriller than a classic noir. The scenes of the killers’ pursuit of the Ziggy are well done but the final chase sequence with the Ziggy, Pippa, and Tom in the car loots the credit for taking the plot’s intensity to a climax.
The supporting characters seem unimportant for a good part of the movie, particularly Tom, but they increasingly become important as the killers accelerate their hunt for Ziggy. The boy’s Grandpa becomes the hero of the movie in the final sequences as he realizes the boy is speaking the truth.
Eyewitness is a good thriller and worth watching on any thriller movie night.
